The Rising Stars of Gossip Blogs

By ALEX WILLIAMS

IT had all the elements for the perfect tabloid gossip item — a clash between star financial journalists, big egos and a surprise ouster that had Wall Street buzzing: Henry Blodget, the well-known disgraced-analyst-turned-financial-pundit and co-founder of the much-read blog, The Business Insider, stunned the financial community last week by firing John Carney, the star managing editor of the site’s Clusterstock blog, reportedly because of philosophical differences over the site’s coverage.

The news, which was quickly picked up by the Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon, who subsequently sparked an online spat of his own with Mr. Blodget, did not break in a gossip column like The New York Post’s Page Six or in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, which in a previous era might have owned this story. Rather, the scoop came from a 25-year-old Village Voice gossip blogger and University of Utah dropout named Foster Kamer.

Surfing the Web after business hours one evening, Mr. Kamer ran across speculation about Mr. Carney’s job status on a Twitter post by Gawker Media’s owner, Nick Denton. After 90 minutes of phone calls to sources within the financial journalism subculture, Mr. Kamer nailed down the item and posted it on the Voice site.

The lines between “reporter” and “blogger,” “gossip” and “news” have blurred almost beyond distinction. No longer is blogging something that marginalized editorial wannabes do from home, in a bathrobe, because they haven’t found a “real” job. Blogging now is a career path in its own right, offering visibility, influence and an actual paycheck. As more gossip action in a variety of fields moves online, young writers who might have hungrily chased an editorial assistant job at Condé Nast a few years ago now move to New York with the dream of making it as a blogger — either launching their own blog into the big time, à la Perez Hilton, or getting snapped up by a prominent blog network like Gawker Media or MediaBistro.

And although the better-known newspaper gossip columnists still churn along, among them Richard Johnson and Cindy Adams of The New York Post, and George Rush and Joanna Molloy of The New York Daily News, much of the action has moved online, with the up-and-coming players having little in common with legendary predecessors like Walter Winchell and Liz Smith. While Ms. Smith, 87 and still active, toiled in journalism for nearly 30 years before getting her own by-lined column (working first, among other things, as a typist, proofreader and radio producer), some of the newest notables in gossip are still in their 20s and only a few years removed from the days when they blogged from their college dorm rooms about fraternity hazing mishaps and the quality of the cafeteria food.

The following are profiles of nine emerging gossip bloggers, whose names came up in interviews with influential blog entrepreneurs, fellow bloggers and other journalists as potential future stars of the online world. The list, by no means exhaustive, represents a cross-section of New Yorkers covering varied beats — entertainment, fashion, real estate, finance —for a variety of prominent blog networks. Some, like Sara Polsky of Curbed and Lilit Marcus of The Gloss, are relatively new to the business, but recently installed in a position of prominence by Web star-makers like Lockhart Steele, who runs Curbed and Eater, or Elizabeth Spiers, a founder of Gawker in 2002 who has introduced a number of successful blogs since then. Others, like Fred Mwangaguhunga of MediaTakeOut.com, are popular niche players who are quickly crossing into the mainstream.

ERIN CARLSON:  Editor, Crushable

If you’re starting a high-profile blog in the already saturated, and fiercely competitive, celebrity-gossip category, you had better have an edge. And Elizabeth Spiers, who debuted Crushable last month for the Canadian company b5media, says she has a plan to differentiate her new blog from the competition, including heavyweights like Perez Hilton, who happens to have been a roommate years ago, and new sites like Bonnie Fuller’s Hollywood Life. Go young.

Crushable, run by the 29-year-old Ms. Carlson, a former Associated Press entertainment reporter, seeks to leave the bulk of the Brangelina coverage to the other guys and focus more on a Teen Vogue-ish 15-to-25-year-old female market. So look out for more news on more hunky young stars like Matt Bomer of “White Collar” and Cory Monteith of “Glee,” as well as tweens like Lourdes Leon, Madonna’s 13-year-old fashion designer daughter.

Ms. Carlson seems well-pedigreed for her job. At The Associated Press, she reported the story of the $14 million sale of photos of the Brad-Angelina twins, and last year, the story of Sean Penn’s split from his wife, Robin Wright Penn.

NOTABLE SCOOP: Reported this week that the rumored relationship between Rob Kardashian and Angela Simmons, which some gossips had speculated was a Kardashian family publicity stunt, was real, according to a source.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: None yet. It’s early.

