At the end of last summer I had two competing offers to write for a living. One was a contract gig at a sports website, and the other was a night blogger gig at Gawker. I chose the latter, and eventually it didn’t work out, and I moved on.
I had a hard time with this choice, and changed my mind several times. The Editor in Chief of the sports website was incredibly patient and helpful during this process, but one thing stuck in my mind: in all our conversations, at no point did he make much of an effort to articulate his site’s editorial outlook. It would be hard for me to overstate just how important that wound up being, when the time came for me to finally sit down and make a decision.
Because I am a bottom-rung freelancer in the shrinking industry of paid writing, and because I am a hugely undisciplined writer and roughly a third as smart and articulate as the people who get to do this full time, it’s really, really important to me that I have some confidence that whoever I am writing for will help steer me in the right direction, and—as firmly as necessary—keep me from being an obnoxious blowhard, like, all the time.
The possibility that this sports website might not have a specific sense of why it should exist in the world of sports media, and that its editorial sensibilities would therefore sort of fall back to “tastefulness,” really terrified me. How much of my native skepticism would fly in a place that concerned itself with getting along? Or, on the other hand, how easily would I slide into easy hot-take-dishing without a clever and wise and firm editor spiking my bad shit and keeping me in check?
So, it mattered to me that Gawker’s then-EIC didn’t even need to articulate her site’s editorial outlook in our conversations. Hell, I’m not sure I could describe it, except to wave you towards Gawker’s archives and depend upon you to spot it yourself. It is apparent, to me, that Gawker has always known why it should exist in the world of media. To me, back then, that sense that I could easily pick Gawker’s editorial outlook out of a crowd meant a kind of passive guidance—I was confident that, if nothing else, I could at least do a serviceable job aping Gawker’s style. Also, importantly, I had the sense that Gawker was so leathered by years of choosing to not get along that it could and would easily absorb any mistakes I might make, and keep right on churning. I knew I shouldn’t have too much trouble staying inside the lines.
In other words, if they’ll publish and stand behind that, they will probably publish this.
I did not come by that understanding of Gawker and the Gawker Media sites accidentally. This has been a great recruiting point for these sites for years and years: come here and experience the terrifying and exhilarating freedom to write what you want to write—we will help you! The sites don’t hang a banner advertising that point, but it’s there in the things they publish. It’s this stuff that tends to drive uptight dickwads crazy: an essay about a favorite cereal, or an underexplained list, or an attack on Olympic equestrian events, or 500 days of updates about a minor celebrity. To an aspiring (or even recreational) writer, this stuff says this site will publish whatever you have to say, for no reason other than that you are able to articulate it.
Gawker Media’s concept of journalism brought the world the Violentacrez story, and also the Favre Dong story, and also the Hulk Hogan sex tape story, and also the Manti Te’o story, and also last year’s escort extortion plot story that blew up the organization. There is not some alternate universe in which those stories all happened inside the same shop merely by coincidence. Partly this is a testament to the talent and anarchic impulses of the people doing the work, and partly this is also a straightforward if-then narrative. If you publish the seedy, prurient, less-good-smelling story of Brett Favre sending unwanted dick pics to a team staffer, then you will gain a certain reputation. If you gain that reputation, then tipsters with knowledge of a seedy, sensational, slightly-better-smelling rumor about a fabricated girlfriend will come find you.
It’s tempting, right now, to think this all came back to bite them. Gawker had its misses, but then, so does every publication on earth. Their misses were no worse than the misses of, say, Buzzfeed, or New York Magazine, or the New York Times. Crucially, they are not out of business right now because they missed, and so doing an autopsy of the site’s content history in search of the cause of death is stupid and pointless.
I don’t want to get into that very much, except to say this: a reckless, basically fascist idealism about how journalism and freedom of the press ought to work, overwhelmingly motivated and manipulated by the personal financial interests of a vile, psychotic, hell-bound billionaire motherfucker, just put Gawker out of business. The “those are your people” argument is a lame one, generally, but, look: if your position is that the good and good-smelling work that made Gawker and its sister sites popular and profitable actually isn’t worth the occasional prurient and/or unsavory and/or less-good-smelling story, that billionaire vampire and his washed-up celebrity avatar and a blinkered, home-cooked civil jury from America’s most fucked-up state are your people.
What frustrates me now is this: shops close often enough, and every time a shop closes, some number of people will mourn its passing. It’s striking, though, to see a bunch of people mourn the closing of shops that expressed no editorial outlook and had no authentic sense of why they should exist in the world of media, except that people like the prestige of writing for a living and would like to continue doing that. Grantland, for example, existed primarily as a vanity project for its founder, and its entire purpose was advancing romantic ideas he and the site’s staff had about themselves. Mostly it did this by pandering to its readers, and those readers rewarded it by acting as if its closing was the blinking out of some important star in the sky. They did some good stuff over there! The blinking out of that site left exactly zero deficit in the world of sports media, because nothing good they ever did couldn’t have been done at any number of other shops.
And Grantland’s biggest, most visible failure was orders of magnitude worse than anything Gawker ever did. It didn’t do them in, and here’s why: they concerned themselves with getting along, and so they never much ran afoul of the kinds of people who might eventually be dangerous. And that’s the difference! Gawker is dead because they offended exactly the sort of monster who should be chased away from the village with torches. Only when this particular monster came crashing down the hillside, the fucking villagers convinced themselves the greater sin was pissing him off in the first place.
So, I dunno, to me, the world as of next week—in which a site that took it as a specific mandate to give the finger to the very idea of tastefulness, and considered whether a thing was true more important than whether it would hurt someone’s feelings, and was willing to utilize gossip as a way of teasing out greater truths, and happily encouraged its writers to go all the way in, has been conquered by a maniac billionaire—is a wildly shittier world. The world with Gawker dot com and the Gawker Media sites in it is a better one, if only because of the incredible sleaziness of their enemies, and the persistent cowardice of their competitors, and the smarm-choked stodginess and hypocrisy of everyone else.
What the fuck am I gonna do? Am I gonna game some fucking paywall so that I can slog through the Washington Post’s soft, insincere, aggressively-hedged bullshit? Am I gonna hunt around the web’s vast network of micro-blogs in search of informed, unshackled skepticism? Nah. My world is gonna shrink at the same rate the paid writing business shrinks. Only now it’s not just market forces chipping away. Now a rich person can simply decide to destroy a media company, and not for telling lies, but for telling the truth, and people will throw up their hands and say yeah but they outed a guy that one time. Terrible. There will be a Gawker-shaped hole in news media for a long fucking time. For my part, I’ll be mourning the whole gnarly thing.
