It’s not exactly the Pentagon Papers, but Gawker is still fulfilling its sacred duty. Hogan might not have wanted his racist rants and peccadilloes published, but none of us want our bullshit aired. Towards the end of my tenure, I probably flirted with that line.īut as Gawker grew in scope and reach it was only fitting that its quarry grew in stature and mustache. What I hadn’t fully realized then but do know is that the power dynamic of the one calling bullshit to the one on whom bullshit is being called is the difference between whistleblowing and bullying. It can look either like an investigative longform piece by the Guardian, or a takedown of a writer making fun of his own son for the pleasure of a byline. Nevertheless, calling bullshit was then and is now an essential function of media. Calling bullshit was then and is now an essential function of media In my early 20s at the time, it was thrilling to be feared, but I didn’t know what it meant to be kind. Since I often covered parties, this was made manifest by the sycophancy of many who we mocked, which in turn, simply fed my contempt. Working at Gawker made us well-known and even feared among a small circle of New Yorkers. Our targets were names that have been swept into the dustbin of history: web celebrities like Julia Allison and journalists like Steve Garbarino and Kristian Laliberte. In those days, before Nick pivoted toward reaching a national audience, our quarry was primarily the Manhattan-based semi-demimonde, the barely socialites, the sweaty strivers in the antechambers of Graydon Carter’s seven rooms of New York City. When I worked at Gawker as what we called an after hours editor – which meant only my purview included restaurants and nightclubs as well as creatures of the night and also those of the day, so it was everything, basically – calling bullshit was the site’s mission. Bullshit in all its flowering, self-serving, ridiculous forms. Joshua David Stein, after hours editor (2006-2008)īullshit. The easiest course of action in that case is to just cave to legal demands, but Nick has made it Gawker’s business to fight it where appropriate because the stakes aren’t just about the story itself they’re about what journalists can and can’t cover, and the consequences of that are far more serious than a story about a celebrity behaving badly. I think that was my first exposure to attempted censorship via lawyer, something Gawker deals with regularly – and so does any outlet that produces entertainment journalism. Singer’s team didn’t understand enough about the web at the time to grasp the concept of a hyperlink. We had to respond that we couldn’t take them down because they weren’t hosted on our site. This wasn’t the sort of thing we’d cover directly (Gawker was not as celebrity focused then), so I threw it into the link roundup and didn’t think much about it until I got a cease and desist letter from Marty Singer, Zeta-Jones’s lawyer, demanding that we take the photos down. One of the links I received was to a paparazzi photo on a Dutch site of Catherine Zeta-Jones, topless, pregnant and smoking. The stakes aren’t just about the story itself they’re about what journalists can and can’t cover I did it mostly to encourage people to send us more tips and signal that we were listening and responding to what our readers were telling us. Even then we ran into some thorny journalistic issues, in part because most people only dimly understood what a blog was and we were not a traditional media company, so it wasn’t obvious that what we were doing constituted journalism in the first place.Īt the time, I had a throwaway feature I’d do at the end of the day called “Remainders” and it was a link roundup of things readers had sent in that weren’t necessarily relevant to Gawker’s mandate (which was to cover all things New York), but that we thought might be interesting to the audience. Initially, it was mostly an aggregator with the occasional opinion piece and every now and then – almost by accident – actual reporting. Nick Denton and I were friends socially and he pitched me on writing it in exchange for a $1,200-a-month stipend and I thought of it as more of a side project than a job. When we launched Gawker in 2002, I would have never anticipated that it would grow into a large media company.
0 kommentar(er)
