The New York Magazine has a cover story about Gawker, the blog and the blog group, this week which, if you can get past the first page and a half of insufferability, is pretty neat. There’s a lot of Gawker-hate in the article — it must have been pretty satisfying to take the piss out of the people who day out do the same to you — but it gets better as it progresses, and there are some passages on the psyches of the bloggers and the tension between print- and popular web-writing that are interesting.

Journalists are both haves and have-nots. They’re at the feast, but know they don’t really belong—they’re fighting for table scraps, essentially—and it could all fall apart at any moment. Success is not solid. That’s part of the weird fascination with Gawker, part of why it still works, five years on—it’s about the anxiety and class rage of New York’s creative underclass. Gawker’s social policing and snipe-trading sideshow has been impossible to resist as a kind of moral drama about who deserves success and who doesn’t. It supplies a Manhattan version of social justice.

Gawker blogging (which includes Weblogs Inc. and any of the other non-user-generated blogmills, but I’ll just call “Gawker blogging”) is not like regular blogging. The writers of these blogs are churning out post after post (up to 12 per day!) on any aspect of their beat that finds their way across their rss feed or into their inbox. After a few weeks on the job it seems impossible to still be engaged in the subject matter. The heart leaves, and out comes the snark. As a commenter at Metafilter said:

It’s only miserable in that it takes a LOT of work to crank out 24 pieces of interesting, relevant, pithy content in a given day without wanting to kill yourself. And for Gizmodo, that writing about cell phones every day for six months might make you want to choke a bitch.

But damn if the blogs aren’t popular. It’s difficult to find any self-respecting geek that doesn’t have Engadget on his or her rss, or any hip reality-show watcher who doesn’t float over to Perez or TMZ regularly.

[Gawker Editor Emily] Gould published a book last spring, and wasn’t sure if she should write another. “At the end of the day, your ideas in a book have less impact than if you had summed them up in two paragraphs on the most widely read blog at the most-read time of the day, so why’d you spend two years on it?” she said, delicately picking up a piece of toro. “But there’s other ways to get noticed than the Internet, right?” She laughed bitterly. “There’s always TV.”

I don’t know if her statement is borne of warped perspective, but she may be right. My instincts tell me that profound impacts will be better communicated in books, as blog posts get buried under more recent material, but anyone familiar with Del.icio.us or reddit knows that those really important memes and articles tend to come up again and again in the queues as new waves of people discover them. So I don’t know.

I realize that it’s New York Magazine, so it’s going to cover the blog that’s based in New York (okay, it may have taken me halfway through my second read to realize that), but what’d I’d like to read is a comparison of the biggest, most successful of these blogs, Gizmodo and Kotaku, with their Weblogs Inc. equivalents Engadget and Joystiq and maybe some of the other popular tech blogs like Slashdot or something. How have these blogs, which get upwards of 4 million pageviews per week, changed the technology/computing industry? Have they actually broken any ground or are they just mouthpieces for endless PR departments? They’ve certainly, as far as the videogame blogs are concerned, begun taking down their print counterparts one by one, but is that a good thing? I understand it’s a totally different article, but it seems more relevant.

It seems to me that, for anyone who’s not a New York journalist, these are the blogs that have changed the landscape of the media most of all. They’re on the cutting edge and are usually the first people to have tech information. It’s something print media can’t keep up with without embracing the tools of the blogger. It’s almost the opposite situation as Gawker, where you have young journalists railing against the establishment as they take their first steps into it. On the tech blogs you have people first and foremost trying to get the information out. The commentary comes second.