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After 14 years of media takedowns and gags run into the ground, Gawker is finally gone – but is that a good thing?
An internet site where folks who would never be on the list at a membership told The USA what wasn’t cool anymore died. Or maybe last week. I don’t care.
Gawker is gone, felled by Peter Thiel, an anti-democratic billionaire creep who flawlessly embodies the stereotype of Libertarians as those who will scream “tyranny” whilst the government does anything to them that they believe private organizations have a proper to do to every person else. Thiel performed a protracted game, steamed for almost a decade after Gawker “outed” him, despite his sexuality being a secret as carefully kept in Silicon Valley as Paul Lynde’s turned into on Hollywood Squares.
Along with the manner he had assisted, courtesy of a Pinellas County, Florida trial over the sex tape of Pinellas County celebrity Hulk Hogan, who knew he became being filmed fucking the wife of his buddy Bubba the love Sponge — host of Tampa Bay’s avatar of “Skippy and Goatface’s FM Drivetime Holocaust” — and who spent the closing unpublished portions of the tape explaining how wealthy a black man could be for his daughter to “fuck with niggers.”
It turned into a lovely pairing: a billionaire with infinite resources for a grudge, and a geriatric nostalgia act who alienated maximum of the wrestling enterprise over a career described via megalomania, and who’d hemorrhaged his fortune on divorce, his daughter’s pass-nowhere music career and repeated prison fees for his son’s inebriated-using waft crew schtick. One to hack the beef off the bone, the alternative equipped to pounce on any morsel that fell off the blade as it swung.
(People with the simplest passing familiarity with the trial or even much less with the first Modification are recommended to begin angrily respond-tweeting straight away.)
It is an interesting tale, and it would not count now. Gawker is dissolved, its writers absorbed by other sites from the Gawker Media own family, which themselves have been sold using Univision. It’s a banner day for its haters anywhere; there’s no shortage of them.
And that does not count either.
Aside from that final felony struggle, Gawker mostly won. Gawker’s in-residence writing style came to define the voice of blogging nearly everywhere. The “absolutely everyone’s a fraud” tone of media Twitter is a lot Gawker’s as it’s far from everybody else’s. And for as a great deal as first-rate media continually held Gawker at arm’s duration even as reporting on it and its effect on journalism, they certain as hell employed a lot of alumni.
You probably might not see several mourning for Gawker. It makes the experience.
I worked for Gawker for a year, covering the 2012 election, and left in 2013 after the absence of an election made my contract less than vital.
I do not think I ever fell in love with the place. I carped approximately it on my weblog before being hired; after I left, I had trouble concealing the reality that I was irritated. I labored from 1,000 miles away on the group of workers, and the personnel-extensive chatroom changed into complete of in-jokes I didn’t get and conversations I couldn’t make contributions to. What friendships I made got here ordinarily after my departure. In no way even set foot within the workplace until the end of 2014, and then simplest to get Christmas drunk with the Deadspin crew.
Plenty of things approximately the site drove me up the wall. I in no way idea the “Gawker Stalker” factor becomes interesting. Like some other outlet, it could emblem a gag and run it into the ground — the “500 Days of Kristin” being just the most monumental example. And, over its lifetime, the site time and again fell prey to an ailment unique to a plurality of new Yorkers: thinking that residing there represents the fruits (or an element) of a few heroes adventure or full-size innovative or mental procedure, and not, as an alternative, a real-estate choice beside the point to the over 310 million people who do not stay there and do not remotely supply a shit.
The problem with talking about Gawker is that most people labored there or sought after it experiences a need to express regret for their fondness. Anyone else belabors their refusal to talk nicely of it. Writing approximately Gawker descends into an unbearable rut wherein the writer announces support or antipathy and then temporizes the matters they reluctantly remorse or esteem.
