![]() You don’t read a lot of summaries of the New York Times‘ importance that feel a burdensome obligation to mention that Judith Miller faithfully reprinted every feral Dick Cheney growl that fell into her ear and helped grease the skids for the murder of anywhere from 100,000 to 1 million Iraqis. Writing about Gawker descends into an unbearable rut wherein the writer declares support or antipathy, then temporizes about the things they reluctantly regret or esteem.Įd Sheeran Confesses: Tears, Trauma, and Those Bad Habits The problem with talking about Gawker is that most people who worked there or admired it feel a need to apologize for their fondness, and everyone else belabors their refusal to speak well of it. And, over its lifetime, the site repeatedly fell prey to a disease unique to a plurality of New Yorkers: thinking that living there represents the culmination (or a part) of some hero’s journey or significant creative or psychological process, and not, instead, a real-estate decision irrelevant to the over 310 million Americans who do not live there and do not remotely give a shit. Like any other outlet, it could brand a gag and run it into the ground - the “500 Days of Kristin” being just the most monumental example. I never thought the “Gawker Stalker” thing was interesting. Plenty of things about the site drove me up the wall. I never even set foot in the office until the end of 2014, and then only to get Christmas drunk with the Deadspin crew. What friendships I made came mostly after my departure. ![]() On staff, I worked from 1,000 miles away, and the staff-wide chatroom was full of in-jokes I didn’t get and conversations I couldn’t contribute to. I carped about it on my blog before being hired after I left, I had difficulty concealing the fact that I was angry. I don’t think I ever fell in love with the place. I worked for Gawker for a year, covering the 2012 election, and left in 2013 after the absence of an election made my contract less than necessary. You probably won’t see a lot of mourning for Gawker. ![]() And for as much as respectable media always held Gawker at arm’s length while reporting on it and its impact on journalism, they sure as hell hired a lot of alumni. The “everyone’s a fraud” tone of media Twitter is as much Gawker’s as it is anyone else’s. Gawker’s in-house writing style came to define the voice of of blogging nearly everywhere. And that doesn’t matter either.Īpart from that last legal battle, Gawker mostly won. It’s a banner day for its haters everywhere there is no shortage of them. Gawker is dissolved, its writers absorbed by other sites from the Gawker Media family, which themselves were bought by Univision. ![]() It’s an interesting story, and it doesn’t matter now. (Those with only passing familiarity with the trial and even less with the First Amendment are encouraged to start angrily reply-tweeting immediately.) One to hack the meat off the bone, the other ready to pounce on any morsel that fell off the blade as it swung. It was a lovely pairing: a billionaire with endless resources for a grudge, and a geriatric nostalgia act who alienated most of the wrestling industry over a career defined by megalomania, and who’d hemorrhaged his fortune on a divorce, his daughter’s go-nowhere music career and repeated legal fees for his son’s drunk-driving drift team schtick. Thiel played a long game, steamed for nearly a decade after Gawker “outed” him, despite his sexuality being a secret as closely kept in Silicon Valley as Paul Lynde’s was on Hollywood Squares.Īlong the way he had help, courtesy of a Pinellas County, Florida trial over the sex tape of Pinellas County celebrity Hulk Hogan, who knew he was being filmed fucking the wife of his friend Bubba the Love Sponge - host of Tampa Bay’s avatar of “ Skippy and Goatface’s FM Drivetime Holocaust” - and who spent the remaining unpublished portions of the tape explaining how rich a black guy would have to be for his daughter to “ fuck with niggers.” Gawker is gone, felled by Peter Thiel, an anti-democratic billionaire creep who perfectly embodies the stereotype of Libertarians as people who will scream “tyranny” when the government does anything to them that they believe private companies have a right to do to everyone else. , a website where people who would never be on the list at a club told America what wasn’t cool anymore, died today. ![]()
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