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

I guess I'm so damaged from working for publically traded companies but I was just sitting there almost stunned like...oh yeah...you can actually just run a business that makes something and makes enough to pay for expenses and all the employees' salaries

yeah its cool happy for them

And building on ums's point there, here's Defector's annual report as such (as noted, they have no investors to report to). Very interesting read:

https://defector.com/defector-annual-report-year-one/

transparency is rare and welcome

I mean, if more places actually did this alone:

Target salaries and bonuses are calculated based on the previous quarter’s actual financial results rather than any forecasted results, so we should never be committing to distribute cash that the company would need to retain for other reasons.

happy for them, seems like a good model get a bunch of writers/editors who have followings/a track record of writing stuff people want to read and start a coop with sustainable business practices, much better than substack which is on the silicon valley money train and will inevitably just dump a bunch of people who are relying on them, theres also brick house and discourse blog attempting similar things tho i suspect theyre not doing as well

for a number of reasons i don't think the deadspin to defector model is really replicable

ok

replication step one: bring in jim spanfeller

for a number of reasons i don't think the deadspin to defector model is really replicable

― J0rdan S., Monday, October 4, 2021 12:22 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Piggybacking on this a bit there was a tweet somewhere when the deadspin staff quit en masse that ‘there’s basically a popular newsroom sitting on the curb if any secret lefty millionaire wants to go pick it up.”

I suspect that when substack starts upping their cut a defector2 could happen.

I do wish they posted more but i may be misremembering the number of posts deadspin did per day

for a number of reasons i don't think the deadspin to defector model is really replicable

― J0rdan S., Monday, October 4, 2021 12:22 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Piggybacking on this a bit there was a tweet somewhere when the deadspin staff quit en masse that ‘there’s basically a popular newsroom sitting on the curb if any secret lefty millionaire wants to go pick it up.”

I suspect that when substack starts upping their cut a defector2 could happen.

I do wish they posted more but i may be misremembering the number of posts deadspin did per day

building up brand equity, a readership, and personal notoriety over 15 years as part of a successful new media organization and then quitting en masse over new ownership meddling to ubiquitous press coverage that helps you rally a subscriber base behind you... there's lots of factors (aside from the work being good) inherent to the success of defector that will be hard for another group of people to replicate. a talented group of ex-substackers could perhaps make something work, but there's a passion for defector as a cause celebre that is unique to their situation. perhaps the andrew sullivan/matt yglesias/bari weiss wing of substack could make it work as there is a similar tho sort of politically reverse anti establishment passion for why ppl read those kinds of writers, but again you're gathering a unique set of ppl who were largely able to use successful media organizations as audience building platforms first. also the fact that the core of defector have worked together for like a decade is largely unheard of in media. they can run the site w/ no internecine drama or warring factions, the co-op runs smoothly & coherently on an organizational level beyond the front facing output, i feel like a substack exodus would have most trouble w/ that part

i think you could do —something— doesnt have to be exactly defector with just a bunch of people who are capable of writing things that people read, might not be able to be ad free or whatever, but like other media companies exist theres no real reason they cant be worker owned

and then of course theres also........podcasts

building up brand equity, a readership, and personal notoriety over 15 years as part of a successful new media organization and then quitting en masse over new ownership meddling to ubiquitous press coverage that helps you rally a subscriber base behind you... there's lots of factors (aside from the work being good) inherent to the success of defector that will be hard for another group of people to replicate

Although in a different domain, there's by now a well-established analogous pattern of "editorial board of scientific journal published by predatory for-profit publisher resigns en masses and collectively launches a new free open-access journal with identical scope and similar name"

along the same lines, many of today's freshest young entrepreneurs just start claiming to be the entity itself. for example, "i own gawker.com and i run it now, and i publish the stories. talk to me if you want to know the details", etc, running with it from there

i am ranger rick

Yikes

https://www.gawker.com/media/inside-the-turmoil-at-jezebel

‘tarpley hitt’ tho

so tired of the clowns who are like, what we need is more clicks and fewer dollars spent on writers, so just hire some more 22 year olds to piece together different variations of celebrity names and controversial ideas to create zero-content articles

“why aren’t we interviewing rihanna” is killing me, because at some point, you need someone experienced enough to interview the rihannas of the world and a rep that isn’t “we aspire to be clickbait” to get those interviews. you chose the other path?

