Obligatory Gawker Eulogy Post, Pt. 2

All that’s a long way of saying: My ten months at Gawker were and are one of the most formative moments of my life. I’d be so, so much worse off without it. And I suspect a majority of the people who have worked for Nick genuinely (if not secretly) also hold that to be true, no matter how awful their exit was, or how much they supposedly resent their past being tied to, well, Gawker.

They really, really shouldn’t. Like it or not, so many of us owe a deep debt of gratitude to Nick for having worked there. I mean, it’s a hell of a lot easier to say outloud now that Nick’s declared bankruptcy, because before that, he hadn’t, and we’d all made him wildly fucking rich, but still, it was true before, and it’s true now (even if Nick probably will be fine). Look no further than Adrian Chen’s far better version of this than my own for more on that.

Adrian’s one of dozens of alumni who have gone on to make media better after getting their starts at GM—so many people did. Lots of ideas did, and ideas that have been replicated in triplicate again and again, and usually, are done shittier every time: “Ladyblogs,” gadget blogs, the entire idea of “lifehacking,” celebrity coverage, granular-insular cultural coverage, trend reporting on trend reporting, the rejection of the sports-journalism-industrial-complex and refusal of deference towards the leagues that control it, and so on. Again: Like it or not, hate it or don’t, but I promise you there‘s something you love or that’s important to you on the Internet that started at Gawker, first.

Don’t get me wrong: In the great tradition of Gawker Media alumni, I’ve projected everything from ostensible apathy to resentment to sheer outrage at iterations of the site that came after the one I worked for, mostly because it wasn’t the one I worked for, knew, loved, and thought I helped cultivate. It’s a retrograde, reductive mentality, and I know it, but that’s how those things go. And christ, I can only imagine what those who came before (and after) me thought of my own work on the site.

And there are things that have been done with the site after me that I actually have genuinely disliked. Gawker has absolutely made mistakes, before, during, and after my short time there. But while every media company makes mistakes, at Gawker, they’re deeply magnified and public, because:

1. The site has lived and died by the religion of being the harshest critics in the room.
2. Schaudenfreud, the root of which is, let’s be real, usually smarm.
3. It’s Nick’s company.

And by that, I don’t mean people have jumped down Gawker’s throat at every available juncture because it’s Nick (though, ha, that’s definitely been the case before).

It’s because, I think, Nick created—consciously, or not—a company culture so progressive that to hear him routinely being told to fuck off (explicitly or in subtext, sometimes in person, and sometimes on the site) wasn’t uncommon. It was probably less common in recent years, but still: Gawker Media employees have always been, um, passionate. To say the least.

They’ve had skin in the game. And more often than not, they’ve cared deeply about and have invested deeply in the sanctity and integrity of their own work, and their colleagues’ work. And if this sounds like it’s the case where you work, you’ve probably never seen someone unafraid to scream at their boss, or their company’s founder, owner, and CEO in an all-hands meeting and then, keep their job after. You’ve never had the kind of arguments that are had there. Nick cultivated a company culture built on those arguments and that insolence—insolence was always one of the core values. Show me somebody who’s left Gawker Media and gone on to have a job with an equal amount of freedom to speak their mind and produce work they want to, in the way they want to, and I’ll show you somebody who clearly didn’t take advantage of a good opportunity back when they had it, much less understand it.

[Oh, and to that end, the backlash aimed at Nick after the “20% nicer” comment was absurd. 20% nicer under Nick is still 180% more interesting and skeptical and unforgiving and important than 90% of everything else out there even remotely like it. Suggesting otherwise is just fucking myopic and obtuse.]

Anyway, that kind of company culture can breed resentment. It can also breed brilliant and daring work that makes the kinds of missteps nobody else would dare make.

