Even though it seems arbitrary, the start of a new year always manages to bring many real changes with it. Today, Brian Crescente, former Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku, has announced that he is leaving the site—but he’s not the only one who is changing roles. Current Editor Joel Johnson is going to Gawker site Jalopnik, and Kotaku’s new Editor is now Stephen Totilo, formerly of MTV.
It’s not a big secret that Gawker sites were hit hard in 2011; the redesign they introduced about a year ago led to the collective sites’ bleeding readers. It got so bad that a consultant named Rex Sorgatz bet Gawker chief Nick Denton cash money that the redesign would never work. In October of 2011, Denton lost the bet—traffic was 10 million pageviews lower than he had said it should be.
Gawker in 2012 is going to look very different; Totilo has laid out his “vision” for Kotaku 2012 in his introductory post. It is, sadly, extremely generic: “We’ll make it the best site ever” doesn’t exactly inspire hope. Jalopnik now has an Editor who comes from the video game reporting world, traffic is down, commenters seem angry, and Gawker’s reputation in 2011 is not quite as glowing as it once was.
As all-purpose aggregators and social networks like Reddit, Twitter, and Tumblr continue to grow, topical blogs continue to shrink. Perhaps it’s a sign that people want to visit fewer sites since they are able to get all their entertainment and information needs met in a single place.
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