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

Reading the informal obits posted by friends on FB, I realized, surprised, that I never read more than a couple of Gawker-related stories a month – if that. Only by referral too.

i still get mixed up by the proliferation of clickbait blogs in the mid-2000s. they really all blur together for me. i think i was just busy in grad-school coursework when other folks were able to attend to the differences between all the various brands...

(also the period when i scarcely posted here. some may wish for those days to return.)

according to this article from fortune magazine:

And what happens after the auction? The new owner takes possession of the assets, and the amount they paid goes into an escrow account to await the final decision in the Hogan case, which Gawker appealed. It has been on hold since the company filed for bankruptcy.

If Gawker loses, then all the proceeds from the sale go to Hogan. But if Gawker wins a reduced judgement, some of it may go to Denton and the other Gawker investors, including a venture fund that put money in earlier this year.

yeah, it's a bankruptcy reorg -- there's gawker the entity that has the lawsuit liability, and the group of blogs known as gawker media which are what was sold. the proceeds of the sale go to the former, with the money tied up in courts. the owner of the latter entity don't hold the liabilities

will gawker finally answer whether or not it plagiarized nabisco?

ask a puppy

http://dog.gawker.com/

Gawker has seemed like the center of the Internet to me for some time in both good and bad ways. I've complained about some of the things they did that seemed mean or invasive but I never stopped reading. In hindsight I probably took their independence for granted. I remember once Max held an "open discussion" with the readers on the commenting system but then sort of berated the commenters who asked stupid questions. What other site had that kind of an honest relationship with its readers? It was refreshing in a world where journalism is increasingly becoming flattened into just another commodity.

In hindsight I probably took their independence for granted.

no shit

when i think about how gawker is disappearing while stuff like upworthy thrives it kind of makes me want to -- i don't know -- kill myself

the last thing I read on Gawker before it was announced that it would be shuttered was a link to an esquire article about Jared Kushner, who has owned the New York Observer for 10 years and has turned it into a plaything which he uses to pursue various grudges. But a long time before that, the NYO had ceded its central position re: NY media to Gawker.

Like Treeship, Gawker has been the hub of my internet since 2003. I learned about most shit that I would talk about with my friends or what you needed to know as a working journalist there. I also worked steadily for the music blog curated by Maura J. and this other guy who got me involved that Gawker did in 2006-2009 which I 'm sure you guys remember. I was proud to work under the Gawker umbrella and am grateful as such, but mostly I don't know what my main internet artery for what the fuck is going on will now be.

The thing to be really proud of is that there will absolutely be a "gawker era" that people can remember, even outside the NYC media scene.
The timing of this couldn't be worse, though. I feel like Stewart's retirement, Colbert going to CBS, and Wilmore getting cancelled are all somehow of a piece with this.
The next decade & half is going to be very different than the last.

i don't think i've ever been to the homepage of a gawker property, just read articles as i heard about them

I miss when the site was much more NY-centric and insular, but there was still a lot of good stuff in the last few years.

the first seven bookmarks on Chrome on my personal phone:

lawyers, guns & money
gawker
kotaku
deadspin
gizmodo
eschaton
talking points memo

io9 was there for a while. Good jalopnik stuff would usually get cross linked from gizmodo and good jezebel stuff usually turned up on gawker too.
Anyway, time to read less internet.

does this mean I can take the name "Nick Denton" now?

Most of the stories people remember from Gawker and mentioned in their obits were Deadspin, Gizmodo, or Valleywag. LOL

reminds me of the last days of suck

Most of the stories people remember from Gawker and mentioned in their obits were Deadspin, Gizmodo, or Valleywag. LOL

― Allen (etaeoe), Thursday, August 18, 2016 8:36 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in san francisco maybe

i just googled "why is texas such a shithole" for no real reason and got

Americans Moving Exclusively to Shitholes - Gawker
gawker.com/5990623/americans-moving-exclusively-to-shitholes
Gawker
Mar 14, 2013 - Try Midland, Texas. Just pack up, move on out to Midland, Texas, get a nice job in a gas field, make friends with the god damn Bush family put a ...

RIP i guess

why doesn't univision sell gawker.com and keep the rest? more trouble than it's worth?

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, August 18, 2016 2:56 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's got a huge judgment against it

― 龜, Thursday, August 18, 2016 3:10 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

seriously though, i thought the money univision paid pays off the judgment. aren't they free to sell it? it has >0 value once the judgment is settled. or is the problem that the judgment is going to take years to settle to the certainty required to sell it? or are they not allowed to break up the assets by the terms of this kind of acquisition?

will gawker finally answer whether or not it plagiarized nabisco?

ask a puppy

http://dog.gawker.com/

― 龜, Thursday, August 18, 2016 6:37 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://twitter.com/max_read/status/766407466766700545

now the world knows

i know we like to laugh and all, but has anyone ever figured out who tf veronica moser is?

to answer some of the questions upthread, gawker.com is being left with gawker media -- the bankrupt entity -- which means it will be technically owned by the creditors, the primary of which is hogan. i believe if nick et al get the verdict overturned by the state appellate court -- which they believe will happen -- then they will regain ownership of the company and the site. (though i'm pretty sure hogan et al would then attempt to appeal that appeal, so we're talking like potentially a very long time until any of it is truly settled.)

the rest of the sites are being sold to univision. univision has no liabilities from the hogan suit or the other previously open litigation against the company. my understanding is that they're also protected (by law) against litigation stemming from stories published previous to their ownership of the purchased properties.

univision didn't take gawker.com because they didn't want the risk of becoming a target of thiel's. nick told us he talked to a dozen or so potential buyers about obtaining or funding the site (one idea was to basically give the site to the writers with some sort of investor) but that ultimately nobody wanted to potentially incur thiel's wrath, which is to say he won.

wow

that is insane

Hopefully Thiel will give an inspiring Ted talk about how he "disrupted" the first amendment

the first seven bookmarks on Chrome on my personal phone:

lawyers, guns & money
gawker
kotaku
deadspin
gizmodo
eschaton
talking points memo

io9 was there for a while. Good jalopnik stuff would usually get cross linked from gizmodo and good jezebel stuff usually turned up on gawker too.
Anyway, time to read less internet.

