Alex Balk

My Cock, ASME-nominated profile subject.

The Gawker.com editors stand mostly to the side, in a cool-kid clique. Although they may in some sense be outsiders with their noses pressed to the glass, horrified by a world of New York that doesn’t quite want to have them as members, in the bubble of blogs, they’re the elite, especially because lots of smaller bloggers’ traffic relies on “link-whoring” (i.e., Gawker editors being solicited for links by smaller sites). Sicha leans against the back of a parked car, tanned and lean, his jeans slung low enough to reveal the waistband of his underwear, talking to Alex Balk, a former copywriter who tweaks Denton’s desire for lowbrow posts that generate page views by dialoguing with a character known as “My Cock” (his bitterness conceals an emo side: Balk’s previous blog was named after a line from a Leonard Cohen song).