At 8 P.M. on October 27, 2009, I sat at my desk in the hallway that I used as an office in my Brooklyn apartment and stared at a blank field on my computer screen where I could type words and hit “publish” and the words would instantly appear on a Web site read by tens of thousands of people. It was the first day of my three-shift tryout as the night editor of Gawker.
This was long before Gawker became the subject of national fascination as a principal player in a drama that resembles something that Trey Parker and Matt Stone might imagine if they were commissioned to write a musical about the First Amendment. After Gawker posted a sex tape featuring Hulk Hogan, the wrestler sued Gawker and won a hundred-and-forty-million-dollar judgment. It was then revealed that the suit was financed by the billionaire tech titan Peter Thiel, in retaliation for Gawker’s coverage of Thiel and his Silicon Valley colleagues. In 2009, Gawker, like most of the Internet, operated on a smaller stage. It was best known as a diversion for college students and bored office workers, who obsessively refreshed the site to devour its young writers’ acerbic dissections of New York City power players’ comings and goings.
I became enamored with Gawker as a sophomore in college. I loved the clever writing, a dizzying mixture of sophisticated and immature, but I was mostly captivated by the site’s gonzo style, in which Gawker’s most engaging writers became starring characters in the drama they covered. They seemed to take real risks, proving the value of pulling back the curtain on the rich and powerful by pulling it back on themselves. I thought it was so cool when Choire Sicha, the editor at the time, put up a post protesting a change in the color of Gawker’s own headline fonts, designed to appease the site’s advertisers, and how Sicha and his co-editor, Emily Gould, announced that they were quitting the site at the very end of a meandering account of an evening they had spent with Keith Gessen, the founder of the literary magazine n+1 and a favorite target of Gawker, during which they discussed an essay that had recently run in n+1 . . . about Gawker. Whoa. For a couple of years, I read the site with a reverence most people reserve for holy texts or classic novels. Now, at twenty-four years old, I was the one who had to produce biting one-liners in three to four blog posts during my four-hour shift. Obviously, I was scared shitless.
While “night editor” sounds fancy, all it meant was that I was the only person posting on the Web site between eight and midnight. (No title has been so diminished in online media as “editor.”) Gawker’s editor-in-chief had ultimate authority, but all that night the indicator light next to his name on Gchat remained gray—away. After I got the job, the gray dot was a beautiful sight; it meant that I could take time between posts, because I could assume my boss wasn't online, wondering why I wasn’t writing faster. (I came to think of the green dot as the Eye of Sauron.) But now, as I began to type my first words into the field, the sense of total isolation only heightened my anxiety. I felt as if an abyss of failure deeper than anything I’d imagined before had opened up in front of me. I had already made plenty of mistakes in my extremely brief career as a journalist. But those errors had been caught, or not, by an editor or an internship director, whose job it was to make sure that I didn’t screw up. They owned my mistakes nearly as much as I did. Here the only thing between me and total self-immolation was the “publish” button on Gawker’s content-management system, a janky custom job that had the unfortunate tendency to delete a post a few seconds before you put the finishing touches on it. I was confronted with the possibility of ruining my career and tarnishing the name of my favorite Web site in a single click.
At the same time, the opportunity to write anything and have it appear on the front page of Gawker was exhilarating. I could put out an endless stream of swear words, make fun of someone I didn’t like, or construct a penis from numbers and symbols (8===D, haha). It would be seen by thousands of strangers—and potentially by the entire Internet! In college, I had a personal blog, where I posted knockoff Gawker commentary on the day’s news. At its peak, it had perhaps ninety-five regular readers. I felt sufficient obligation to my regulars to post nearly every day. But the real high came when a rare stranger stumbled onto my blog and left a comment. In the golden age of personal blogs—a phrase that makes me feel incredibly old to type—the motivating factor, I think, was the possibility of making a connection with strangers based on nothing but your words. It’s a sentiment that has carried over from the early days of networked society. In 1968, the computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider imagined a proto-Internet where people communicated over networked computers. He predicted that “life will be happier for the on-line individual, because those with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.”
