Ken Layne

Ken Layne
Ken Layne at 92YTribeca in New York, November 2012
Born	United States
Occupation	Writer, journalist, blogger

Ken Layne is an American writer and novelist best known for his political coverage, essays and blogging for Gawker, Wonkette, The Awl, and many early Internet blogs and webzines.^[1] Layne is editor of the Desert Oracle, a quarterly periodical focused on the folklore and natural history of the American deserts.^[2]

Career

Layne has described his career as consisting of "Local newspapers, domestic and foreign radio stations, consumer computer guides, television newsrooms, glossy progressive magazines, the cartoon page of college newspapers, Washington wire service desks, expatriate post-Iron Curtain tabloids, sporadic appearances in respectable media, occasional musical endeavors, a few forays into traditional book publishing and a long chain of oddball news and satire websites—that's how I've barely earned a living over the decades."^[3] Layne began his career in local television news and daily newspapers in Southern California.^[4][5] He relocated to Prague in the early 1990s and was a staff writer and Slovakia bureau chief for Prognosis, the English-language newspaper, where he covered the Velvet Divorce that broke up Czechoslovakia.^[6] Layne was editor of ComputorEdge magazine in the middle 1990s, technology columnist for the Budapest Business Journal, and new-media columnist for the USC Annenberg School for Communication publication, Online Journalism Review.^[7] In 1997, he co-founded Tabloid.net, a popular early Internet daily newspaper.^[8][9] Despite "safe for work" articles and columns about topical events, the site was extremely controversial.^[10] It closed for business in approximately 2000, and included future-Reason Magazine editor Matt Welch and future The Daily Show With Jon Stewart writer Jason Ross (writer) among its staff writers.^[11] He was a staff columnist for GettingIt.com under editor R.U. Sirius.^[12] In the early 2000s and especially following the 9/11 incidents, Layne was a prominent blogger.^[13][14] An off-hand remark he made about bloggers "fact checking" newspapers became a rallying cry.^[15] In 2005, Layne and then-Gawker editor Choire Sicha launched the tabloid-style headlines site Sploid for Gawker Media.^[16]

Wonkette

Layne joined Alex Pareene as co-editor of the satirical politics blog Wonkette in August 2006. Layne became sole editor after Pareene left the site a year later.^[17] Pareene has described Layne as "the world's best political blogger who hates politics and doesn't want to be a political blogger."^[18] Gawker Media sold Wonkette in 2008; Layne was among the buyers. He remained with the site for six years, until it was acquired by Rebecca Schoenkopf.^[19][20]

LA Examiner

Between 2001 and 2003, Layne and Matt Welch were the founding editors of LA Examiner, an early metropolitan media blog focusing on the media in Los Angeles.^[21] In 2003, former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan published his prototype of a weekly print version of the online newspaper, with Layne as editor.^[22][23]

The Awl and Gawker

As a staff writer for The Awl and national correspondent^[24] for Gawker, Layne writes primarily satirical pieces about politics and American culture, including his "American Almanac" series on U.S. holidays.^[25]

Controversies

Worst Person in the World

For his remarks on then-MSNBC host Keith Olbermann skipping his MSNBC broadcast for several weeks, Olbermann declared Layne to be the "Worst Person in the World" on^[26][27]

Sarah Palin controversy

Wonkette was the first national publication to regularly feature Sarah Palin after her election as Alaska's governor in 2006, and gave her the nickname "America's Hottest Governor" in December 2006, a nickname then adopted by Alaska Magazine for its 2008 cover story on Palin.^[28][29] But the liberal site caused a backlash and threat of boycott by Palin's supporters in 2011, when writer Jack Steuf posted a collection of Louis C.K. standup comedy videos from YouTube criticizing Palin for using her Down Syndrome child as a "political prop" and calling her child "retarded.".^[30] The Louis C.K. videos were quickly removed from YouTube, and wrath was directed at Jack Steuf and Wonkette. Layne claimed he was off work when the post was published, but he was slow to remove the offensive post claiming there was "no point" in deleting articles from the Internet when foes would immediately repost the articles on other websites.^[31]

Books

Layne wrote the short novel Dignity during his last year at Wonkette.^[32] The book deals with "the worst of the late-2000s bursting housing bubble and takes place in a future eerily close to the present."^[33] Layne is also the author of a satiric thriller published by Duffy & Snellgrove in 2001, called Dot.con.^[34] It was reported by the New York Observer in 2008 that Harper Collins had signed Layne to write a non-fiction book about the California coast, but no book by Layne on that subject has appeared.^[35]

Personal life

Layne apparently lives in or near Mojave National Preserve in the Mojave Desert, and was photographed by the Los Angeles Times at the site of a Christian cross that had been illegally installed on a mountain within the U.S. national park.^[36] The Mojave Desert is the setting for much of the novel "Dignity" and was the subject of Layne's column for LA CityBeat from 2008 to 2009, called "Desert Rattler."^[37]

References