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

the thing about Vice is that it's really easy to ignore the 90% of their coverage that is dumb/offensive/whatever for the 10% that is fantastic (adjust those %'s as need be but no one gave coverage - complete w/ intimate video - of eg anti-balaka like Vice did).

this is kind of the end game of enjoying a website that has been positioned as a tabloid blog and has always had gossip, from the early "gawker stalker" days to the tmz-lite and jokey tmz-like articles to ones where they break lurid stories. we love the long-form articles on race and sex and politics but they're just one piece of the site's content.

I have no idea what the tabloids and celebrity gossip rags on the supermarket end caps have in them outside of what country music star is cheating or w/e and whether this particular story would have run in those, but the nastier articles in those definitely aren't morally better than this crap. But I'm not picking those up. Maybe shouldn't be picking up gawker.com but it's free and has stuff I like.

LOL Gawker just namechecked, in typical stumblebum fashion, by Jon Snow on Channel 4 News.

I'm assuming in some other context because no way did this make Channel 4 News.

xpost i got made fun of the other time i mentioned this on ilx but since my clicks = money for these entities, i have had a total self-imposed moratorium on clicking any links to gawker, huffpo, slate, buzzfeed and several others for quite some time. I just won't do it bc that click is me "buying their magazine" and fuck all of these sites, starve them to death IMO

(NB I made an exception for the runaways piece on huffpo)

j0hn D is advocating for the same kind of moratorium fwiw

good! where? on social media?

Yes, it was just a story on C4 news, tied together with the Ashley Madison hack.

"Think of the children" was funny and accurate once on the simpsons two decades ago and even then it was probably overrated.

gawker, huffpo, slate, buzzfeed

slate?

"don't trust anyone who doesn't have a picture of their asshole on their phone" is the rallying cry of our age

#ConfederacyofAssholes

They just reposted this piece without comment from February over on Jezebel.

http://gawker.com/brands-are-not-your-friend-1684232182

Someday we're going to be unlocking doors and paying for groceries with scans of our assholes so I guess the only downside of having asshole pics on your phone are potential identity theft.

Wesley Snipes tearing someone's asshole out in Demolition Man 2.

I'm not sure that questioning the sending of reproducible/distributable digital images of yr genitalia is necessarily reducible to a generational gap

none of those words look spelt right btw

*sexy computer voice*
"rectal scan complete. access granted."

I'll say it is.

all brands are inherently psychopathic. A company does not have feelings. It will never love you. It does not love its workers. It likely screws them over. Think about that the next time you tweet at a brand, or defend one online. Treating brands like buddies isn't just embarrassing for all parties—sympathy for a brand is antipathy for all humans. The great friending of the brand undermines the vital skepticism of corporate America and capitalism altogether. It's horrid enough that our laws treat corporations as people—to treat them as personal friends is just rotten.

no no no no Klein no

I agree completely w Mordy's quote

xp

Cosign that brand loyalty is bizarre

pretty sure that Mazda loves me

i'm not sure what this has to do with anything except maybe being a veiled objection to the managing partners

Sufjan, Mazda has always spoken very highly of you

Mazda esp appreciated all the dick pics

This is the weirdest recent example for me, sry for ot https://twitter.com/blobtower/status/610903479398182913 that's justin vernon on apple

I'm starting to think that there are a number of Gawkerers that have been under the impression that they were working for Democracy Now but are just discovering that they were surreptitiously sponsored by Pizza Hut the whole time.

Energizer.

good! where? on social media?

yup

Buzzfeed and Gawker are like garbage landfills that decided to get into the condo development business, but they only build condos on half the landfill and keep the other half a garbage dump.

"I know it smells but look at the view!"

Admittedly, Buzzfeed has some great journalism.

But yeah, they're weird experiments in going "legit" while continuing to seek profit from the junk that launched them. I think the Gawker story caused all the more outrage because Gawker tries so hard to hold itself out as something more substantial than the millennial version of a supermarket tabloid.

definitely. if they were like "look we're trash and we post trash articles" no one would care but they're like "we are intrepid brave journalists" and then not only that but "this is a great example of our intrepid brave journalism!"

https://twitter.com/leahfinnegan

http://www.newsweek.com/how-rage-quit-your-prestigious-media-job-out-principle-355815

As slimy as Denton is, it's hard to imagine ways in which the Gawker staff could handle this worse.
Particularly given that between throwing a fit about editorial independence they mention Max and Tommy were dear friends and wonderful people - makes it look like they're pissy that their buddies aren't on the job anymore.

No one on Earth respects Gawker staff as 'journalists.'

i can't get over how shitty that newsweek page looks. it makes the cracked magazine website look classy.

xp: Newsweek claims I have already hit my limit of "five free articles per month." No fucking way I have read five Newsweek articles this year let alone month.

yow, leah's twitter is pretty brutal

when asked by @pareene about their favorite posts on the gawker network, the partnership was only able to name 2 things

this might be a clue about the value of individual writers' contributions to the company - you're jaded Buzzfeed, as long as each 'vertical' pumps out a couple dozen posts each weekday to keep people checking in every now and then, that's what matters
I hope one of the things was the "best restaurant in New York" is series.

Leah Finnegan ‏@leahfinnegan 57 minutes ago
nick just hit his head on a lamp

He was probably hoping no-one would tweet that - he has taught these young tigers too well.

Feel like more is lost than gained in a gawker implosion, the schadenfreude is weirdly idealistic to me, like just in terms of the principles on which the company runs it's been, historically, superior to buzzfeed and vice in so many ways

Of course, now that it's inviolable principles are oops actually violable if the brands get mad, nm it's exactly the same

"this bucket of shit smells so much nicer than these other two buckets of shit"

she's clearly pissed with /some/ good reason but also going for like faux-naif crossed with snarktastic and it's nagl

i really dont know where they think they'll have the freedom to do this shit with such abandon, like did they really not think they were slaves to fucking board members /like everybody else/

Wait, if they are like everyone else, then surely 'where they'll have the freedom' is.. everywhere!

well obv i mean i dunno what new media fiefdom will grant them said freedoms in a professional capacity

guys the internet mediascape is not interesting fyi these are not fitting subjects for the breathy-tales tones used itt