[Another aside, because here, it goes worth mentioning, that the past and present of Gawker’s publishing-side represents a pretty amazing group of humans who have ultimately been far, far better for the media business than they haven’t. Gawker’s sales-side and revenue and operations people have so often been just as brilliant, talented, and meaningfully creative as anybody on edit, and they’re (usually) just as passionate and unapologetic about the core mission of that company as anyone on edit, too. To take that gig, you kinda have to be, to say nothing of the famous “Gawker Tax” that they’ve sold against, which makes lesser direct sales reps in media who can’t get the job done look like unseasoned yellowbellies. And yeah: I remember when Andrew said Biddle shouldn’t keep his job. I also remember who outlasted the other.]

The crazy thing is: What major missteps Gawker Media has made, ultimately, haven’t even been fuckups or procedural/process errors so much as taking too serrated an edge in philosophical arguments about the public interest, and taste, and ideas about the future of media.

So of course this is how the ship goes down. Gawker got gutted over a press freedoms case. And not just a press freedoms case, but one mounted by Hulk Hogan, backed by the world’s richest Donald Trump supporter, a self-loathing sociopathic technologist utterly devoid of charm or humor, who wants to live for eternity, watch the world burn from a perch while he does it, and also, suffocate truth, dissent, and any kind of objective morality using only his obscene wealth while he’s at it. Gawker Media goes down in the manifestation of what would in virtually any other circumstance be an unhinged conspiracy theory. It’s a spectacularly awful end, but it is, as per Gawker Media’s spirit, definitely and at the very least, still spectacular.

Gawker’s importance in the media ecosystem probably can be overstated. But I’m convinced it just hasn’t been, yet, even with whatever hyperbole’s already been put out there in its waning, pre-auction days. Because the story of journalism’s sad-sack future and long, slow, undignified decent into incoherent and unimportant madness has really only just started to be written, and once Nick’s contributions to it are firmly entrenched in the historical context this moment will eventually become, I think everyone who still works in whatever media’s about to become next — and anyone who holds dear the value of the fourth estate — will want to make good to Nick 0n a sincere debt of gratitude for ever opening up shop. And I think this moment, wherein Gawker Declares Bankruptcy, will be, in that greater history, a watershed. It didn’t become Buzzfeed or VICE or Vox, because Gawker Media was built to be antithetical to and skeptical of and an antidote to institutions of that size.

Gawker Media had no guardrails, and held practically nothing sacred. It was fearless by design. It produced (and still produces) patently original work. That kind of business regularly involves forging through dark, uncharted waters, and god knows how many Gawker Media employees have lost count of the times their hearts have pounded, hitting the publish button. But that’s also because its writers aren’t mindless robots that built an empire shamelessly and mechanically pilfering the work of others. New value was always key to any halfway passable post, to say nothing of the sense of abandon required to pull that off when the truth is most people in media don’t know what the fuck we’re talking about, and rely hedging on the hedges of others to get the job done.

And despite what so many people probably want to think about its inner-workings, intellectual rigor and respect was demanded in even the dumbest of ideas. My favorite communiqué from Nick to me came mid-shift on a Saturday, and almost made me throw my laptop in rage through a plate window and quit. I can recite it by heart: “Your kneejerk contempt is embarassing. Come in Monday morning for a lesson in professional blogging.” It was infuriating for so many reasons, but mostly, because he was right.

So, anyway: This is it. Yeah, I know: Gawker Media will live on in some form, but so long as it’s not Nick’s company, it’ll never be the same thing, in form and certainly in function.

I’m gonna go to the party, but I’m not gonna stay for long. I love a good Gawker party, but I hate long goodbyes, especially when I’m still in denial. Gawker was—in the moments I most loved it, and most hated it, before, during, and after the time I worked there—a North Star of sorts, a high bar that was ethereal in the sense that limitations didn’t apply to its mandate. It was salacious and highbrow, literary and lowbrow, silly, serious, a high practitioner of the parenthetical wit, bracingly and searingly dedicated to cutthroat critique, a place where nothing was sacred but the story, and to that end, a proponent of the truth, whether you liked what it had to say or not.

Long live Gawker Media, and here’s hoping we remember what the darkness covered up before the torches it held there got snuffed.