Sex up your content: 6 tips for brands from Gawker

But our curiosity was piqued by a Nieman Journalism Lab analysis of Gawker’s editorial experiment of garnering eyeballs through shameless link-baiting.

Could the purveyor of online snark and satire offer lessons for stodgier organizational communications?

Nieman tracked Gawker’s experiment, announced by its new editor, of assigning a different writer each day to post whatever he or she feels will generate the most traffic.

“While that writer struggles to find dancing cat videos and Burger King bathroom fights or any other post they feel will add those precious, precious new eyeballs,” wrote Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio, “the rest of the staff will spend time on more substantive stories they may have neglected…”

Stipulated: A corporate communicator would be shown the door after trying to drum up intranet interest with photos of “man boobs” or a video of a confused young woman in her underwear making out with a tree.