This morning, briefly, Gawker trended on Twitter. If you ate breakfast, you missed it; if you had a quick bagel on the go, you might have caught the news. After only a year and a half, the second incarnation of the proto-snarky New York blog died once again, this time to far less media fanfare. This will probably be the last time we talk about Gawker, which was once all a certain type of person talked about incessantly. I visited the latest incarnation of the site about once a week, hoping for some of the pale fire of the original site, but never quite found what I was looking for.
Gawker, in its time, did things that no one else had ever done, which was both fascinating and, oftentimes, profoundly horrible. It had no guardrails, but it covered the rich and the powerful fearlessly in an age when the Conde Nasts and Hearsts of the world — does anyone even know the names of these once all-powerful relics? — were their stenographers.
To be fair, it would probably have been bad business to repeat the original Gawker sauce, which ultimately made an oily bigot like Hulk Hogan — aka, Terry Bolea — a rich man. Variety’s Todd Spangler has the story:
In 2016, Nick Denton’s Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy and sell six of its websites to Univision Communications for $135 million — excluding Gawker.com — after it lost lawsuits funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. (Univision sold those sites, known as Gizmodo Media Group, along with The Onion to a private-equity backed G/O Media.) Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, had been angry about an old Gawker story that reported he was gay. The Thiel-backed litigation included Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Gawker over a video the site posted showing the wrestler having sex with his ex-friend’s wife; a jury awarded Hogan $140 million in damages in the case.
But there was so little of that original DNA, so little of the edge, left in Gawker 2.0. It seemed punch drunk from its legal woes. And that was a shame. For, why buy the notorious name of Gawker, then turn it PG-rated, feel good newsletter? Was this a classic bait-and-switch? Did the Publisher demand that Editorial pull its punches? Was there a abject fear of litigation? Was there a lack of resources put into the venture? All of the above? Whatever the case, it was clear that Bustle never unleashed its writers, as there were no scoops and very little daring in the second-sailing.
Gawker 2.0 just seem too … anodyne (“Tom Brady is so divorced he lost 10 pounds”); the typeface was also maddening. Not that anodyne is something to avoid, but there are toddlers and puppy videos online if one wants to go that route. That having been said, a poisonous Gawker 1.0 story on the collapse of Tina Brown’s career in Big Magazines, would today probably interest no one. Who really wants to revisit the gladiatorial brutality of the snarky era, in a couple dozen post a day. But there is, somewhere, a middle ground between the theater of the cruel of Gawker 1.0 and “BEN AFFLECK BUDDIES UP TO JENNIFER GARNER’S GHOST BOYFRIEND.” Right?The whole endeavor did not seem long for this cold, cruel world. From the Variety Obit:
Among the last stories published on Gawker were “Andrea Riseborough Guilty of Being a Good Actor With Friends Who Appreciate Her”; “Robert Zemeckis: I Love Using the Computer to Make Tom Hanks Look Insane”; “Why Is Taylor Swift Always Showing Feet?”; “The Best and Worst Media TikTok Accounts”; and “Surprising No One, George Santos Is a Disney Adult.”
None of these stories, to be honest, strike my fancy. And did they strike anyone’s? Apparently not, because here we are at the Cemetery, saying farewell.
It is not, to put it lightly, a good time to be in media or in tech or, in the case of Gawker, straddling both sectors. Bustle Digital announced that it was laying off 8% of staff companywide alongside Gawker’s suspension of service. And from Oliver Darcy at CNN:
In recent months, the media and technology sectors have taken a battering as advertisers tighten spending amid economic uncertainty.
Across the news industry, layoffs have been rampant. CNN, NBC News, MSNBC, Vox Media, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Dotdash Meredith, Gannett and other news organizations have cut their workforces in recent months. And companies that haven’t laid off staffers have taken strong measures to reduce spending.
So — here we are. There are, seemingly, tens of thousands of new influencers on the cultural horizon and on the dark web that need coverage. These influencers are sorely in need of a spotlight for their conspicuous consumption, their sometimes violent behavior on video, their hate — their thumotic excesses. Right-wing TikTok alone is worth dozens of viral posts daily. And there are many ways that young, up-and-coming writers could have covered these hugely influential libertarian-types. Gawker could have been writing about DeepFakes, Crypto-bros, the salaries of right-wing video influencers, Instagram money launderers, drug dealing on Snapchat …
Instead, we got “CELEBRITY RECONCILIATION WATCH: EXES SEAN PENN AND ROBIN WRIGHT ‘GET ALONG GREAT.’”
Outstanding.
“The thumping church music, booming choir and exuberant crowd of about a million people greeting Pope Francis for an open-air Mass on Wednesday in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, felt a world away from the violence ravaging the country’s east, where scores of competing armed groups are pillaging villages, plundering resources and heightening tensions with neighboring Rwanda.” (NYT)
“Just hours after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz cleared the way for the export of German-made tanks to the country, the focus shifted to the who, what, where and when of supplying fighter jets to Ukraine.” (Politico)
“On Monday, the Russian foreign ministry condemned the Isfahan attack as a provocation, warning that ‘this act of terror could have unpredictable consequences,’ adding an unusual statement: ‘Russia’s intelligence services are analyzing information about the attack to get a more complete picture of what happened.’ Moscow has never hitherto used the term ‘terror’ in relation to Israel’s long offensive against Iranian military targets.” (Debka)
As hip-hop turns 50, Chuck D praises its power as "a worldwide cultural experience and religion" (Salon)
“Well, every month, in the 1970s and 1980s, Bendel’s would have an open-house day where anybody, no matter who you were or where you came from, could stand in line and bring anything they made to show the buyers. Every month all kinds of people came from far and wide to line up on the sidewalk, holding garbage bags or cardboard boxes filled with dresses, accessories, sweaters and stuff they made. You just had to wait in line and if the buyers liked what they saw they would buy it on the spot from anyone. They discovered so many amazing unique talents this way and it made their store so unique and fresh.” (Kim Hastreiter/System-Magazine)
“Set entirely at a remote, lakeside holiday home, Knock At The Cabin makes for a nerve-jangling return to form.” (NME)