hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

this is on the front page at nyt.com now btw

what if kid rock were the CFO of Conde Nast

what if that

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/21/business/media/2-gawker-editors-resign-over-articles-removal.html
nothing we haven't done here a dozen times but i lol'd at

(In the midst of the controversy on Friday, Mr. Hogan sent a one-word Twitter post: “Gawker.”)

Denton also criticized his editors for failing to consider the impact that the story would have on its author, 27-year-old staff writer Jordan Sargent. Sargent, Denton said, is now "shell-shocked" after receiving so much criticism and abuse online in response to the post.

i have considered sarge a friend and peer and overall very smart and funny guy for a long time and hope i can continue to in the future. but man, if anyone getting their mentions bombed on social media has ever deserved it, it's him. like...this is the medicine you were dishing out to people on a daily basis, i think you can handle some mean tweets and blog posts! and on the basis of the quality of your work, not because someone else made your personal life go viral.

this whole thread is such a sad artifact now of people who liked and cared about these guys trying to tell them about the road they were going down and them being too stubborn to care. i never even bothered to join in on the lectures because i could tell they were already pretty far gone. balls comparing gawker's weird pointless feuds with other websites to benzino is otm, the 'vice is such a terrible place to work BUT YOU KNOW WHAT'S A GREAT PLACE TO WORK WINK WINK' posts seem especially funny now.

Jordan seemed p cool this weekend, article may be overstating the case

(shell) shocked that gawker may be overstating the case

"Jordan is the rarest of all things, a funny writer and fantastic stylist who can also report the hell out of difficult and awkward stories—in other words, a perfect Gawker blogger. I am hugely proud of what he’s done for the site, and there is no one whose work I’d rather take a stand over."

http://www.fordyceletter.com/media/2015/01/Laughing-man-stockimages-free.jpg

yeah old man Denton possibly playing up that this poor 27-year-old is just a babe in the woods in all this xp

i mean.. is that supposed to be some kind of smoking gun? advertisers write the checks. of course their interests will be considered. why wouldn't they be? if you're running a business, you would have to be a moron to ignore the people writing the checks.
xpost
― transparent play for gifs (Tracer Hand), Monday, 20 July 2015 23:32 (Yesterday)

This is true but also the logic that leads the Telegraph to spike stories about HSBC helping clients evade billions in tax. Obviously the Telegraph has paying readers to think about and there is no definition of "public interest" that excludes that story and it's a million times more important but the same defence would be used.

Honestly it had never occurred to me that Gawker had an editorial/advertising firewall but I haven't seen "this offends our advertisers" used in this case? The point of "principle" seems to be more that commercial decision makers were given say over an editorial decision for any reason, commercial or otherwise.

Maybe Max and Peter Oborne should form a martyrs club where they drink brandy and thump the table angrily at what's happened to their noble profession.

From darraghmac's summary upthread

loads of readers against story
mgmt pull story

'loads of advertisers against story' is probably a crucial step here too - Tommy whatever's resignation mentioned serious fallout in passing on the way to "what's important is that we should have kept the story up", but it's worth remembering that any Gawker advertiser will have been getting emails every day for 10 months from Gamergate dickholes explaining that Gawker is Satan. So actually talking about quitting will seem particularly significant.

It's probably a blue dress / yellow dress whether you think the thought process went "Our advertisers are angry -> we have wandered from our values" or whether "our values" is only good for bringing in advertisers.

(xp - not specifically a response to Matt!)

what if kid rock were the CFO of Conde Nast

what if that

"Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy" would be on page one of the Conde Nast strategic business plan.

I'm not sure it's quite the same as the Telegraph though - one of the things about journalistic ethics is that it should be (should be) more okay to write something that directly fucks with one of your advertisers than something that makes them uncomfortable with having their ads next to your copy.

Denton criticized the editorial staff for adopting what he called a "maximalist interpretation of editorial freedom."

No one comes out well out of this but Denton pretending that this wasn't exactly the sort of thing that was encouraged all along is a terrible look.

hey can we stop calling the sex worker in this case a hooker? its pretty gross

just saying it's a shitty derogatory term, and besides, if we can make the distinction between an accountant and a CFO then maybe we can acknowledge that there are different types of sex work and different levels of professionalism in the field. dude wasn't soliciting on a street corner, he was negotiating an offer for $3k plus airfare for a few hours of his services.

also to be fair i don't think denton's being entirely disingenuous about his regret at failing to protect j0rd from backlash. gawker obviously gave this story to j0rd because they thought his being gay would help deflect any charge of homophobic motive but the result is that they set up their gay writer to become vilified as a political traitor by gay men everywhere. maybe it's just a distinction of degree but it's a bit different than the standard comment froth tabloid writers should expect.

jordan got the story because he got the tip

gawker obviously gave this story to j0rd because they thought his being gay would help deflect any charge of homophobic motive

I don't think this is obvious?

this whole thread is such a sad artifact now of people who liked and cared about these guys trying to tell them about the road they were going down and them being too stubborn to care.

OTM. It's like the road to shitsville. Lots of people saying "you seem pretty decent on ILX, maybe you should rethink some of this noxious stuff you're publishing" and them replying "no we're fine thanks, nothing can go wrong, chill out".

maybe that's just cynical speculation on my part, but it'd be naive to think having the post penned by a gay writer wasn't factored into how they story would play on some level; and if it wasn't considered then... wow

xp

if I didn't read ilx and were just following this story I would still have no idea that its author was gay. not that that excuses anything (which is probably why nobody brings it up) but some of the online hate j is getting is gonna be in the context of people assuming he's a straight guy outing gay guys.

