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

Tabloid for self-appointed clever people

what's the over/under on io9 getting shuttered completely because nobody feels like bothering to replace Annalee Newitz?

if the alternative is an io9 headed by rob bricken, i'm all for them shutting up shop

give it to Casey Chan, you simply WON'T BELIEVE how EPIC it would be!!!!!!!!!

lol I was gonna say, Rob Bricken will Peter Principle his way right to the top.

Editing Nerd Blogs is Amazingly Beautiful

Why don't you think Charlie Jane Anders can hold onto the throne? She's got a book coming out later this year, so there's a small degree of prestige in keeping her there.

Seems like a problem might be that when Alex has to spend all day writing his screed about how Chelsea is a bitch and the Clinton campaign is attacking Bernie from the right, he doesn't have time to be an editor, and this happens:

http://gawker.com/the-problem-with-journalism-is-you-need-an-audience-1752937252

I guess we're all done here then! Thanks!

that's a good and otm piece imo. what don't you like about it?

It's tritely pessimistic & also, He names a number of quality diverse American publishers vs the proposed solution of 'government gives the good writers money' which can be deconstructed equally unfavorably

Besides the fact that it's a college newspaper column written by a sophomore?

lol CJR actually linked to the piece and quoted the line about the true interests of the public being garbage. I give up. Where do I sign up for the job where I get paid to complain about my job?

I think the sentiment has a lot in common with this hypothetical sophomore but to be fair, the writing's a bit better.

Have you read any college newspapers lately?

I don't think it's an ad hoc endorsement of government-funded media. Just seems to be the lay of the land. Quality writing on its own isn't anything, you will still end up getting gigs that pay for large interests that either are profitable from their other properties, or fund your publication out of some sense of altruism.

It's true of nearly every field, though, unless you make physical products yourself or perform manual labor, in which case you're directly contributing goods or services for cash. Then you have to question where that cash came from. Or not.

There's still a minor stripe of gawker that's writers talking about journalism or the journalism market, it seems pretty much in that niche

Just work in computer security auditing, it's non-stop complaining about the state of security

I sympathize with the sentiments in the article. I tried doing some writing for a clickbait-esque website recently and despite having a lot of freedom to write about what i want, the medium (quick turnaround, pieces pegged to whatever hot item is trending), is very unpleasant. otoh historically writing has only rarely been associated w/ any kind of profitability and not having a huge literature market hasn't stopped mankind in the past from generating great + important texts. it might even be that the less profitable writing is, the better the writing you'll get since all the not-so-talented writer hacks will stop writing and you'll just be left with ppl who have to write bc they feel compelled to say something important or compelled to write as some kind of metaphysical experience idk now i'm rambling and have to get back to work writing copy for my company.

why do you think good, "literary"-ish journalism outlets keep closing, other than for the reasons mentioned by ham? is there a smart non-sophomoric reason, or is it just sophomoric to say the true reason?

good journalism doesn't create it's own market and the demand for it is highly depend on the fragile whims and egos of super-elites is a good thesis imo

i like the contrapuntal dissonance of holding up England Britain as a non-capitalist model of journalism right underneath a photo of someone reading the Daily Star

i pick up an issue of gq or esquire or vanity fair or w/e when i'm traveling as a sort of ritual, but i've been at home lately so i grabbed one at the store

magazine is thinner than ever, 1/3 is advertorial (shades of that episode of 'girls') and the two long-form articles, which those publications still manage to sneak in, are pretty weak. bleh.

some level of journalism can probably be naturally supported by the market but not at the level we're currently at. like every frontier town can maayyybe support one fast-talking nosey can't-mind-his-own-business reporter w/ a press card on his cap

The answer is that quality and audience do not go together. The media is not the enemy of thoughtful writing. The public is.

says the media.

I've been in journalism for 20 years (first paid credit November 1996), edited three magazines, two newspapers and a couple of websites, and nothing Nolan says in that piece is false or even exaggerated. People love stupid crap. Sometimes they'll read an interesting, smart story, but they'll go right back to crap afterward. Me included. Media ownership has been a playground for rich idiots for hundreds of years, and will likely never be anything else, at least not under capitalism. (State media is a separate issue, of course.)

as much as I ridicule the NYT it is probably as good as The Guardian, and better at some things - and despite the shellacking local US papers have taken they are mostly better than any/all local papers in the UK

television/radio is an entirely different story of course

Any talent he has as a prose stylist disappears under layers and layers of greasy, florid smugness. He's clearly too precious to be asked to trim a sentence or a paragraph here or there even when he's making the same point for the third time.

I didn't realize the death of good content demanded this particularly sneering and hateful explainer, but I guess if you guys have never read a piece on the economics of commercial news media before, it's an okay start.

yeah i'm not sure any amount of editing could have stripped that tone away

I love the assumption that I had an issue with the point he was arguing, like I'm a fucking numbskull who doesn't understand why some parts of magazines are pictures of attractive people with just the name of a perfume in big letters

i don't think 'socialize the media' is a serious alternative (although uk has good some private media alongside bbc so it's not either/or) but Hamilton's beat is cranky socialist guy, plus that's like one half sentence added in as kind of an afterthought

sorry i assumed you didn't like else about it other than the tone, my bad. tbh Tombot u are just craving to edit him lol

easy to see how i can make that mistake though since everything he writes is in the same tone

his tone is the WORST

well, that's fair

I thought you were getting at it being the naive college sophomore seeing the true shape of the world and attempting to illuminate

well that too but apparently the point needed to be made I guess? I was pretty sure I understood why my CVS checkout counter is festooned with 120-point yellow letters instead of a wide variety of science and literary publications

maybe his next article can be about how Top 40 is a format entirely composed of third-hand ideas

that point needs to be made. i don't think its really common currency

well that too but apparently the point needed to be made I guess? I was pretty sure I understood why my CVS checkout counter is festooned with 120-point yellow letters instead of a wide variety of science and literary publications

― El Tomboto, Thursday, January 14, 2016 5:26 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Do you not follow media people on Twitter at all? When Grantland and the Dissolve shut down, people seemed completely at a loss that sites THEY clearly read all the time weren't profitable

I try to follow nobody on twitter and have gotten pretty topnotch at it

I guess a lot of gawker posts make more sense if one assumes that they are using their competition as an audience proxy. Actually a lot of a lot of things about modern web media make more sense through that lens. Doesn't give me any more appreciation or use for it, though.

I try to follow nobody on twitter and have gotten pretty topnotch at it
--El Tomboto

Am I supposed to read this in Ron Swanson's voice?

Close enough

El Tomo Swanboto

Meet Gawker’s New Boss: ‘Russia’s Richest Man,’ Viktor Vekselberg

Aw man, Vikky V-Berg! Yeah that guy's really cool

meet gawker's new boss: a minority investor in the company

Always good to see minorities involved I spose

if only!

does the union have any input on this kind of thing?

i would think not, but i dunno, what if the guy was all BLOOD DIAMONDS

He has a colourful history, for sure.

Organised labour probably best staying out of his way on past experience.

Fabergé egg bonuses!

Countdown to Hulk Hogan dying of polonium poisoning...

Colourful history month