Gawker’s Gone. Long Live Gawker.
But even if you avoided Gawker, you can’t escape its influence. Elements of its tone, style, sensibility, essential business model and its work flow have colonized just about every other media company, from upstarts like BuzzFeed and Vox to incumbents such as CNN, The New Yorker and The New York Times.
.. The most important innovation Gawker brought to news was its sense that the internet allowed it to do anything.
.. Though we wrote online, in most ways we were really putting out a relatively fast paced magazine, just without ink and paper.
.. They offered a template for blowing up everything about how news was created and delivered. This was most obvious in Gawker’s tone — it was conversational, written in the manner of your supersmart, kind of funny, foul-mouthed friend, rather than the newspeak that pervaded much of the industry.
.. In the print era, writers were always constrained by a lack of space and audience. There were lots of potential stories to tell, but they could work only on the ones that commanded enough of an audience to justify the physical space they were devoting to it.
.. “Posts can be anything — inspired by a flickr photo, a blog post, news story, something you overheard, something you’ve always wondered.” It adds: “A good post is almost always a short post” and “get right to the point” and “tell the story in the first sentence.”
.. Gawker’s second innovation was to cultivate niches.
.. “Just for one example, the relentless assault we made on traditional women’s media had an effect,” said Anna Holmes, Jezebel’s founding editor. “There was a gradual process, but it was undeniable after a while that they were responding to and really mimicking what we were doing.”
.. it’s obvious that Gawker inculcated a more antagonistic, more suspicious tendency in the press, especially toward the most powerful people in politics, business and the media
.. It sped media up to an insane pace. After Gawker, you didn’t take nights and weekends off. You couldn’t publish once a week. The internet was a beast that always needed feeding, and it demanded ever-hotter, ever-more-outrageous takes.
.. Some of Gawker’s worst practices — reflexively criticizing people without giving them the benefit of the doubt, weaponizing internet outrage against ordinary people who didn’t merit it — have now become de rigueur online.