Quote of the Day: Richard Morgan

"Jesus spent three days in Hell. I could only handle one."

That's weary journalist Richard Morgan as he emerged from the bowels of Gawker, the popular New York media and gossip blog after just one day on the job.

Morgan, a freelancer who has written for the New York Times and Forbes, was hired to cover the television beat. He told New York Magazine that "I believed what Nick [Denton] said about making the site more reported, making it more mainstream, and, vainly, thought that's why he hired me."

Nick Denton, the creator of Gawker, repsonded: "Richard Morgan didn't so much quit as splutter out. We did manage to get two publishable posts out of him before that happened. I wish him luck at a more leisurely institution."

Morgan was frustrated with Denton's focus on the sleazy and the sensational. "There is no vision beyond page views. I was announced as being some kind of television beat writer. And I spent the day reading TV blogs and e-mailing and calling and meeting with TV folks. And Nick would tell me to post, like, something about Us Weekly getting Ashlee Simpson's engagement wrong. And then he wanted me to do another on Playgirl."

Expect more of that sort of thing on The Masticator. We need to get those page views up.

Oh, and more Quotes-of-the-Day. That sort of thing requires much less effort on my part. So expect less from The Masticator in 2008.