Ben McGrath profiles Gawker owner Nick Denton. John Cassidy follows up:
Denton has moved beyond the stage of running a cottage business, but suggestions that he has joined, or is about to join, the ranks of moguldom, where revenues are measured in the hundreds of millions, or billions, are absurd. Denton is aware of this disjunctureup to a point. A few weeks ago, I met him at a party, and he told me that New York magazine, which recently profiled him as one of the people who run the city, had pitched the story to him as “the new Rupert Murdoch.” In telling me this, Denton said he thought New York’s editors had been “a bit premature.” When I suggested that they might have been about forty years premature he didn’t smile.
The web is not about moguls, methinks. It's too bottom-up. It cannot be controlled the way old media was. Or not for the foreseeable future.