![]() ![]() “But we’ve been through it before, three times, and this change of the guard does give us the opportunity to accelerate the transformation of Gawker from cute blog to fully-fledged news site.” “Choire’s departure as managing editor, and that of his blogger protégés, will obviously be a complete pain,” Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media, which includes 13 other sites, wrote in an e-mail message. Nick communicates such things intentionally to us, to continually erode our standards.” Meanwhile, Denton called Julia Allison (remember her? No?) a “Gawker celebrity.”īut when more than half of its editors and writers abruptly quit in late 2007, Denton decided it was time to make Gawker into something bigger: I’ll tell him, ‘That guy’s gay,’ or ‘That guy’s having an affair,’ and he’ll say, ‘Then write that.’ Well, I haven’t slept with the guy, so I don’t want to go to court over that. In 2007, Denton’s then-editor, Choire Sicha, told New York: “He has defiantly lower print standards than any of us. Over the course of the next several years (and editors), Gawker maintained its focus on Manhattan and the media industry, with the addition of some more mainstream celebrity gossip. Spiers was ”still amazed by things that a traditional newspaper might think of as boring or repetitive.” ![]() ”She’s smart enough to plug herself in, but has the freshness and naïveté of a good Web log,” Mr. He described her world view as ”that of a slightly cynical but enthusiastic outsider.” In a May 2003 New York Times piece introducing its audience to local “web logs,” Spiers said Gawker chronicled “class warfare as recreational sport pathological status obsession and the complete, total, and wholly unapologetic embrace of decadence,” and Denton explained what he liked about his then-sole writer’s approach:īy selling advertising around her tart prose, he hopes one day to earn a profit. “Tina Brown, urban dating rituals, Condé Nastiness, movie grosses, Hamptons gauche, real-estate porn, Harvey Weinstein, fantasy skyscrapers, downwardly mobile I-bankers, Eurotrash, extreme-sport social-climbing, pomp, circumstance, and other matters of weighty import.” Here are Gawker’s original interests, per a manifesto published when it launched in 2002: Below is a compilation of Denton’s various descriptions of Gawker’s nature and mission throughout the years: In the ensuing 13 years, Gawker saw an exponential expansion of its ambitions, reach, and influence, as well as Denton’s shifting ideas of what, exactly, he wanted the site to be. The episode garnered a lot of negative attention, caused several writers and editors to resign, and prompted Denton to declare that Gawker would become “nicer.” This week’s announcement marked the end of a long evolution for the site.ĭenton founded Gawker as a no-holds-barred Manhattan gossip blog in 2002, with a then-26-year-old Elizabeth Spiers as the site’s editor and writer. The decision followed a period of organizational turmoil that began in July, when Denton deleted a controversial Gawker post detailing a married media executive’s effort to hire a gay escort. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesĪ few days ago, Gawker Media proprietor Nick Denton revealed that the company’s flagship site,, will shift its focus to “political news, commentary and satire,” laying off several people and hiring six new staffers.
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