ME and Ophelia

Sunday Times says Wonkette reveals the steamy truth
And Nick Denton grinds out another gossip mill

On glancing through today's Sunday Times, I noticed an article entitled "Wonkette reveals the steamy truth". Wonkette.com is authored by Ana Marie Cox, a 31-year-old writer who writes salacious gossip (usually about prominent politicians in Washington DC) on the internet under the name of Wonkette. It is funded by Nick Denton, the British publisher behind Gawker e-zine and Kinja digest of weblogs.

The article, written by Sarah Baxter in New York, reveals that next week Nick Denton is launching a new gossip site about prominent people in Los Angeles. On Wonkette and Denton, Baxter writes:

The launch party for her site in March became a talked about event. "With her gossipy, raunchy, potty-mouthed blog, Cox, a self-described failed journalist, has grabbed the attention of staid Washington," The New York Times observed last week.

Cox has the rare distinction among bloggers of getting paid for her efforts. Her site, created in January, is funded by Nick Denton, a British publisher who is about to shake up Hollywood stars by launching a similarly irreverent Los Angeles blog next week.

Denton, 37, a former Financial Times journalist, made a fortune in the dotcom boom in the late 1990s. He lives in New York but says he misses the guts and humour of British newspapers. "You can stir up a lot of trouble for very little money with a blog," said Denton. "Washington and Los Angeles are the political and entertainment capitals of the world. The ratio of power to gossip is totally out of whack."
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Note, this article appeared in the World News section, on page 29, of the Sunday Times. So far, I've not noticed any articles reporting on the genocide that is happening right now in the Sudan.

Makes one wonder about people's priorities. And why they expend precious time, energy and money on salacious gossip. What is it about such gossip that draws people like flies to a dung pile? Must be a weakness or flawed psyche.

Those who have no compunction about such gossip, and enjoy seeing it spread around like muck, must surely be shallow and not very nice. What decent character would even read such stuff. Words like sleazey, parasites and leeches spring to mind.

Maybe Nick Denton and Wonkette, and their readers, can find it in their hearts to contribute and do something creative about the news in Jim Moore's very important post on the genocide in Sudan.