"you seem pretty decent on ILX, maybe you should rethink some of this noxious stuff you're publishing"

i think there were generally more people defending gawker here than criticizing it.

as far as the going-down-the-road thing, i saw the same thing happen more than once to ambitious young journalists in the print era. they'd land a magazine job and absorb the publications' MO/ethos whatever into their DNA and run w/it until they got burned or often moved on to another job. sometimes even taking it further than their bosses. today the scene is even more extreme/cutthroat - nihilistic - and the result is max doubling down with this absurd moral justification which no doubt seems perfectly logical to him. not excusing him, just understanding EXACTLY how it happened. this is why I find Denton's comments so disingenuous. as if he didn't egg his minions on every step of the way. moral of the story: none.

denton def comes off worse than anyone in this

its interesting so many of his employees have found themselves ideologically aligned with him while p much universally admitting that he is some sort of sociopath

ability to call yr boss of bosses a sociopath while still retaining yr job def a v admirable thing abt gawker btw and i suspect that sort of thing is a major reason so many employees feel such loyalty to it

tho it seems to be becoming a more conventional company and maybe that sort of thing isnt is out of style

I want a job where the boss is a sociopath and I can call him a sociopath.

see

at this point i don't know how much their is to say other than denton seems like a peice of shit, that max & j0rd are good dudes that made a mistake and maybe dug in their heels too much, that the story was taken down -- even though I do feel it should have been taken down for journalistic reasons -- in the most snaky, shitty way -- and i understand why the editorial staff was upset and they should be.

anyway the whole thing sucks and i wish max & j0rd the best and i think gawker will not be as entertaining w.o them

I haven’t been here for very long, but I was immediately aware of the freedom that defines this job uniquely, and as time passes, I value it almost exponentially more. For example, on Friday, I missed the early rumblings about the deletion because I was writing a piece in the voice of a fake David Brooks living inside his own butthole. It’s a phenomenally dumb example, but there is no other major media company where a person could read a very bad, very racist op-ed column published at the country’s most respected newspaper, then decide to spend 90 minutes writing a piece about that columnist’s butthole, have Tom Scocca edit it perfectly within fifteen minutes and Bobby Finger make a stupidly professional gif within five, and then publish it immediately on a large platform—and, not to be a dickhead, also have that piece be decently good.

http://politburo.gawker.com/gawker-s-editorial-freedom-inherently-gets-defended-onl-1718884062

I'm sure there are lots of fine people working for gawker media but I read that post and I think to myself: freedom ain't free y'all

there is no other major media company where a person could read a very bad, very racist op-ed column published at the country’s most respected newspaper, then decide to spend 90 minutes writing a piece about that columnist’s butthole, have Tom Scocca edit it perfectly within fifteen minutes and Bobby Finger make a stupidly professional gif within five, and then publish it immediately on a large platform—and, not to be a dickhead, also have that piece be decently good.

nice work if you can get it

what happens in david brooks asshole should stay in david brooks asshole imo

Also like I said upthread anyone whoever got a paycheck from writing or editing has to have some sympathy for the writers because i know goddamn well the things i fucked up and got by with because (thankfully) i wasn't on a big level yet and no one noticed, and that's just fucking luck not me being smarter or more ethical. the grind of having to produce every day will make you make lapses in judgment you would never think you'd make, and not even out of spite. it's just like hey that looks like the big chunk of meat I can throw into the sarlacc pit of the internet today and some days you're just busy or just don't step back and think. the pace of it makes these things impossible to avoid. my beat was much more in the toy dept compared to people's lives but i can't say i didn't make mistakes. but everyone has gutted fact checkers and good old school editors and racheted up the pace to having to deliver daily (or more) pieces, it's like this shit is preordained to happen.

that said, i don't agree w/the defense of it that came after, i like those guys i just think they are full of shit on those points about why it was "news." but when it's pulled because of advertisers coming down that is bullshit even if the story that is the crux of it should have been scuttled before it was published.

upper MS sh@kedown otm
lag00n otm

i never should have left the woods

same

were you in the woods when all of this happened too? a few days ago i was floating down a river drawling "keep on choooooglin....chooglin....CHOOOglin...CHOOOglin, CHOOGLIN, CHOOOGLIN.....*buuuurp*..........................keep on chooglin...", then i emerge and suddenly everything is wrong

ha i caught the beginning of it on my way to the woods and was all why am i going off the line now!

instinctively i realized that the golden era of the internet was truly over. i had a chance to join gandalf and frodo and the rest of the gang on a boat ride west from middle earth, once and for all, in the form of a beer-soaked CCR raft, and instead i went back to the airport.

im going toobin today B-)

anyway, pointless posts on my part because every angle of this has been dissected a million times and now everyone hates each other more than they already did, but yeah, all of this is just sad.

xpost

KEEP ON CHOOGLIN!

CHOOG 4 LYFE

gr8 thread

for me to http://rs717.pbsrc.com/albums/ww173/prestonjjrtr/Smileys/slapen_aan_pc.gif~c200 on

wow incredibly rude tbh

a lot of posters worked very hard on this thread

whats the thread abt anyway

have u seen the movie horrible bosses?

well this thread is about its sequel horrible bosses 2