TOMMYE FITZPATRICK: Editor, Fashionologie

Short indeed is the list of fashion influencers whose journey to that tent in Bryant Park took a detour through a biomedical-engineering course load at Duke University. But that’s what Ms. Fitzpatrick, now 25, was mired in when she started Fashionologie in her dorm room in 2005 as a kind of study break. In five years, she has managed to distance herself from the infinite number of would-be Anna Wintours blogging from their bedrooms and actually made the industry insiders take notice. Fashionologie now attracts 1.5 million page-views a month, and has seen a 45 percent increase in visits over the last year, according to Ms. Fitzpatrick, and is being linked to established fashion sites like Refinery29 and The Cut at New York Magazine.

While primarily a news aggregator and style curator, as opposed to a gotcha-style gossip columnist, Ms. Fitzpatrick, is driving traffic while providing plenty of original content of late. In competition with rival sites like Fashionista, she reports from the front lines at the shows in Paris, London and Milan, and interviews designers like Alexander Wang and Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy. She routinely mines online fashion forums for tips, sources and insider arcana (when Vogue’s André Leon Talley joined Twitter, you read about it in Fashionologie).

NOTABLE SCOOP: She recently reported that Alexander McQueen had done final fittings on a substantial part of his fall collection before his death.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Posted one item recently describing a Twitter account supposedly belonging to Anna Wintour’s daughter, Bee Shaffer. But when she noticed that it linked to one purporting to be be her mother’s, which had only one tweet (“those poseurs got to stop”), she determined it to be bogus and quickly removed the item.

FOSTER KAMER: Staff writer, The Village Voice news blog, Runnin’ Scared

Mr. Kamer may cite The Village Voice’s co-founder, Norman Mailer, as a personal inspiration, but online he comes off a bit like a Wi-Fi era hybrid of J. J. Hunsecker and H. L. Mencken, delivering missives on the news media, politics and New York culture in an acerbic, knowing tone — even by Gawker alumni standards —sometimes at lengths that call to mind Op-Ed essays more than gossip items. The former weekend editor at Gawker and assistant editor at BlackBookMag.com, he seems to know everyone and everything about the tight-knit — some might say incestuous — New York online-gossip subculture. The big figures in that subculture consider Mr. Kamer a rising force. “He’s supremely talented,” said Mr. Steele, when asked his opinion on which rising stars to focus on for this article. “He qualifies as a must-include.”

Mr. Kamer, who started at The Voice last month, wasted little time afflicting the comfortable. An off-color wisecrack about James Dolan in a recent item about the media mogul’s rumored purchase of the Gothamist blog may have cost his paper more than $20,000 in advertising revenue; the IFC Center, a Dolan property, recently pulled a $400-a-week ad from The Voice, Mr. Kamer claimed in his blog. The square-off inspired Gawker’s Adrian Chen to joke in a recent item that his former colleague “has been busily blogging the Village Voice to financial ruin.”

It might be a reasonable price to pay for alternative weekly if Mr. Kamer can help The Voice, struggling for an identity along with most alternative weeklies in the Internet era, end up with its biggest gossip must-read since James Ledbetter in the ’90s.

NOTABLE SCOOP: The John Carney story.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: At Gawker, he ran an item about a University of Minnesota journalism professor excoriating the traditional news organizations for ignoring the Jon and Kate Gosselin story. The story, picked up from The Huffington Post, turned out to be a satirical piece written by the humorist Andy Borowitz.

STEVE KRAKAUER: Television editor, Mediaite.com

No one thought the world needed another media gossip site when Dan Abrams, a former general manager of MSNBC, started Mediaite.com last July. But at least he brought in a credentialed team — including the well-known media blogger Rachel Sklar — to help him elbow his way into a crowded market. At 26, Mr. Krakauer is not only the site’s youngest editor, but also a seasoned reporter in his own right. He honed his skills as an assistant editor at MediaBistro’s influential TVNewser site, which became an industry staple under former editor Brian Stelter, now a New York Times media reporter.

He is already starting to break a steady stream of scoops, like his posts that reported that ABC was planning a major layoff in February, or the story last October that Fox News’s 3 a.m. show was getting better ratings than CNN’s 8 p.m. primetime show — a fact that Fox later worked into an advertising campaign. Some in the news media are starting to take notice. Last year, Rush Limbaugh quoted Mr. Krakauer’s TVNewser podcast with Terry Moran, the co-anchor of ABC’s “Nightline,” in his radio show. The Hollywood site TheWrap.com listed him along with Ryan Seacrest and The Los Angeles Times media reporter, Joe Flint, on its list of “50 TV Insiders to Follow Right Now” on Twitter last fall.