One of Gawker’s key innovations was to industrialize this utopian impulse, by putting writers in front of a mass audience while still encouraging them to express themselves however they wanted, as long as they wrote a sufficient number of posts and attracted a decent number of page views. Connection was transformed into attention, while the authenticity of the personal blogger’s voice became a performance of authenticity, which was almost as gratifying for the writer, and more fun. Critics of Gawker and other online media of the time often mistook accumulating page views as the end in itself, attributing blogging’s incivility to a craven pursuit of an audience. (Gawker’s bonus system, which was tied to page views, helped to cement this reputation.) But the drive to connect with as big an audience as one could was self-generated, at least in my case. Page views only gave you a sense of whether you were succeeding.
How did I do? For all the talk of the Internet’s infinite memory, Gawker’s search function makes it almost impossible to access any of the thousands of posts I wrote for the site, unless I’m looking for a particular one and remember exactly what it was about. I do recall one post from that first night, because I had spent some time before my shift researching it. (I wanted to be a reporter as much as a blogger.) In the post, I decried the hysteria surrounding the H1N1 “swine flu” epidemic, interviewing a relative of a woman who had died of the illness and whose family members were too scared to attend her funeral. As of this writing, it has fifty-six hundred views, which, if I had written it toward the end of my Gawker career, would have been deeply disappointing.
Whatever—it was good enough to get the job. I worked at Gawker for four years, walking the tightrope. The immediacy of publishing encouraged me to be extremely sure of arguments and facts and to write things I truly believed, since I had nobody to fall back on but myself. And, in order to find an audience, I had to be entertaining and provocative. At the site’s best, these two often conflicting impulses encouraged writing with a spontaneity, humor, and self-assuredness that wasn’t like anything else on the Internet. At its worst, it led to gratuitous meanness and a bad lack of self-awareness. I know I’m talking in generalities, but looking back on one’s old writing is rarely a fruitful prospect, even when it was produced under the most considered circumstances. There are plenty of posts that I’m proud of, and others that make me cringe to think about. Regardless, I can’t imagine having had a better place to develop as a journalist than Gawker.
Gawker Media, Gawker’s parent company, which also owns the Web sites Deadspin, Jezebel, Gizmodo, and others, filed for bankruptcy last week. The highest bidder so far is Ziff Davis, which publishes the venerable computer-enthusiast publication PC Magazine. Ziff Davis is not known for supporting interesting or controversial voices, and a memo from the C.E.O. about the bid conspicuously omitted Gawker from a list of sites it would be excited to welcome into its portfolio. The pro-Gawker camp has mourned the bankruptcy as a blow to freedom of speech, and has highlighted instances of quality journalism that Gawker has produced over the years. The anti-Gawker camp has celebrated the comeuppance of a bully. As much as I’m tempted to, I will not mount a defense of Gawker, since this is exactly the kind of self-serving argument masquerading as a principled stand that I would have scoffed at when I was at Gawker. (He gets paid to blog at his new job about how good his old job was!?) Plus, Stephen Marche, writing in the Times, has done a good job already.
Instead, I’ll make a few observations: Gawker has always had a strong political bent, in addition to its unabashedly prurient and gossipy side. In recent years, writers called out right-wing bigots, supported Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter movement, and agitated for a universal basic income in the same pugnacious style in which they talked about everything. It was the first digital news organization to unionize. The indirect cause of its downfall was targeting powerful figures in Silicon Valley, which largely views unions as outdated impediments to technological disruption. What happened to Gawker will have a chilling effect on interesting voices that take on these sorts of subjects. Who wants to take the risk of an impulsive writer saying the wrong thing about the wrong person and getting sued into oblivion by a pro wrestler? (O.K., this is probably a problem unique to Gawker, but still.) This is especially unfortunate because, in the age of Twitter, raw, original voices stand out more than ever. Today a voice hailed as an authentic truth-teller by his supporters and decried as a bully by his enemies dominates our social networks. Donald Trump’s invective targets immigrants, Muslims, women, and the disabled, and one of his most prominent backers is a Silicon Valley billionaire named Peter Thiel.
