The Genius Of Gawker

This string of comments about Nick Denton, the Gawker Media titan, which appear in the middle of Ben McGrath’s New Yorker profile of the man, sounds like it might have been ripped straight from Denton’s star website – which should tell you everything you need to know about Gawker, if not about Denton himself.

“He’s not, like, a sociopath, but you kind of have to watch what you’re doing around him,” Ricky Van Veen, the C.E.O. of the Web site College Humor, told me.

“The villain public persona is not a hundred-per-cent true,” A. J. Daulerio, the editor-in-chief of Deadspin, Gawker Media’s sports blog, said. “It’s probably eighty-per-cent true.”

“He has fun when people say horrible things about him,” the blog guru Anil Dash said.

“I can’t lie to make him worse than he is, but he’s pretty bad,” Ian Spiegelman, a former Gawker writer, said.

“Other people’s emotions are alien to him,” Choire Sicha, another Gawker alumnus, said.

“He’s got a strong carapace of not really thinking other people’s opinions are that important,” John Gapper, a columnist at the Financial Times, said.

“He’s right,” Matt Welch, the editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, said. “He’s never right about me, of course. But people are lazy and not very good.”

“He almost sees people as Legos moving around,” Sheila McClear said.

“He’s not a fully human person,” Spiegelman said.

“I mean, maybe he thinks he’s the one truly advanced human,” Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel, a.k.a. Girlie Gawker, said.

“Does he have parents?” Daulerio asked.

“I always imagine that he came fully formed out of British finishing school,” Holmes said.

“Part of getting to know Nick is accepting that there are things you’ll never know,” Jeff Jarvis, the new-media critic and author, said.

“What can you do with a person like that?” Spiegelman said. “He’s a character out of Dr. Seuss, frankly.”

“Nick is a bit of a sphinx on purpose,” Joel Johnson, the longest-serving Gizmodo writer, said. “He has some of the attributes of the dork who wraps his Asperger’s around him like a cloak.”

“There’s no point in writing about Nick if you can’t get to the fundamental problem of his nihilism,” Moe Tkacik, who has worked at both Gawker and Jezebel, said.

“He likes pretty things,” Daulerio said.

“He takes cancer very seriously,” Sicha said.

“He wants to be Warhol,” McClear said.

“He’s always wanted to be a magazine editor,” Welch said. “He’ll deny it to his grave.”

“What he really wants is to be the editor of the New York Times,” Spiegelman said

Videos by VICE

The kind of irony Gawker lives / kills for. I can remember the days of being only slightly embarrassed about browsing Gawker while interning at a dying magazine in New York City that summer we invaded Iraq (this was how Gawker described itself then). Now I often don’t have the wherewithal to type the address into my browser. I liked McGrath’s description of Dentonville:

Gawker is one of those things which, like neighborhoods, are never as good as when you first discovered them. What it is selling, essentially, is a pose of knowing, cool detachment. Very little of what Denton publishes qualifies as gossip in the traditional sense. It’s a sensibility. As the audience for that sensibility grows, and as the individual voices evolve to suit the expanded reach, the early movers and élites naturally feel some sting of betrayal. But Denton is, above all, a realist, with little patience for nostalgia. He’s the hipster who turns, unapologetically, into a developer.

So Denton has put his content into an exciting new hipster neighborhood, where readers come for the great bar conversation, decide to rent a place nearby, and then explore more of the neighborhood. If they don’t dig it, Denton knows, and he can redevelop the neighborhood to match people’s desires at the press of a few metaphorical (and actual) buttons. It’s one of those places we live now. His greatest innovation isn’t gossip; it’s using analytics to constantly make it better.

Paying bonuses for traffic meant not only keeping statistics about what readers did and didn’t like but sharing that information with writers—a supreme journalistic taboo, as it could easily lead to pandering. Pandering was precisely Denton’s aim, and he took it one step further when he started publishing his traffic data alongside the stories themselves. It almost felt like a sociological experiment designed to prove the obvious: that readers are herd animals, that heat begets heat. A photograph of an unidentifiable mammalian carcass on a beach, cleverly dubbed the Montauk Monster, is viewed two million times: go figure. “I think people are sort of waking up to it now, how probably the biggest change in Internet media isn’t the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability,” Denton told me. “Which is actually terrifying if you’re a traditional journalist, and used to pushing what people ought to like, or what you think they ought to like.”

He is fond of suggesting that newspapers would be shamed into shuttering their Albany bureaus if they acknowledged the full breadth of their readers’ habits, beyond the “ten most e-mailed” lists. No “traditional” journalistic outfit has yet copied this particular innovation of Denton’s, although Jacob Weisberg, the editor of the Slate Group and a wary admirer, admitted to me that he has lately “sort of wanted to,” adding that “people are afraid it has implications that will be followed.”

If Gawker owed anything to deadtree media, it was to The New York Observer, where a revolving door has welcomed and minted a number of the site’s editors. And the paper wouldn’t be the same once Gawker began in 2003. Two years earlier, I had an internship at the Observer, I had a front row seat to the slow-roasted burn of the first newspaper victim of the New York internet. It was that summer when Google launched, the fact checker’s deus ex machina that relieved us from the little hassles of Lexis-Nexus. It was also kind of a Trojan horse, whispering something about endings.

Gawker’s implicit mission seemed to be to destroy the established media, both by cannibalizing its content and by obliterating the reputation of everyone who produced it, without any apparent conviction about what ought to follow. There was something apocalyptic in its futurism and something intimidating in its certainty. The guilt in this guilty pleasure came from suspecting, in part, that you were clicking your way to your own obsolescence.

Near the end of college, I had a remote gig at Gawker Media, as a night editor of Sploid, a headline-heavy news site that Nick Denton dreamed could be the left-wing answer to the Drudge Report. It launched in April 2005, a month before the Huffington Post’s debut; it folded a year later, amidst a flurry of funereal anger and delight usually reserved for old newspapers. (Sploid lives on in a version made up of different Gawker Media posts that feels like a stream of “whoa that’s cool” StumbleUpon posts.)

In 2006, I was working for a short time at an old fashioned news magazine, in its Hong Kong bureau, seemingly far from the head-spinning New York media world. Around the time I arrived, half the staff had been slashed. The magazine was shrinking in size, moving increasingly online, increasingly moved by online economics. Most of my research and writing that winter had to be cut for space in the dwindling pages of the magazine. I spent my nights writing whatever I wanted to on my personal blog.