Ken Layne

Ken Layne
Ken Layne at 92YTribeca in New York, November 2012
Born	United States
Occupation	Writer, journalist, blogger

Ken Layne is an American writer and novelist best known for his political coverage, essays and blogging for Gawker, Wonkette, The Awl, and many early Internet blogs and webzines. Layne is editor of the Desert Oracle, a quarterly periodical focused on the folklore and natural history of the American deserts.

Layne has described his career as consisting of "Local newspapers, domestic and foreign radio stations, consumer computer guides, television newsrooms, glossy progressive magazines, the cartoon page of college newspapers, Washington wire service desks, expatriate post-Iron Curtain tabloids, sporadic appearances in respectable media, occasional musical endeavors, a few forays into traditional book publishing and a long chain of oddball news and satire websites—that's how I've barely earned a living over the decades." Layne began his career in local television news and daily newspapers in Southern California. He relocated to Prague in the early 1990s and was a staff writer and Slovakia bureau chief for Prognosis, the English-language newspaper, where he covered the Velvet Divorce that broke up Czechoslovakia. Layne was editor of ComputorEdge magazine in the middle 1990s, technology columnist for the Budapest Business Journal, and new-media columnist for the USC Annenberg School for Communication publication, Online Journalism Review. In 1997, he co-founded Tabloid.net, a popular early Internet daily newspaper. Despite "safe for work" articles and columns about topical events, the site was extremely controversial. It closed for business in approximately 2000, and included future-Reason Magazine editor Matt Welch and future The Daily Show With Jon Stewart writer Jason Ross (writer) among its staff writers. He was a staff columnist for GettingIt.com under editor R.U. Sirius. In the early 2000s and especially following the 9/11 incidents, Layne was a prominent blogger. An off-hand remark he made about bloggers "fact checking" newspapers became a rallying cry. In 2005, Layne and then-Gawker editor Choire Sicha launched the tabloid-style headlines site Sploid for Gawker Media.