NOTABLE SCOOP: His post in February about the NBC cafeteria’s fried chicken menu in honor of Black History Month had Wanda Sykes joking about it on Jay Leno that night.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Last August, reported that Fox News’s Twitter account had been hacked and littered with nasty comments about Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly — a juicy scoop, except that the account was a hoax.

BESS LEVIN: Editor, Dealbreaker

Success is often just being in the right place at the right time. So it was perhaps fortuitous that Bess Levin’s former co-editor at this sharp-fanged financial gossip site, John Carney, left it for Ms. Levin to run solo in the fall of 2008, just as blood was starting to flow on Wall Street. Since then, Ms. Levin has elbowed her way into an exclusive and still heavily male club, becoming a must-read not only for $250,000-a-year-bonus investment bank drones wondering which boss’s head is about to roll, but also among the corner-office types themselves. Financial powerhouses like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, as well as hedge fund managers like Steve Cohen, Dan Loeb, and Ken Griffin, have been known to visit the site.

In February, Dealbreaker was named one of the 10 best Wall Street blogs by The Wall Street Journal’s David Weidner, who wrote that “Dealbreaker is full of Wall Street snark and has a potty mouth to boot.” Of the 10, Ms. Levin’s was only one of two written by a woman (though a few are anonymous), and certainly the only one by a woman who was 25 and never worked on the Street.

NOTABLE SCOOP: After BusinessWeek published a profile of Mr. Cohen in 2003 that referred to, but did not show, party invitations that his wife sent out of the prominent but discreet hedge-fund manager dressed up in a king costume, the invitations entered into Wall Street lore, sight unseen. Ms. Levin finally dug up an image of the regal invitation and ran it last November.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Published an “unfounded rumor” that a major hedge fund’s prime brokers were threatening liquidation at the height of the financial mess in late 2008. It turns out the rumor was indeed “unfounded,” so she quickly removed it under pressure.

LILIT MARCUS: Editor, The Gloss

The Gloss, a fashion and beauty site that also focuses on career, dating, women’s issues and culture, is another new site in the growing b5 media stable that was overseen by Elizabeth Spiers, a challenge of sorts to Jezebel.com. Ms. Marcus, 27, is its highly regarded editor. Before taking over at Jewcy.com, an irreverent blog about Jewish issues and culture, in 2008, Ms. Marcus founded SaveTheAssistants.com, a forum that gave beleaguered assistants a place to sound off anonymously about their jerk bosses, like the one who stole a book from his assistant and gave it to his girlfriend. The site grew out of her grueling experience as an administrative assistant for a media company.

The site, which she later spun off into a book, attracted attention on National Public Radio and CNN.com, which compared the tales on the site with those on “The Office”: “Bosses like Michael Scott do exist and employees have to deal with them every day,” the article reported. “The good news is they don’t have to commiserate alone.” Even though Ms. Marcus has never named the company that inspired the site, its management still threatens to sue her, she said. “There’s a saying where I come from: ‘if they’re shooting at you, you’re doing something right,” the North Carolina-bred Ms. Marcus said. “I think about that a lot as a gossip writer.”

While Ms. Marcus and Ms. Spiers acknowledge the inevitable Jezebel comparisons, they also bristle. The site, which focuses on fashion and beauty as much as the latest from the feminist writer Cynthia Ozick, aims to be lighter, Ms. Spiers said. “The Gloss is more playful, it’s funnier,” she said of her site, which relies heavily on fashion and beauty as well as stories about bigger women’s issues. “Jezebel is more Ms. Magazine. The Gloss is not a humor site, but humor is one of its key components.”

NOTABLE SCOOP: A recent Gloss item about tensions between Tinsley Mortimer and her sister-in-law Minnie Mortimer, a fashion designer, was picked up by Page Six.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: It’s early, and no major strike-throughs yet, although the site did take some heat from fashion bloggers for not doing more to get the other side on a recent post about an alleged sexual overture by the photographer Terry Richardson toward one of his models.

