“Nick viewed Gawker as the property that was the most mutable, so it could turn on a dime.” “We could be really experimental about what we were doing,” she told Salon, recalling an age when blogs and media sites were still outliers. Gawker mess “a drama that resembles something that Trey Parker and Matt Stone might imagine if they were commissioned to write a musical about the First Amendment.”) The roll call becomes much larger if you include staffers from associated sites, such as Will Leitch, formerly of Deadspin, or Anabelle Newitz, former editor of io9 (where I briefly contributed.)Įlizabeth Spiers, Gawker’s founding editor, who went on to the New York Observer and other adventures, is proud of the 10 months she spent at the site in 2003. Gawker's series of stories from unemployed people could be poignant and important.Ī number of talented reporters and editors got their start at Gawker or stopped there along the way, including Adrian Chen, now a staff writer at The New Yorker. It published some agenda-setting pieces, like Tom Scocca’s essay on smarm - a piece worth reading even if you don’t agree with its advocacy of snark. Gawker itself helped break the news of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s use of crack cocaine and Hillary Clinton’s employment of a private email server. This includes associated sites like Jezebel and Gizmodo, which are likely to continue publication under Univision. (Given the hero worship with which tech moguls are often treated, the tough coverage of Thiel was valuable, even if the outing is hard to defend.) The site has been blowing its own horn lately - here are some pieces Gawker wants to be remembered for. Gawker also did serious work, and showed very little deference to the kind of powerful people who sometimes evaded real coverage. Most infamously, Gawker outed not just an noisy and unpleasant tech mogul whose homosexuality was an open secret in Silicon Valley - and who later and funded a bankrupting lawsuit - but a reasonably private magazine-publishing CFO who was married and the father of three. Was Gawker good for America, for journalism, for “the media,” for the Internet? Damn good questions and damn hard to answer - because the site demonstrated some of both the best and worst of 21st century journalism.
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