DealBreaker is a week old today and so far everything seems to be going well. Traffic is a bit higher than I expected and a frightening number of people I know have taken to responding to factual inaccuracies with "that's absurd," which has to count for something.

More DB press:

From today's Financial Times

...According to an introductory post, Dealbreaker aspires to provide "interviews with people about how much money they make and whether they sometimes buy things just so they can throw them away, sightings of Eliot Spitzer, pitchbook origami, fun with league tables, and so on."

Dealbreaker founder Elizabeth Spiers, the first editor of celebrity and media gossip blog Gawker.com, said she hoped to start breaking original news about Wall Street personalities and scandals. "It could be anything you might talk about at a cocktail party," she said of the site's news ambitions...

Blogger Aims to Lift Lid on Financial Earnings [FT]

Also: I did a Q&A about DealBreaker with mediabistro, wherein they explore the potential for trouble:

mb: Has the SEC, FTC or other regulators been in touch?

Spiers: Ha. No. The SEC gets in touch if there's a problem. They don't call just to say "hi."

mb: Will you be disclosing your investments anywhere? What are they? What's your policy for you and writers/staff? What about for your investors?

Spiers: I have no investments at the moment, so there's nothing to disclose, but the internal policy is that you can't write about something if there's a conflict of interest. My investors don't direct editorial, and I don't know what their financial holdings are, so it's a non-issue.

Elizabeth Spiers: Launches Aren't Much Fun

Belatedly:

From The New York Times, Business Section, "What's Online" (April 8, 2006):

DealBreaker operates on the idea that Wall Street types are at least as worthy of mockery as the media types Gawker makes fun of, or the politicians Wonkette takes on.

The content bears this out. On his new CNBC talk show, Michael Eisner shows himself to be ''a charisma black hole,'' Ms. Spiers wrote. ''On a scale of one to charismatic, Eisner is a negative 10 Clintons. It's painful.''

Wall Street may be hungry for such material -- at least the busy comments sections seems to indicate that. Some of the most popular posts, in terms of reader comments, are written by ''Muffie Benson-Perella,'' an obnoxious, deliciously fictional columnist who wields her credentials and whose name and bio manage to make fun of about half a dozen people and institutions in fewer than 70 words.

From Institutional Investor, "A New Deal for Gawker's Spiers" (April 17, 2006):

Call it The Daily Show for the CNBC set. That's how Elizabeth Spiers, a former New York magazine reporter and founding editor of infamous celebrity-gossip blog Gawker, describes her new, satirical Wall Street blog, DealBreaker.

"The press does not talk about the things you talk about at cocktail parties," says the 29-year-old Duke graduate, who worked as an investment analyst for several hedge funds before launching Gawker in 2002. "Most mainstream financial coverage seems to imply you need to cover business in a deadly serious manner."

Downtown Express, "Wall Street Gets Snarky" (April 21, 2006):

Now Spiers, 29, has combined her business acumen, eye for gossip, and considerable writing ability to create Dealbreaker.com, an “online business tabloid and Wall Street gossip blog,” which she launched last month. It’s the first of what will be a commercial blog network published and operated by Spiers — much like Nick Denton’s Gawker Media, which includes sites like the Hollywood gossip blog Defamer and the gadget blog Gizmodo. Spiers admits it’s not exactly a new idea. “What we’re doing is a traditional media model,” she says. “We’re just creating content and selling ads against it.”