![]() ![]() Nick rented out the newly constructed Budapest Music Center, where the tech and product teams spent their days working out Kinja’s kinks while the editorial staff met to vision-board the future of Gawker Media’s editorial properties. In August 2014, the editors-in-chief of Gawker Media’s sites and their deputies were flown to Budapest with the entire tech department and top advertising and operations employees for a lavish off-site meeting. Over emails, Nick imagined “at least a decade” of building Kinja - at the end of which, if done right, “we’ll be the ones doing the acquiring.” In the future, it would be a public platform, designed to give anyone the ability to publish useful information - gossip, news, context - in an infinitely modular format: a stand-alone piece of writing that might also be a comment on another stand-alone post or embedded in a third. ![]() But Nick had Facebook-size aspirations for it. Practically, Kinja was just the proprietary publishing software and commenting system that had been introduced on the blogs in early 2013. Gawker, and its seven sister sites, had been so successful that we were even looking beyond the blog and into the future with a project Nick had dubbed Kinja. (It violated the primary edict of being in walking distance from Nick’s apartment, but we’d been rejected from the Puck Building, we were told, after Oscar Health founder and Ivanka Trump brother-in-law Josh Kushner, who held offices there, learned we were interested.) I was told, my first week as editor-in-chief, to increase the size of the staff from 13 to 25 at the same time, the endless hunt for a new office was ending with a Fifth Avenue building in our sights. ![]() That pressure had, however, produced a phenomenally successful publication: By 2014, Gawker was the anchor site of Gawker Media, a blog network with eight publications, some 300 employees, millions of readers, and countless imitators. When I was given the opportunity to “audition” for a blogging job in 2010, the only thing that gave me pause was fear of Gawker’s reputation for instability and pressure. As an intern at the Daily Beast in 2009, I read Gawker precisely because it had such gleeful disdain for the social rituals (“kindness”) that propped up the lame, the stupid, and the fraudulent. Gawker was as obsessed with, and scornful of, the powerful as the editorial assistants, interns, freelancers, and other young and precariously employed people at the bottom of a rapidly deteriorating ladder were. To what Vanessa Grigoriadis called in New York Magazine, in 2007, “the creative underclass,” this was a revelation. In this sense, the hook of Nick’s “barroom story” elevator pitch wasn’t the story but the barroom: a loud, sociable space for people to gossip, argue, joke, and whisper, a place where decorum and politeness were not only unnecessary but actively objectionable. But it was the first to do so in the format that now seems completely natural for it: an endlessly scrolling, eternally accessible record of prattle and wit and venom that felt less like a publication than like a place. Gawker wasn’t the first publication to treat gossip as an intellectual pursuit. The noblest version of Gawker’s premise was - as its founder, Nick Denton, repeated many times - that the version of a story journalists would tell each other over drinks was always more interesting than whatever was actually in the paper. But the “media” qualifier was always secondary to the gossip core. What Gawker was depends a lot on whom you ask, but at the start it was a media-gossip blog Elizabeth Spiers, its first editor, covered the people and politics of the still-powerful institutions of New York media - Condé Nast and the Times in particular - with equal parts obsession and skepticism. It managed to be, in a way it never had been, the kind of place about which you could say, “I could see myself being here in ten years.” Which I did often enough for it to seem funny now, since I myself would end up dramatically quitting in the summer of 2015, a little more than a year after being promoted to editor-in-chief and a little less than a year before the company would declare bankruptcy and auction itself off to the highest bidder. Just over a decade old, Gawker still thought of itself as a pirate ship, but a very big pirate ship, ballasted by semi-respectable journalism, and much less prone to setting itself on fire than in its early days, when its writers had a tendency to make loud and famous enemies and when its staff was subjected to near-annual purges - unless they were able to dramatically quit first. ![]() For a certain kind of person, at any rate - ambitious, rebellious, and eager for attention, all of which I was. It feels a bit strange to say this now, but in the spring of 2014 there was no better place to work than Gawker. ![]()
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