Why Politico and Gawker Are Embracing Quality

By: Andrew Beaujon | Washingtonian

For those who follow digital media, 2015 may be remembered as the Year of Quality. In New York in January, Gawker Media announced that the company would shut down the live chart on its Manhattan office wall showing how many clicks its articles were getting in real time. Gawker’s CEO, Nick Denton, wrote on his blog that his company had “reached the limit” of paying writers a bounty for posts that cracked open the internet. Instead, Gawker would salute high-quality work—“a recognition that we can never play the viral traffic game as shamelessly as BuzzFeed,” sniffed Denton.