TIME.com's First Annual Blog Index

This is the blog that turned snark into success. Gawker's relentlessly critical, headache-inducing cynicism about, oh, practically everything, (even its employees we hear, but whatever) would seem downright mean it weren't for its usual juicy targets: the self-important boobs that rule Manhattan media and high society. Or think they do. Founded in 2002 by "journalist" Nick Denton (Denton would enjoy the quotation marks), Gawker is all about bringing pain to power. The formula has proven so adaptable that Denton's Gawker Media now comprises more than a dozen blogs, each with its own area of meanness (Defamer-LA; Wonkette-Washington D.C., Valleywag-Silicon Valley .) If Gawker were describing itself, it might come up with something like "a moderately successful pack of sneering jackals." We'll just call them a guilty pleasure. And a pack of sneering jackals.

Sample Gawker Post: The owners of wilting alt weekly The Village Voice continue to condemn their staff to the torture of a thousand cuts. Last week, the Voice's overlords at cost-cutting conglomerate The New Times laid off dance critic Deborah Jowitt after she'd served forty years at the paper...The problem, our tipster says, is that Voice editor-in-chief Tony Ortega has most of his hiring decisions dictated to him by his New Times bosses "and then he sulks because he doesn't really like them, and then decides they aren't 'working out.'"