Gawker seeks new editor ... of anger, envy and resentment?

There's a job opening at i Gawker ("daily Manhattan media news and gossip"): Managing Editor. It's a high-visibility gig:

Gawker.com receives more than 10m pageviews per month. Think of Gawker less as a blog than as a full-blown news site. The right candidate will oversee Gawker's evolution.

We're casting a wide net for candidates, beyond the clubby world of bloggers. Because Gawker is becoming a larger and more complex operation, and, frankly, a more traditional one.

It's no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories.

Speaking of snark, they actually link to a very critical Oct. 14 article in New York Magazine: Everybody Sucks; Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass. I've sort of avoided covering that article to date, but here's a relevant excerpt: (emphasis added)

... at the Gawker offices, where, beneath a veneer of self-deprecation, the core belief is that bloggers are cutting-edge journalists—the new "anti-media." No other form has lent itself so perfectly to capturing the current ethos of young New York, which is overwhelmingly tipped toward anger, envy, and resentment at those who control the culture and apartments. "New York is a city for the rich by the rich, and all of us work at the mercy of rich people and their projects," says Choire Sicha, Gawker's top editor (he currently employs a staff of five full-time writers). "If you work at any publication in this town, you work for a millionaire or billionaire. In some ways, that's functional, and it works as a feudal society.

Choire Sicha was Managing Editor when the article appeared; he and editor Emily Gould apparently gave their notice on Friday (per Peter Kafka of Silicon Alley Insider). Rachel Sklar (Eat The Press, The Huffington Post) pointed to a confirmation in a long, rambling Gawker post. Worth reading for those interested in the job:

In the Budget truck, I also had time to read most of Carla Blumenkranz's review, 'In Search of Gawker.' Carla went back into the Gawker archives to trace the site's evolution from Elizabeth Spiers' first post in 2002 to the decadent Gawker of today. ... the site's next editor Choire Sicha's appeal was that he was "almost impersonally sharp and cruel and correct."

That's appealing? Welcome to Gawker.

Update: Jakob Lodwick (co-founder of Connected Ventures, Vimeo, CollegeHumor, and Busted Tees; all bought by IAC/InterActiveCorp in August 2006) posted his view on Saturday:

Gawker's premise is "people are bad". It acts as if all humans are inherently awful. Any achievement is framed as an accident; a distraction from the achiever's underlying depravity. This worldview is directly at odds with our city's best and brightest. Nick, it won't be easy to recruit someone better than Emily and Choire; as the months march on, the pool of creative youngsters who are willing to turn themselves into professional assholes will shrink. If you would like to reverse Gawker's premise and turn it into something else entirely, we should talk. A publication that celebrates excellence instead of negating it could be a big hit in the near future.

Hat tip: Jason Calacanis who calls it "the most accurate description of Gawker Media I've ever read". (For those who don't track such things: Calacanis founded Weblogs Inc., a competitor to Gawker Media.)