Gillin hopes to ‘re-create spirit’ of Black Table on Esquire.com

As it stands, Esquire.com doesn't exactly enjoy the must-read cachet of other mainstream glossies on the Web -- like, say, New York or Vanity Fair, Wired or the Atlantic.

But with last week's news that Esquire has hired as its Web features editor the bomb-throwing blogger Foster Kamer, an alum of Gawker and the Village Voice, The Cutline wondered whether the manly Hearst monthly wasn't angling to become a louder voice in the online conversation.

"If you frame it that way, that's fine," said Eric Gillin, director of Hearst Digital Media's men's network, during a brief phone interview late Wednesday afternoon. "Sure, that's an accurate perception, but the numbers are what I'm focused on."

If Gillin's name sounds familiar, it should. He was editor-in-chief of the Black Table, an irreverent and influential Web start-up that gave a plethora of emerging scribes some of their earliest bylines during its three-year lifespan, which ended in January 2006.

"Black Table editors and writers were persistent blockheads, just for the sake of putting funny and original [content] out there," Jessica Coen opined on Gawker at the time. "If nothing else, that merits one of the most earnest pieces we've ever written."

Gillin's Black Table co-founders -- Aileen Gallagher, A.J. Daulerio and Will Leitch -- went on to become luminaries at Gawker Media and New York magazine. (Leitch now writes for Yahoo!, as does fellow former Black Table regular Lindsay Robertson.) Gillin took a Web editing gig at Esquire.com. By September 2009, he was running editorial operations for Esquire.com and its brother site, PopularMechanics.com.

With Kamer -- who says he was heavily influenced by his new boss's former website -- now on board, might Esquire.com morph into something of a Black Table 2.0?

"We can only hope to sort of re-create that spirit," said Gillin. "Bet on us producing more stories that grab people. We want to become the first thing that you check in on." But he cautioned: "We're not trying to create Black Table 2 here."

In any case, media insiders will probably start paying more attention to the site. Kamer helped increase traffic at the Village Voice's Runnin' Scared blog and turned it into a must-read for Manhattan journalists. He's already putting together a roster of buzzy contributor bylines for Esquire.com, though Gillin declined to offer up any names. His first day is Monday.

Kamer turned down a competing offer from News Corp.'s much-hyped forthcoming iPad newspaper, The Daily. "It took [Gillin] and [Esquire.com editor] Matt Sullivan about five minutes to convince me I wanted [the job] more than I've ever wanted any gig in town before," said Kamer. "The guy comprehensively understands the nexus between quality writing and what works on the Web."

As for those numbers Gillin was referring to, Esquire.com averaged roughly 1.33 million monthly unique visitors from June to October, according to comScore, up from around 400,000 monthly uniques when Gillin came on board in 2006. Internal metrics, which skew higher than traffic trackers like comScore, put the site closer to 3 million monthly uniques, said Gillin.

By either measure, Esquire.com is beating the website of its Conde Nast competitor, GQ, which averaged 1.05 million monthly uniques during the same five-month period, according to comScore.