Gawker Editor Dishes at HLS

At 11:40 a.m. yesterday, Jessica Coen, added a line to her blog.

“I’m heading to Cambridge to speak at some law school there tonight,” she wrote.

One might expect the former editor of the celebrity gossip blog, Gawker.com, to be less reluctant to name names.

Coen, who spoke last night at the Harvard Law School, began writing for Gawker in 2004, penning over 6,000 entries in just two years. During her time at the Manhattan-based blog that chronicles celebrity exploits, readership rose to around 8 million people per month, approximately the number of inhabitants of New York City.

“When I first took the job, my parents were livid because I was supposed to go to Columbia [School of Journalism],” she said.

But ditching the traditional path paid off. When Coen left Gawker two years later at the age of 26, she sauntered her way to a spot as deputy editor at Vanity Fair. Coen currently works as the news editor for New York magazine’s Web site.

“Going into the corporate environment, you realize how much freedom you had at Gawker,” Coen said of her move to Vanity Fair, which prompted a switch in work attire from pajamas to something slightly more formal.

Gawker postings—which include headlines such as “Anderson Cooper And Jeff Corwin Insanely Homoerotic In HD—But Not In New York”—often incite celebrity outrage.

In March 2006, George Clooney called for people to “flood their Web site with bogus sightings” to sabotage Gawker Stalker, the blog’s controversial feature that pinpoints celebrity sightings on an online map of Manhattan.

Gawker’s response?

“We did a George Clooney contest for the best picture of him,” Coen said.

Yesterday evening, Coen, who said she was suffering from a cold, did not mention specific plans for the future apart from her intention to “kick the superbug.”

“My ideal future would be having an editing job and writing when I feel like writing,” she said.

Despite the number of law students in the audience, the discussion barely touched upon legal issues.

“Gawker had one lawyer and we called on him only in desperate times,” Coen said.