FRED MWANGAGUHUNGA: Founder, MediaTakeOut.com

A Columbia Law-educated former corporate lawyer from Hollis, Queens, whose previous professional apogee was founding a high-end laundry and dry-cleaning service, Mr. Mwangaguhunga came to blogging in his fourth decade of life, a little late to qualify as a prodigy. But that doesn’t seem to have held him back. In four years, his site, which focuses on the urban culture industries, now attracts a following of five million unique visitors a month; traffic grew by 125 percent last year alone. His items are routinely picked up by sites like TMZ.com, enhancing his reputation — which he is perfectly happy to encourage — as the Matt Drudge of African-American entertainment.

And lately, mainstream journalists and sites are starting to pay a lot more attention. Mediaite.com, the media gossip blog, called him one of the top online blog editors of 2009 and explaining: “The site, which covers black celebrity gossip, boasts an enormous readership and regularly breaks big stories. To wit: they called Lady Gaga’s decision to pull out of Kanye West’s tour a day before it was reported elsewhere, and — if this can be called a scoop — they were the first to run the infamous nude Rihanna pictures.” Meanwhile, the site’s first post about Chris Brown’s assault on his former girlfriend attracted 100,000 hits in its first few minutes, Mr. Mwangaguhunga said.

Last year, The New York Beacon, a newspaper that focuses on African-American issues, praised his “significant reach in the vastly ignored urban community.” And Mr. Mwangaguhunga himself seems supremely confident about his site’s future: “If done properly, I don’t see any reason why MediaTakeOut can’t be as popular as TMZ.”

NOTABLE SCOOP: That news about Lady Gaga.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Announced the birth of the N.F.L. player Vince Young’s daughter, before paternity tests showed that the child was not his.

MAUREEN O’CONNOR: Weekend and night editor, Gawker

Talk about coming of age in the Internet era. Ms. O’Connor, 25, has never had a journalism job that even remotely involved a print product, having started at Princeton blogging for the IvyGate, a popular gossip blog about the Ivy League. “Our bread and butter was the scandals and follies of Ivy League students and faculty — hazing bloopers, secret societies, campus controversies,” said Ms. O’Connor, who tracked campus stories like that of Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art student who stirred a national controversy with her hoax project supposedly involving aborted fetuses, during her time there.

After graduation, Ms. O’Connor landed a job at Tina Brown’s Daily Beast as a home-page editor, and then, in November, started as weekend editor for Gawker, the Nick Denton site that has been the launch pad for nearly a whole generation of blogosphere stars, including Choire Sicha and Jessica Coen, who served the online managing editor for New York Magazine before recently returning to Jezebel, a Gawker Media blog.

Ms. O’Connor is off to a strong start at Gawker. Her lengthy obituary of the heiress Casey Johnson — “among the first celebutantes to decamp to Hollywood in search of 21C fame,” she wrote — attracted 100,000 hits in January.

NOTABLE SCOOP: In January, she began an “investigation” into the White House budget director Peter Orszag’s hair — a rug or a barber’s misfire, you be the judge — that became a fleeting Internet meme in its own right.

MEMORABLE GAFFE: Took Fox News to task over a typo in a chyron (a term for the graphics at the bottom of a TV screen) identifying former the Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth as a “congresswoman.” Too bad Ms. O’Connor misspelled the word chyron in the post.

SARA POLSKY: Editor, Curbed

Curbed, the real-estate blog that attracts two million page views a month, is a something of an addiction for many in a town that is (still) addicted to real estate, even after the crash. Ms. Polsky, 24, is its newest voice, an understudy to longtime editor Joey Arak and Lockhart Steele, the site’s founder, who is one of the most influential blog personalities in town, and thus a star-maker of sorts. Ms. Polsky, whose prior experience consisted of a year as an editorial assistant at Real Deal magazine, is up against stiff competition. The field is dominated locally by older, established real estate professionals, like Jonathan Miller of the Matrix, who is the head of a major appraisal company,; and Douglas Heddings of TrueGotham, a long-time broker. Even Jonathan Butler of chief competitor Brownstoner used to run a hedge fund. The big rivals are generally “written by people who are in the industry,” she said. “They can write about how brokers work, or what the statistics say. We have more of a laypersons’ approach.” But unlike bloggers of old, this Harvard graduate is not above old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, like the time she trekked out to Greenpoint in November to watch a developer silence the gavel at a major auction of new condominium units when early sales on units priced up to $599,000 started selling in the $200,000s. Like the best bloggers, Mr. Steele said, “she’s got the jaundiced eye, that I’m always looking for, but it’s not knee-jerk negativity.”

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