The word nanopublishing was coined by Jeff Jarvis, creative director of the US company Advance Publications Inc. Jarvis first used the term after being shown Gawker, a New York media gossip weblog launched by Nick Denton in December 2002. The prefix nano- is derived from the Greek word nanos, meaning ‘dwarf’, and is used figuratively in the word to denote the idea of ‘publishing on an extremely small scale’. An alternative term incorporating the same idea is thin media.