Each day, readership heated as Manhattanites took to their desks and cooled as they left their seats for their extramarital affairs and/or four-tops at Spice Market or Megu. The site was something to refresh on your desktop office computer’s Internet Explorer for entertainment purposes only it predated the iPhone by about five years. In its first incarnation, the lone writer, Elizabeth Spiers, embodied a parody of elite Manhattan’s foolishness and grotesque priorities. First, there’s a golden era, when you thought it was really cool, and second, later, there’s another era, when you know better. One former Gawker editor - dating from the meatier, better-funded end of its first life - suggested to me that Gawker actually has just two eras. ![]() Gawker’s various expressions over time are divisible into as many eras as you have biases. Arrivederci, a- -holes!” celebrated Michelle Malkin that summer most recently, she has spent her time tweeting white-supremacist, anti-vaccine, pro-January 6 drivel. “The bottom feeders at Gawker are going under. That was at the end of a long and painful process of the site’s parent company’s being sued into bankruptcy in a well-funded scheme, though not everyone was sad. “The greatest compliment one could ever pay to a Gawker writer is fearlessness - the willingness to say what needed to be said irrespective of the consequences,” wrote its founder, Nick Denton, on the publication’s last day, almost exactly five years ago. The work kept me suspended in a state of anxiety that I have also tried to replicate for the rest of my life. I tried working there twice, never lasting more than a year. It’s something about working quickly and aggressively, in public, with chaotic or unintelligible leadership, and with little infrastructure to cushion the disaster when a story or a joke inevitably is done wrong. (Most recovered!) This isn’t because working at Gawker is special or as stressful as military life or nursing. Working at Gawker broke many people in many different ways. A small class of people were obsessed with it because the site covered people they knew or knew about, and those people all worked in media so Gawker got written about really quite a lot. It had an expansive coverage mission and a staff with an obsessive need to be unpredictable. Gawker was a website that most recently existed from 2002 to 2016, and its most enduring creation is its own mythology. ![]() Bottom: Olivia Craighead, Leah Finnegan, George Civeris. Middle: Darcie Wilder, Claire Carusillo, Allie Jones, Sarah Hagi. Zhang, Brandy Jensen, Tammie Teclemariam, Jocelyn Silver, Tarpley Hitt. Top row (from left): Kelly Conaboy, Jenny G.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |