Maybe Nick Denton was right....

Last summer, Gawker Media's Nick Denton told the Interactive Media Conference in New Orleans that newspapers should not bother trying to blog.

They don't get it, he said. After reading a spit-take-inducing quote in Los Angeles magazine while flying cross-country last weekend, I see better Denton's point of view.

In the magazine, Steve Oney profiled Mark Lisanti, editor of Denton's Defamer Hollywood gossip blog. In the piece (not online that I could find, sorry), Oney revealed that Lisanti's been in talks with the Los Angeles Times about blogging for latimes.com as well as writing for the paper's Calendar section.

Here's the quote:

"If Mark cleaned up his language and tightened up his fact-checking," says a Times editor, "everything he does could appear in the paper."

And if he just grew feathers and learned to quack, he'd be a duck.

Um, isn't the point of a salty, irreverent gossip column to have, you know, salty, irreverent gossip?

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