A Memo From Nick Denton to Everyone Not Invited to The Gawker Media Reunion Party

You will have seen, of course, in the invite somehow leaked to Page Six, that I was keen to welcome “all” former writers, coders, sellers, and undefined Others who worked for Gawker Media to yesterday’s last hurrah.

This was an obvious exaggeration. Yes, our new offices are spacious — perhaps unnecessarily so, in hindsight — but they’re hardly the graceful spiral of the Hayden Planetarium, where I was wed amid pomp and circumstance in what seems another era (what will one day be viewed as a gilded blogging age of unfettered free speech — but I digress).

Onwards. In response to countless @notifications received in the run-up to our fête, I will not shy from the truth regarding how I chose to populate the “Against All Odds” affair — and why some were left cast adrift without admission.

These truths may be uncomfortable, but they are, nevertheless, truths; and I remain unswerving in my mission, first cemented by the oath I swore as a journalist and as co-author of the book All That Glitters (available on Amazon for $0.01 — Gawker Media may receive a commission), to speak my words unvarnished, and without care for delicate sensibilities. All who have bored me in meetings know this to be unerringly true.

To the matter at hand. Some enlightenment as to why you, former Gawker Media employee, were not included in our final bow of freedom before the corporate yolk (though we need not fear it — the stewards who guide AskMen.com can do our hallowed brands no harm):

• I do not follow you on Twitter. You are dead to me, for this is my only means of receiving information.
• I follow you on Twitter, but you do not have an established presence upon it. You would have been better served using your time at my company developing your Twitter persona, rather than working, if your intention was to leave a legacy.
• You are not a white male writer whose joie de vivre filled my Twitter feed; whose cheeky antics and relentless pursuit of story I could readily peruse and easily identify with.
• You are not a talented female, of color or without (I do not discriminate here — I stop at gender) whose leadership potential was overlooked and perhaps maligned until you left Gawker Media, but whose rather more elevated present-day position reflects well upon us all.
• You are not a youthful white male whom I groomed all these long years to succeed me, and who left me still. Did I not pay you enough? Was seven times the average female Gawker Media worker not enough?
• You are, perhaps, one of the above (a confident male writer or gifted female in some field), but I never cared for your approach, nor saw it much Retweeted. You have no place among us.
• You are female, but not, at current, my legal representation.
• You sued me in the past, or are presently engaged in a lawsuit. This voluminous litigious army, raised by billionaire rapscallion Peter Thiel, could fit only within the Hayden Planetarium, and so it goes without saying are unwelcome as we toast our track record of independent journalistic triumph. Who will forget the Canadian mayor smoking crack? Shall Julia Allison be lost to history? I think not.
• You are an ex-employee who once invested your scant bonus into Gawker Media Group shares, with adorable naïveté. I find it disquieting to look upon you.
• You are a kind-hearted person, without pretense, easily recognizable ambition, claim to celebrity, or even the whiff of “fame-balling.” Your selfless goodwill for others confounds and, in the dark of night, enrages me. I will replace you on your lunch break, and inform your staff via AIM.
• I do not recall our time together at all, despite your years of labor in my employ. You do not have similar luck, as your ongoing therapy sessions attest.

I have several further paragraphs planned, but as with the great majority of my lengthy correspondence, you stopped reading halfway. In conclusion — for the benefit of the media reporters charged with parsing this missive — know that if you did not personally intrigue me with scandal or your unbridled desire to speak truth to power, so long as that power was not my own, this was why you passed onto the list of the undesirable Uninvited.

Yours,

Nick