Time to Add Gawker to Your RSS Feed

In my Best PR Blogs posts of a couple of weeks back, I included the PRWeek blog because it was everything — fresh, lively, snarky — that PRWeek the trade rag isn’t. One of the main reasons that blog is/was any good were the contributions of former staffer Hamilton Nolan.

Shortly after my post, Nolan moved over to Nick Denton’s Gawker blog, one of the many sensational, shoot-from-the-hip blogs in Denton’s little media empire (which includes Gizmodo, Valleywag and Wonkette).

It didn’t take Nolan long to draw the attention of the PR industry to Gawker. Last week, he posted an item quoting an anonymous tipster saying that during media training sessions, Edelman PR advises its clients to “lie.”

Want to get the attention of the PR industry? Call out Richard Edelman. Predictably, Richard shot back with an earnest denial, Gawker took another shot, and the game was on.

I’m not writing this post to jump into the fray — that’s pointless. But I did want to call your attention to Gawker. As noted in the Catching Flack post about the Gizmodo flap at CES (remember?), Denton’s blogs make a point of being controversial. That’s how they get readership.

You may not have heard much about Gawker recently. Apparently, that’s going to change.