![]() ![]() As Gawker is lowered into the ground, a descent we will all follow down at some point, better that we bow our heads and mark its passing with the solemnity due to the occasion. Even though the deceased would not have extended the same courtesy to others while it was still alive, the greatest tribute we could pay is to honor it with hypocrisy and stay silent about its monstrous misdeeds. To stand before the body of the dead and tell the truth about the transgressions it committed in life is impermissible, an insult to the survivors who gather together to weep by the side of the grave. This is the equivocation we make when we contend with the horror of mortality. Former editor Alex BalkĪt a funeral one does not speak ill of the corpse. If you need a reason, those people are why Gawker is great. That openness and flexibility is why Gawker was able to make itself home to a generation of writers and editors who will continue to populate your smartphones and magazines long after the site ends. Gawker was only whatever the people running it at the time wanted it to be, and Nick’s best idea was to continually stock the site with people who wanted to do good, despite what he liked to say. It did not help, too, when your boss and owner liked to issue sweeping anti-manifestoes like “We don’t seek to do good.” When tasked with writing a new tagline for the site, my favorite contender, “Honesty is our only virtue,” lost out to my clunkiest and most didactic suggestion: “Gossip from Manhattan and the Beltway to Hollywood and the Valley.” The vacuum most organizations would have filled with a rousing (and mostly untrue) mission statement created a situation of asymmetrical branding that contributed to Gawker’s demise: Those with the strongest idea of what Gawker is tended to be those who hate it the most.īut for what it’s worth, this anarchic rudderlessness, this lack of myth-making bullshit, was also Gawker’s greatest strength. Daulerio wrote the best artifact of Nick telling a new editor about what Gawker should be.) Much of this traces directly back to Nick, because whatever vision he had for Gawker, at least as communicated as instructions to his editors, was varied, changing, and often contradictory. Trying to get my bearings in those early days, I began darting at random through the history of until that notion of a Gawker monolith I had shared with other outsiders faded away: The site was barely recognizable from year to year, through redesigns and editorial personnel changes. Fans (and enemies) of Gawker typically haze new editors by demanding an explanation of how they plan to carry on the traditions of the editors that came before and aside from what I’d mumbled through during my job interview at a SoHo bar a few weeks prior to that morning, I had bupkis. The morning he met me at 210 Elizabeth Street, carrying his 27-inch iMac underarm from his apartment as my company computer, he showed me my desk, told me I was in charge, then disappeared for a week. Nick Denton didn’t give me much direction before he hired me to edit the site in 2008. While fearlessness at tackling any topic is its hallmark, Gawker was always terrible at talking about itself, especially at telling the world what it was for. Thanks for reading, commenting, and tipping. ![]() I asked former editors of the site to help us send it off. ![]()
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