MOLI VIEW™

There are only a few blogs where a resignation merits a piece in The New York Times, and one of them is Gawker. On Friday, two editors quit — in a bizarre, rambling post — quickly followed by a third. And the theories started flying, fast and furious.

At the center of the take-this-job-and-shove-it post was an article from the literary magazine N+1 about the history of the site, which apparently got to the heart of the editors' increasing discomfort with Gawker's tone. It's worth a read, but I wonder if the real story is simpler than that.

What happened? The N+1 story casts the shift as an age-old New York saga of outsiders looking in who turn into insiders looking out. Maybe it is. But I wonder if that underestimates the role of Gawker Media owner Nick Denton's new pay-for-traffic scheme, whereby writers got bonuses based on the popularity of their postings.

As the saying goes, follow the money. When Gawker paid very little, at least according to rumor, launch editor Elizabeth Spiers did it for love — or at least so it seemed. As you'd expect, the site was full of surprises, most but not all of them good. As Gawker grew, the next editors did it for the money — and as you'd expect, the writing gradually became more professional and less surprising. Then the site gradually went over the tipping point where snark turned to sourness.

Apparently, the new system made one Gawker editor quit a couple of months ago. And one of the editors who just resigned said that the new pay system encouraged "pandering" and competition among editors to say the most outrageous things. This you can see on the site, which went from picking on successful celebutards to picking on everyone. As the Gawker editors themselves might have put it, we all became douchebags.

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