Gawker media stock11/13/2023 “People are too worried about how they will be perceived, and they’ve ceased to be playful, so anything that starts to be like that again is welcome,” Brown adds. “Editorials are uptight, and comedy is seen as in a field outlet of its own.” “It seems now that social media is so flooded with humor and irreverence that people no longer see it as having a place in the mainstream media,” he told the Guardian. Purchased by Bustle media and led by a new editor, Leah Finnegan, Gawker’s reboot has added (or returned) a welcome blast of satire to a US media landscape that often lacks it.Īccording to James Brown, founder and editor of Loaded, a British magazine that started the lad-mag revolution of the 90s and whose account of that era “Animal House” has just been published, the mainstream US press has all-but abandoned satire. The rotation of subjects, relatively ideologically unrestrained, marks a return for an organization that had been dead. Over the past week, the site has run stories that much of the media would sooner swerve: alleged anti-British, anti-Royal sentiments at the New York Times whether it was wrong for Meghan and Harry to hold hands at the Queen’s funeral (“Even for a family filled with perverts, this is beyond”) and if the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills are “too mean, too callous, too focused on tedious drama” to merit a show. It may again be up to Gawker to find out where the lines are currently drawn.Since a quiet relaunch a year ago, under entirely new owners, Gawker is once again starting to attract interest and readers – still purveying snark, still relying on attitude against elites – but without the edge of nastiness that got its original iteration in such trouble. The verdict was widely interpreted as a perceptible shift in how the public and juries view privacy rights.įive years on, freedom of speech is, if anything, more contentious. And jurors sided with Hogan, who shed tears in the courtroom when the verdict came down. Gawker’s original travails began when it refused to take down a 2006 sex tape of Hogan, real name Terry Bollea, with the wife of his best friend, Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. Bustle has already attempted a Gawker reboot, only to see it collapse before launching after problematic tweets by its editorial director were dug up. The problems independent journalism sites face under ownership of venture capitalists are well-known. But he knows how to build traffic using content that we all hate.” “Goldberg is an opportunist who thought he could buy an asset on the cheap, plus the archives, and get all the sparkle, branding and name-recognition to build a large-traffic site to go with his group – and all of which is antithetical to what Gawker stood for. “There’s no way to capture the old anarchic spirit under the control of venture capitalists. “Anyone who cares about Gawker thinks it’s a terrible idea,” said one. While praising Finnegan as a journalistic talent, a former Gawker staffer said many from the old era are unconvinced by its relaunch. “Some great advice I once got was ‘Be less yourself.’ I was 27, and going through a righteous phase that unfortunately coincided with having a national platform on which to write. Finnegan subsequently edited the Outline before it too was sold to Bustle.Īmong her best-known columns, under the heading ‘Unconventional Wisdom: challenging those faux-profound bits of knowledge so often taken for granted’, she reflected on an earlier post in which she had described her boss hitting his head on a lamp during a meeting. Thiel’s crusade against Gawker started after the Gawker-owned tech blog Valleywag, published a post that had outed him as gay.īustle has said the new editor of Gawker will be Leah Finnegan, who had worked at Gawker for a year as a writer and features editor before she took a buyout in July 2015. Sources close to Gawker told the Guardian that Peter Thiel, the German American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist, who had funded Hogan’s libel suit over a sex tape Gawker had posted online, had also looked to buy the company, with a view to preventing the site and its archive from ever returning to the public domain. The company behind the rebirth is Bustle Digital Group, a company known as a clearing house for a dozen publishing sites, among them Bustle itself, Romper, Nylon and W, which purchased Gawker for $1.35m at a bankruptcy auction in 2018.īustle is the brainchild of Bryan Goldberg, described by the New York Post as “a scruffy, 35-year-old media mogul”. But Gawker’s original purpose as an independent publishing meteor could be tough to replicate.
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