Requiem for Gawker Redux
I wanted to write a quick newsletter on the recent death of Gawker 2.0. For starters, I did not read the original Gawker before the resurrection of the site 18 months ago. I knew of Gawker, I was privy to Gawker, I knew vaguely about the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that would eventually be the site’s demise. But it wasn’t the sort of stuff that I read. It’s heyday took place through most of my very young life through adolescence, then ceasing when I was still in college. When it came to celebrity gossip, admittedly I was a Perez Hilton reader around the evil and wicked ages of 12-15. After that, I mostly just started reading the movie reviews in the Philadelphia Inquirer — like, the actual physical newspaper that my dad would lay out on our kitchen table — and it didn’t go much beyond that until after Gawker 1.0 had shut down in the mid-2010s.
Then sometime in late fall of 2021, after it had already been re-launched for some time I think, a Gawker editor reached out to me on Twitter to write about Sean Baker’s new film Red Rocket. I had, just that same day, tweeted about wanting to write something on the film. I assume either my tweet fortuitously made its way to her (she didn’t follow me) and she decided to take a chance on me, or a friend saw the tweet and put in a good word to her for me. I don’t really know how it ended up happening, but nevertheless she was in my DMs and I was thrilled about it. I told her my idea and she told me something along the lines of that it was exactly the kind of take she wanted to publish on the film. She was a fair-handed and thoughtful editor (it’s Brandy lol) and the editing process was an extremely fulfilling experience in getting the piece to a place where both of us were happy with it. The article that ensued was one of my favorites that I’ve ever written, which you can currently see proudly referenced on the Wikipedia for the Red Rocket, and the mere three articles in total that I wrote for neo-Gawker are some of my proudest work.
My quick eulogy for Gawker, which was just shuttered yesterday due to the reason sites of substance are usually shuttered these days (an insipid and hollowed-out tech millionaire husk turning the gears at the company that owns them, putting “unprofitable” but meaningful and creative sites on the chopping block in order to get those stocks up, up, up!!!) is that I wish I had written more for Gawker. But the stars don’t always align for me when it comes to regularly churning out ideas and knowing where exactly to place them. I’m a person, not a machine, but mostly it’s that freelance writing isn’t my main source of income so I don’t need to force myself to write things to help me survive. So I allow myself to have a more methodical approach to my writing and my ideas, and I have a smaller output because of that.
For Gawker, I wrote about Red Rocket, about actor Danny McBride, and about another favorite film of mine, Superbad. After I wrote my Red Rocket piece for Gawker, I found myself regularly perusing their site, reading their quick, superfluous blog posts and in-depth analyses alike on a weekly basis. I read a lot of articles on the site that I loved — in particular, Robert Rubsam’s review of White Noise and Fran Hoepfner’s incredible detailing of her ongoing struggle with IUD removal. This is nothing to say of the other talented writers that Gawker was accustomed to publishing and whose writing I frequently devoured (these are just two of the most recent articles I read that I remember off the top of my head!!!)
Even if I occasionally disagreed with something they posted, or scrunched my nose at a bad take they decided to publish, I was grateful that Gawker existed. It was a good publication for both fluffy writing and serious writing, and things that combine a little bit of the two. It was a place that I think needed to exist. It was why I was happy to have found an in-road with the site, even if I didn’t end up writing much for them. It was nice to know that there was a place where it felt like the kind of writing I did really belonged there. Even when a pitch of mine had to be turned down, I never felt discouraged or that I shouldn’t try again. I always felt like my writing and ideas were welcome at Gawker. There are so few publications where I feel like my writing truly fits, and to see one of the very few leave this mortal coil does make me feel as if a friend—or, ok, maybe a small pet—has passed away.
I’m very lucky to have a WFH day job that allows me to pitch and write at my leisure and not depend on writing for my income. Writing, which is my creative passion, doesn’t need to consume my daily life. I don’t really like to consider myself a journalist because that doesn’t feel true, even if maybe it is. I’m just a writer, and creative essay-writing is my preferred medium. Admittedly, “creative essay-writing” is also a difficult style to pigeon-hole into journalistic writing, which is probably a big part of why I don’t consider myself a journalist. In order for the writing I get commissioned to do to fit into the journalism box, it has to get chopped and screwed in a way where I understand that my style doesn’t quite align with what editors are anticipating. That’s part of why Gawker felt very precious to me, in that it felt like I was still there in my published words.
Obviously I feel increasingly discouraged by “the state of things.” This isn’t a novel opinion and I’ve felt this way for some time — saying this is kind of just beating a dead horse to other writers. Every day there is a new reason for a writer to be more discouraged to pursue writing in a substantive capacity, and the death of Gawker 2.0 is another hand pushed forward on the journalistic doomsday clock. I would like someday to be able to write a little more regularly and in a greater, more lucrative capacity than I currently am. Maybe that means being a regular contributor for a flashy publication, or maybe that means writing a book. Anyway, I don’t know I don’t have an optimistic or snappy way to wrap this all up I guess I just hope things have gotten better by that point ok bye smash that like and subscribe.