Gossip Smackdown!

Even to the jaded readers of the New York Post's Page Six, the item on July 17th, headlined "Gawk at This," stood out. Next to a picture of a glum-looking young woman with lanky blond hair, the piece announced, "This is the face of snarkiness incarnate. Unknown outside the dork-infested waters of the blogosphere, her name is Jessica Coen, and she's the co-editor of Gawker.com, where she regurgitates newspaper and magazine stories and slathers them in supposedly witty sarcasm . . . She smiles and showers us with sycophantic praise, but her every mention of Page Six on her Web site is snide and snarky." The message was unavoidable: Steer clear, or else.

The nasty little piece came as a surprise to many, including the subject of the attack. "Are they threatened?" asks Coen, 25. "I mean, why would Page Six write that?"

It was the most public shot yet fired in a simmering war between New York's gossip titans. In one corner: Page Six, the nation's most powerful and widely read gossip column. In the other: Gawker, the three-year-old blog that has become an addiction for the media with its links, tips and bitchy tone. Both have their favorite targets (Page Six: Alec Baldwin, Lizzie Grubman; Gawker: Matt Drudge, the Olsen twins). But now each has the other in its sight. It's shaping up as a classic battle: the establishment vs. the little guy, old world vs. new media, Richard Johnson, the dapper godfather of Page Six, and his crew vs. Coen, who blogs in sweat pants from her apartment.

But to Johnson, 51, the war is already won. "I don't really care," he says, dismissing Gawker over drinks at Langan's, Page Six's local pub. "I don't think you realize how many gossip columns we've buried over the years." Describing what happens to those who cross him, he says, "If you do something bad, we put you on double secret probation: 'You screwed me -- lose my number!' "

In the beginning, the relationship between Page Six and Gawker was benign, even symbiotic. The column provided much of Gawker's links -- Gawker would even run the Post's blind items and ask readers to name the unnamed. Meanwhile, the site's anonymous "Gawker Stalker" celebrity sightings supplied Page Six with much-needed material. Gawker's founding editor, Elizabeth Spiers, even freelanced for Johnson, and both she and her successor, Choire Sicha, while irreverent, gave the column its props. But that relationship began to sour under Coen, a Michigan native hired last year with scant journalistic experience (she ran her own blog and was preparing to enter j-school). Armed with her $30,000 salary (Johnson is reported to earn $300,000), she set out to make her mark. Observers noticed a change in Gawker's tone: less witty but more caustic. She began taunting Page Six, calling its PR-driven items "shamelessly spoon-fed" and "a crock of low-carb shit."

"I'm not saying . . . Richard is dishonest, but what they do is heavily vetted," she says over three-dollar drinks near her Lower East Side office-apartment. "At least I know my perspective is untarnished."

Despite her self-professed lack of contacts, Coen (along with Jesse Oxfeld, recently hired as co-editor) became more aggressive on the news front as well. Although Gawker can't compete with the Rolodex of Page Six, it receives as many as 500 anonymous e-mail tips daily and is quick to print unverified nuggets about media firings and Hollywood drug habits, fact-checking be damned. ("We don't have to do that, because we don't pretend to be an authoritative source," says Coen.) Last fall, Gawker had a crossover moment: While the Daily News was playing ball with Cynthia Nixon's publicist, Gawker revealed that the Sex and the City star was a lesbian. By the end of the day, both the News and the Post were preparing cover stories on Nixon's outing.

Still, the Gawker/Page Six dust-up appears more personal than professional. When a Gawker correspondent complained of an "openly aggressive" encounter with Page Six reporter Chris Wilson (Coen claims her stringer was threatened after taking a picture of Wilson; Wilson claims the exchange was "mischaracterized"), Coen e-mailed Johnson: "Chris is pretty out of control, unprofessional doesn't quite cover it . . . You need to deal with him."

So why did Page Six run the "hit" item? "Oh, that was after weeks and weeks of being annoyed at the snarkiness and the derisiveness," says Johnson. "And we decided, 'Let's just give her a little shot.' I think we were pretty patient!"