![]() I certainly see why someone would want to bring back that aggressively snarky take-no-prisoners style back to the internet as we enter the frenzy of an election season, but frankly, isn’t that depressingly our default mode these days? It feels like the hostile rhetoric of right-wing bullies has become the norm in a way that forces us to pretend that everything sucks on the same level and caring is stupid. It may simply be that 2019 is not a great time for a new Gawker. Barna will be replaced by Nate Hopper of Time, according to the New York Post. He left Interview to join Gawker but is now heading back to the magazine. Given how much the original Gawker trash-talked Trump and despised everything his ilk stood for, relaunching the site with a wannabe Ivanka at the helm did not go down well with the new staff writers, who quickly packed their bags and left.Īnd now, joining them is Ben Barna, who had been set to act as the number two editor alongside Dan Peres. ![]() Oh, and she admits to loving Donald Trump. Carson Griffith, the new editorial director and as of 2008 a registered Republican, was revealed by Splinter to have a long history of sh*tty comments featuring transphobic and homophobic slurs, insults against the poor, a whole host of racist comments, particularly about Asian people, and hostility towards plus sized people. However, only a week after that big announcement, two of those writers (the only full-time ones planned for the relaunch) quit following offensive workplace comments made by an executive. It seemed unlikely that New Gawker would be right for the current internet age, and that speculation only increased when four major names joined the staff at the beginning of the year. This is the guy who bought Mic.com for under $10 million after they sacked basically all their writers so they wouldn’t have to worry about things like unions or fair pay. On the one hand, yay that an important piece of internet history would not be lost to time. So when it was announced in July 2018 that Bryan Goldberg, owner of Bustle and founder of Bleacher Report, had bought in a bankruptcy auction for less than $1.5 million, once again the internet didn’t know how to react. Sure, Gawker were notorious a-holes who often descended into the worst kind of internet smarm and rhetoric, but who could truly be happy at such an obvious quashing of free speech at the hands of a billionaire with a grudge? For better or worse, Gawker was the internet, the strongest representation we had for a no-holds-barred b*tch-sesh that didn’t care who it pissed off or why. The End of the Facebook Papers Consortium The group of news outlets sharing access to a whistleblower’s trove of documents shut down their Slack a day after their stories published, while publications outside the U.S.When Gawker went down in 2016 following the massive lawsuit Hulk Hogan and his rich benefactor Peter Thiel mounted against the site following his sex tape leak, the internet didn’t entirely know how to react. As I mentioned last week, we now have a website! So that means if you become a subscriber today, in addition to receiving a regular dose of media reporting in your inbox via our email newsletter, you'll now have access to everything we've ever published in our archives - like these great stories we published this week! The Ghost of Gawker Past BDG’s first attempt to relaunch Gawker was aborted in 2019, but a defamation suit filed by its editorial director, Carson Griffith, against The Daily Beast lives on
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