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Type of site | Politics, satire |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Wonkette Media |
| URL | wonkette.com |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Launched | January 2004 |
| Current status | Active |
Wonkette is an American online magazine of topical and political gossip, established in 2004 by Gawker Media and founding editor Ana Marie Cox. The editor since 2012 is Rebecca Schoenkopf, formerly of OC Weekly . Wonkette covers U.S. politics in a satirical manner.
Wonkette was established in January 2004 as part of the Gawker Media network. Its founding editor was Ana Marie Cox, a former editor at suck.com. [1]
Cox rapidly established a large reading audience and media notice for the site. The blog gained further national media attention after Cox publicized the story of Jessica Cutler aka "Washingtonienne", a former Hill staffer who blogged about her affair with a member of former Senator Mike DeWine's staff. [2]
Cox announced her resignation as Wonkette's editor on January 5, 2006, in order to promote her book, Dog Days, and was succeeded by David Lat, the author of Underneath Their Robes, a blog about the federal judiciary, and Alex Pareene, a young New York University student and Gawker intern/guest editor in New York who moved to D.C. for the Wonkette position. (In late 2007, Pareene moved to the flagship Gawker site and, in April 2010, to Salon.)[ citation needed ]
In June 2006, Lat announced his decision to leave Wonkette. His slot was to be filled by guest editors until August 2006, when longtime political blogger Ken Layne joined as editor. Wonkette reached its largest pre-2008 audience during the 2006 midterm elections due to scandal coverage of Mark Foley and other incumbents involved in corruption, sex-abuse and bribery scandals.[ citation needed ]
After Pareene and Layne's departure in October 2007, a team of new editors including John Clarke, Jr. and Megan Carpentier was installed by Gawker management. Gawker publisher Nick Denton brought Layne back as sole editor two months later, who put in place the team of Jim Newell of IvyGate, videographer Liz Glover, former Gawker blogger Sara K. Smith, Columbia literary magazine The Blue and White editor Juli Weiner, and longtime contributors Princess Sparkle Pony (Peter Huestis) and Josh Fruhlinger, the Comics Curmudgeon.[ citation needed ]
Wonkette teams covered both the Denver DNC and St. Paul RNC conventions. Newell and columnist Josh Fruhlinger covered Barack Obama's inauguration in Washington. As with many political websites, readership hit new records between the November 2008 election and January 2009 inauguration.[ citation needed ]
Past and current guest editors and contributors include Reason Magazine editor Nick Gillespie, Washington Post reporter David Weigel, DCeiver editor and Huffington Post writer Jason Linkins, Gawker editor and The Awl founder Choire Sicha, New York comedian and author Sara Benincasa, Chicago artist and journalist Lauri Apple, Boston Globe political blogger Garrett Quinn, cartoonist Benjamin Frisch, and Vanity Fair online writer Juli Weiner.[ citation needed ]
In April 2011, Wonkette came under criticism after blogger Jack Stuef wrote a post that was interpreted as mocking Trig Palin for his having Down syndrome. The post suggested that Trig was possibly the result of incest between Todd Palin and Bristol Palin. In response, at least 14 advertisers, including major companies such as Ford, Toyota, Verizon, Nordstrom, and Papa John's, [3] announced that they would exclude their network remnant advertising from Wonkette. Editor Ken Layne announced that Stuef was placed on probation and Stuef apologized for the post. [4] [5] [6]
The name of the site is a play on the slang word wonk, meaning a "zealous student of political policy", [7] adding the feminine ending to best describe founding editor Cox and as a play on the word "gazette."
On April 14, 2008, Gawker Media announced that it was selling Wonkette and that Layne would remain managing editor and part owner. Gawker Media head Nick Denton attributed the sale to "hunkering down" before another dot com downturn and the Internet bubble bursts: "And, even if not, better safe than sorry; and better too early than too late..." [8] Gawker's Silicon Valley gossip site, Valleywag, was merged with the flagship Gawker.com site, its popular music site, Idolator, was sold to Buzznet, and The Consumerist was sold to Consumers Union as part of the same divestiture effort.[ citation needed ]
Wonkette Media also launched Wonkabout, a D.C. culture guide, which ran from February 12, 2009 until April 28, 2011, and was edited by Arielle Fleisher. [9] [10]
In February, 2017, Wonkette went ad-free, [11] and it is now supported by reader donations.
In July 2023, Schoenkopf moved Wonkette to Substack, retaining its existing URL. She projected that the move would lower the site's hosting costs and possibly attract new readers. [12]
The Bloggies at SXSW selected Wonkette as Best Political Blog in 2005, 2006 and 2007. Wonkette was chosen as a top political blog by Vanity Fair and Real Simple in 2008. Wonkette won the Best Liberal Blog category in the 2008 Weblog Awards and is nominated in the humor, politics and group-blog categories in the 2009 and 2010 Bloggies. Items are frequently picked up by national broadcasts including Colbert Report , Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me and CNN.[ citation needed ]
Alex Nichols, writing in The Outline in 2017, described Wonkette, saying, "This is why I love Wonkette, the gossip blog that refuses to die. Wonkette is Bush-era liberalism frozen in amber, motionless and immortal, forced to passively observe a changing world until the end of time. Why does it still exist? Hard to say. But as long as it is here, we must celebrate its inanity." He wrote, "The site isn't an indictment of centrists, the Democratic Party, or neoliberalism. It doesn't prove a point about anything, and it isn't an example of any trend or political tendency, which makes it all the more baffling ... Wonkette simply exists, and it might outlast us all." [13]
Boing Boing is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice won the Bloggies for Weblog of the Year, in 2004 and 2005. The editors are Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, Carla Sinclair, and Rob Beschizza, and the publisher is Jason Weisberger.
Ana Marie Cox is an American author, blogger, political columnist, and critic. The founding editor of the political blog Wonkette, she was also the Senior Political Correspondent for MTV News, and conducted the "Talk" interviews featured in The New York Times Magazine from 2015 to 2017.
A blog award is an award for the best blog in a given category. Some blog awards are based on a public vote and others are based on a fixed set of criteria applied by a panel of judges.
Gawker was an American blog founded by Nick Denton and Elizabeth Spiers that was based in New York City and focused on celebrities and the media industry. According to SimilarWeb, the site had over 23 million visits per month as of 2015. Founded in 2002, Gawker was the flagship blog for Denton's Gawker Media. Gawker Media also managed other blogs such as Jezebel, io9, Deadspin and Kotaku.
Gawker Media LLC was an American online media company and blog network. It was founded by Nick Denton in October 2003 as Blogwire, and was based in New York City. Incorporated in the Cayman Islands, as of 2012, Gawker Media was the parent company for seven different weblogs and many subsites under them: Gawker.com, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, and Jezebel. All Gawker articles are licensed on a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. In 2004, the company renamed from Blogwire, Inc. to Gawker Media, Inc., and to Gawker Media LLC shortly after.
Nicholas Guido Anthony Denton is a British Internet entrepreneur, journalist, and blogger. He is the founder and former proprietor of the blog collective Gawker Media, and was the managing editor of the New York City-based Gawker, until a lawsuit by Terry Bollea bankrupted the company.
Elizabeth Spiers is an American web publisher and journalist, the founding editor of Gawker, a media gossip blog.
David Benjamin Lat is an American lawyer, author, and legal commentator. Lat is the founder of Above the Law, a website about law firms and the legal profession.
Lifehacker is a weblog about life hacks and software that launched on 31 January 2005. The site was originally launched by Gawker Media and is owned by Ziff Davis. The blog posts cover a wide range of topics including Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, Linux programs, iOS, and Android, as well as general life tips and tricks. The website is known for its fast-paced release schedule from its inception, with content being published every half hour all day long.
Jared Paul Stern is an American writer who currently serves as the Executive Editor for Maxim Magazine, where his byline has appeared since 2015. He had previously served as editor, publisher, photographer, designer, reporter and columnist for the New York Post and other publications. He contributed to the popular "Page Six" column for more than 10 years.
Alex Pareene is an American journalist, writer, and editor. He was the editor-in-chief of the online news magazine Gawker. Pareene later served as a senior editor at Deadspin and editor-in-chief of Splinter News, before becoming a staff writer at The New Republic. As of 2022, he published a newsletter on Substack called "The AP Newsletter".
Valleywag was a Gawker Media blog with gossip and news about Silicon Valley personalities. It was initially launched under the direction of editor Nick Douglas in February 2006. After Douglas was fired, the blog was taken over by Owen Thomas. Thomas left in May 2009, and was replaced by Ryan Tate.
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Consumerist was a non-profit consumer affairs website owned by Consumer Media LLC, a subsidiary of Consumer Reports, with content created by a team of full-time reporters and editors. The site's focus was on consumerism and consumers' experiences and issues with companies and corporations, concentrating mostly on U.S. consumers. As an early proponent of crowdsourced journalism, some content was based on reader-submitted tips and complaints. The majority of the site's articles consisted of original content and reporting by the site's staff. On October 30, 2017, Consumer Reports shut down Consumerist, stating that coverage of consumer issues would now be found on the main Consumer Reports website.
The Comics Curmudgeon is an American blog devoted to humorous and critical analysis of newspaper comics. Its author, Josh Fruhlinger, is a freelance writer and editor based in Los Angeles.
Maggie Shnayerson is an American journalist and blogger. She was an editor at Gawker Media's flagship site, Gawker.com and has written for TIME magazine, the New York Sun, and the New York Post. Before joining Gawker, Shnayerson was the public relations director for the Village Voice and the New York Sun.
While the term "blog" was not coined until the late 1990s, the history of blogging starts with several digital precursors to it. Before "blogging" became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, such as WebEx, created running conversations with "threads". Threads are topical connections between messages on a metaphorical "corkboard". Some have likened blogging to the Mass-Observation project of the mid-20th century.
Owen Thomas is an American blogger, journalist, and entrepreneur who serves as managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times.
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Ken Layne is an American writer, publisher and broadcaster best known for his political blogging in the early 2000s and his association with Gawker Media and Wonkette from 2006 to 2012. He is the proprietor of Desert Oracle, a self-published periodical and radio program exploring themes related to the Mojave Desert and the Southwestern United States. Layne has also written for outlets such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Awl and LA CityBeat.
