• Silicon Alley Insider, Friday, August 8, 2008 11:31 AM

After posting record Web traffic for July, the Los Angeles Times patted itself on the back in a congratulatory email that made its way to the blogosphere. Nick Denton, "the evil genius blogmaster at Gawker Media" (according to Peter Kafka), saw the Times' record traffic of 127 million page views, and scoffed. "That's cute," he said.

Kafka points out that Denton's blog empire, which includes twelve sites, recorded its own record July, generating twice the traffic of the country's fourth-largest newspaper: 254 million page views. Meanwhile (following the most recent round of job cuts), the Times has a newsroom staff of 700, compared to Gawker Media's editorial staff of 80.

In a series of comments, SAI Editor Henry Blodget claims that, "in five years, what's left of the L.A. Times and The New York Times will look more like Gawker (in terms of staffing and publishing velocity), or they won't exist. Newspapers had a great run for 200 years, but the model is now obsolete. Gawker, Huffington Post, et al, have built the next one."

Read the whole story at Silicon Alley Insider »