Gawker Media Founder: Videos, Images to Take Place of Text in Online Media World

Over the last decade, the media world has been flipped on its head. The introduction of a number of technological advances and consumers’ ever-increasing desire for immediate, up-to-date news has forever changed the way that media providers deliver their content. In fact, the majority of Americans currently tap into online resources to get their news, rather than waiting for print publications to be delivered to their doorstep.

Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media, a network of some of the most visible and popular blogs in the US, believes that the media world is about to make another drastic change, according to Mashable.

While speaking at the IAB Mixx conference in New York on Monday, Denton told AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka that online media is soon to become more like television and less like a newspaper.

“People don’t really want to read text,” Denton said. “They want videos, they want images, bigger, more lavish.”

“It means a screen which is less constrained by the need to have three or four ads and every single bit of content on one screen,” he added.

Denton noted that one of Gawker (News - Alert) Media’s most popular stories of the year was based around a leaked image of the iPhone 4, not a traditional text-based news feature.

“There is a huge kind of hunger for that image, for the video we produced," he said. "The core of that story was the image of the phone."

During the interview, the social media entrepreneur also took a few minutes to bash the current state of blogs, hinting at the fact that this company may soon change its format. He expressed his frustration that the average blog layout forces new stories to the top, often burying some of the more popular and news-worthy articles lower down in the blog.

Denton also dismissed Twitter as a “closed, elite audience that is not mainstream enough,” to deliver media content.

When asked whether he thought blogging was true “journalism,” Denton responded that it was an “uninteresting question.”

Beecher Tuttle is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf