Snarky Blog Stuff, Day 2

It's the Day After Yesterday in the "Gawker vs. Mediabistro FishbowlNY" face-off for media gossip eyeballs. With some interesting discussion in our comments from our earlier post, Gothamist asked our experts, Ellen Correia of Standard Deviance and Felix Salmon of MemeFirst, to give us some now more-educated thoughts.

A) Ellen Correia:

To start of this coverage of the head-to-head matchup let's look how the two camps treated the New York Times City article that started this whole mess. Gawker alluded to the smackdown piece twice(1 and 2), and linked to it straight in it's Remainders section. Fishbowl never mentioned it. Chickens! Score +3 for Team Gawker.

Next, let's look at Fishbowl's posts. Fishbowl had some excellent calculations on how much Vanity Fair writers make per word. Their little spreadsheet shows that some Vanity Fair contributors possibly made infinite sums per word over the last 12 months as they did not write any articles for the magazine during that period($x divided by 0 articles equals infinity, n'est-ce pas?). Since they had to do really hard math the Fishies get +200.

Gawker lost some ground by beating that tired old "What's this football thing you speak of" joke again when they posted about the Bud Light ad that will not air during the Super Bowl. It was funny the first 10 times, unfortunately this is time # 11. -1 for Gawker.
Fishbowl's other co-editor Christian Moerk (you know the one who will be writing all but two posts each day while Ms. Spiers does the managing (except for yesterday, of course, when Elizabeth wrote 7 of the 10 posts, but who's counting?) has excellent print-media credentials. However I'm afraid he hasn't mastered this whole internet thing yet. Christian wrote an interesting post about how Maureen Dowd's most recent article in the New York Times bears a striking resemblance to Carl Hiaasen's article in the Miami Herald a week ago. At the end of the post he tells the readers, "You compare. Then decide." So naturally, being the good reader I am, I started clicking about on my screen to compare the articles. I clicked here, then there, but to no avail: Not one hyperlink to either of the articles was included in the post. Apparently Christian thinks us blog readers need some exercise and should walk to the closest newspaper stand so we can pick up a copies of a week old Miami Herald and last Thurday's New York Times. Sorry Christian, I am way to lazy for that. -198 for the Goldfish.

So we're tied up: 2 for Gawker and 2 for Fishbowl. What will decide the face off? Drumroll... Fishbowl's excessive use of BOLD! At first it seemed harmless: They bolded names like Sebastian Junger or for effect, as in this post. But then the bold started to pop up everywhere: Stinger missile, counter, and and. My eyes began to bleed. They're bolding for emphasis and they're bolding bold names. By Trump do they mean the verb of the combover? Is Paris the city or the socialite? So confused! -1 for the Fishbowl

So there you have it, Gawker wins this round with a score of 2-1. Fishbowl could make a comeback though, assuming they learn the wonders of the hyperlink.

B) Felix Salmon:

As far as I'm concerned, Fishbowl lost the minute it launched without an RSS feed. Spiers promised me it would come at some point in the future, but until it does, Fishbowl isn't even really competing.

A quick glance at Fishbowl, however, also reveals two things it's sorely lacking, and without which it'll never compete with Gawker. More hyperlinks, please (can you believe that a large number of the posts have *none at all*, and most of the rest have only one), and more funny! All the MB blogs seem far too serious. Whadda they thinking, they're writing for MemeFirst?

Vive la blog! And with that, Gothamist will go back to our regularly scheduled thinking about how much we miss Jerry Orbach.