― El Tomboto, Thursday, August 18, 2016 7:22 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tom, do you read ars technica regularly? if you don't, i think you would like it a lot.

"Gawker has seemed like the center of the Internet to me"

Bizarre sentence

everyone knows ilx is the centre of the internet

https://twitter.com/max_read/status/766407466766700545
now the world knows
― woke-ing class zero (s.clover)

just admit that there are only people brilliant enough to think of writing in a dog's voice: me and Virginia Woolf

nabisco has forgotten "Jessie" by Paw, or perhaps either nabisco or Virginia Woolf wrote "Jessie"; if so would like to know which

"only 2 people" don't know how mysterious paste error happened

sad dog
sad dog confused by paste error

Virginia Woolf did write 'Jessie', under the nom de plume Furginia Woof.

fp'd u for unacceptable pun abuse

You know what bugs me to no fucking end? When Jezebel runs a story, like this Amber Heard one, which is a realtively fleshed-out news article:

http://jezebel.com/amber-heard-is-donating-her-7-million-divorce-settleme-1785481708

But then they tack on a number of unrelated celeb gossip tidbits at the end:

Apparently Dancing With The Stars has trained its tractor beam on super-awesome and very talented four-gold-medals-and-a-goddamn-bronze-medal-winning gymnast Simone Biles as a contestant on its upcoming 23rd season. If she accepts this rose(did I get that right?), she would join the ranks of Nastia Liukin, Shawn Johnson and teammate Aly Raisman, who have all competed on the show and done pretty okay.

Biles is still committed to appear in the Kellogg’s Tour of Gymnastics which sounds like the So You Think You Can Dance tour but much more impressive, so she’s not quite sure if she’ll be able to feign a fox trot with Derek Hough, or whatever.

“I would,” she told Yahoo! of the generous offer, “but I can’t dance.”

That didn’t stop Mischa Barton!

Yay, Aunt Kylie. [Us Weekly]
Put your Lil’ Smokie away, Biebz. [Celebuzz]
Kendall Jenner got a restraining order against her stalker. Good. [Entertainment Tonight]
Kim Kardashian wore a bathing suit. [Us Weekly]

And then the Kardashian rumors or whatever take up space in the comments, where I'm going to look for discussion of the main subject matter of the post. It's really weird to me.

iirc jezebel stopped doing a lot of single-topic celebrity gossip things and just does round-up posts, which does lend to that unfortunate scenario

fp'd u for unacceptable pun abuse

― The Chinese is NOW doing a munchy box! (bizarro gazzara), Friday, August 19, 2016 7:15 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I employ puns to abuse u
Puns exist solely to be abused

i know we like to laugh and all, but has anyone ever figured out who tf veronica moser is?

― jaymc, Friday, August 19, 2016 12:18 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I did, only because I was and am an admirer of his posts. I'll keep it to myself though.

gawker dudes . . . makin' copies

https://twitter.com/RobSchneider/status/766661455244566529

if nothing else, being the motivation for a rob schneider/glenn greenwald twitter interaction is something

kind of agree wit this

'@ggreenwald

Gawker is like @RyanLochte

It's hard to separate the Medals from the vandalism and public urinating.

God bless our free unencumbered press

kind of agree wit this

'@ggreenwald

Gawker is like @RyanLochte

It's hard to separate the Medals from the vandalism and public urinating.

― a (waterface), Friday, August 19, 2016 9:03 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, hard for some to separate The Glenn Greenwald of the last 10 years from the lawyer who defended murderous neo-nazis pro bono.

tom, do you read ars technica regularly? if you don't, i think you would like it a lot.

I read ars technica daily, it looks kind of terrible on a phone though. Also, it is insufficient.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CqPD9a4W8AQAKqE.jpg

Gawker, and its seven sister sites, had been so successful that we were even looking beyond the blog and into the future with a project Nick had dubbed Kinja. Practically, Kinja was just the proprietary publishing software and commenting system that had been introduced on the blogs in early 2013. But Nick had Facebook-size aspirations for it. In the future, it would be a public platform, designed to give anyone the ability to publish useful information — gossip, news, context — in an infinitely modular format: a stand-alone piece of writing that might also be a comment on another stand-alone post or embedded in a third. Over emails, Nick imagined “at least a decade” of building Kinja — at the end of which, if done right, “we’ll be the ones doing the acquiring.”

"I am the one who gawks"

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wMEq1mGpP5A/0.jpg

RIP, the Kinja died before it could become good-ass

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/08/did-i-kill-gawker.html

anyway a good read from our guy on the inside

Only nine words of Jessie are in the voice of the dog; everything after the intro is the dude yarling at Jessie to leave him alone.

Wait, ten words.