TO media voyeurs, the name Elizabeth Spiers inspires awe. Ms. Spiers is the original “Gawker” – the founding editor of New York’s most popular gossip blog, the pioneer of the site’s dark obsession with New York media, and the exemplar of the snarky tone that bloggers the world over try to imitate.
Now, after a foray into the print world at New York magazine, Ms. Spiers, a wry Alabamian, is returning to online gossip. In October she took a job at Mediabistro.com where, among other things, she will start up a media gossip blog called FishBowlNY and serve as its co-author. Among her chief rivals is Gawker.com itself, which is now edited by a cheerful 24-year-old named Jessica Coen and is still a daily addiction for the gossip hungry and media elite.
The face-off begins tomorrow when Mediabistro, largely a journalist networking site, unveils FishBowlNY and several other new blogs. The rivalry falls squarely into the grand New York tradition of competing for the juiciest bits of gossip. This being the new millennium, the battle is being raged not in screaming tabloids but in cyberspace.
But Ms. Spiers’s nemesis at Gawker is not without resources. Ms. Coen earned her gossip wings just weeks after being snatched out of Columbia Journalism School’s class of 2005, scooping other blogs and traditional media alike. And Gawker’s readership, which has been steadily growing, now numbers a million a month.
Though Ms. Coen is not personally obsessed with gossip, she knows its power. “When Tara Reid’s breasts fall down, I’m not like, ‘Oh, thank God!”’ she said. “But it’s the kind of thing that once it goes up on Gawker, it’s a record-setting day of traffic.”
As the two blogs prepare to compete, they clearly mean business.
“I hope we do it better, we scoop them, and we post first,” Ms. Spiers said.