I misread that as “dickbait” and

What a shitshow.

Lol also if you scroll down to the second-next article after that, by the same writer, it's an article about Nellie Bowles but the tagline is "bowels". Fair play.

xxxxp just reading some articles when that tarpley… hitt?

lmao they let Luke Winkie write for them, that about sums up Gawker 2.0

tarpley hittpiece

https://www.gawker.com/money/a-very-weird-interview-with-robert-f-kennedy-jr

You have a section in this first chunk —

By the way do you consider yourself a journalist or just a pharmaceutical rep? Because that's what you sound like. You don't sound like a journalist. You sound like you're an apologist for the pharmaceutical industry, and for the government agencies that are aligned with them.

Yeah I put that on my business cards. So you have a section in the book called "Final Solution: Vaccines or Bust."

Excuse me?

You have a section — a sub header — in the book called "Final Solution: Vaccines or Bust."

Yeah.

That's a pretty pointed choice of words. Did you mean to invoke the Holocaust?

It says what it says.

Can you elaborate?

It says what it says.

How old are you, Tarleton?

Larry David introduced RFKJR to his wife Cheryl Hines

i must have missed that episode

can’t believe the Q people are doing arcane rituals to summon a Kennedy when this guy is right there

can’t believe the Q people are doing arcane rituals to summon a Kennedy when, after all, it was you and me

not actualy a gawker project but the unfolding ian urbina debacle* maybe belongs on this thread**, if only for the way everything is flailingly unravelling for him

*(former NYT writer uses clout to harvest music contribitions for promotional projects surrounding his (seemingly solid and genuine) investigative journalism, racking up the largest number of composition co-credits in spotify history as a consequence, despite not composing a note himself: it's extremely unclear what money has been generated from this or where it's all going)

**(ok seems it's already linked on the youtubers whomst thread but maybe i wanna reboot it here, venmo me cash if you disagree)

hmm I don’t think it belongs here either

wheres my cash

what’s your venmo address

Oh so this book is what Garrison is referring to then

https://grrrgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/the_real_anthony_fauci-1536x1091.jpg

kinda digging those lines to the left and right of the book. ben is learning to abstract the immense tension in his anus

Is anyone reading nu Gawker? Is it even worth it?

I have not been, based on the first link on the front page doesn’t seem like I’m missing much.

https://www.gawker.com/celebrity/mess-alert-julia-fox-azealia-banks-are-going-at-it

Not that it’s celeb gossip but it feels more Buzzfeed than old Gawker.

They've had some decent essays recently. That's not one of them, but nothing about Azealia Banks is ever worth reading, so.

Gawker's current CSS/layout is bizarre. The logo is often halfway off the screen, layered messily under/over story images. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume its intentional like some sort of Raygun thing but man does it look like shit to me.

there have been some good pieces...the layout on my phone is readable at least.

Yeah I think they designed the phone layout and then called it a day lol

when I clicked on the above link in iOS I got a screen that had "loading" flashing in neon green all over the page for 30 seconds, truly terrible design even on mobile

I went to old Gawker for the entire ecosystem - Deadspin (mostly Deadspin tbh), Jalopnik, Splinter. With all that scattered to Defector, Discourse Blog and Jalopnik (which is awful now) it's less compelling to bookmark the site.

I like the present day gawker but it’s definitely a less spicy offering, with some flavors I remember

I still visit Kotaku because I’m a total idiot

I occasionally visit io9 but I think one of the last decent writers left and it’s completely over

i still read kotaku too but it's extremely terrible. every story is like a book report on steam comment threads or streamer drama. polygon is even worse, they recap comic book storylines and give them newsy headlines--"batman's parents are dead anymore," "dr strange bought a puppy" etc

nu gawker is occasionally entertaining, kills a few minutes here and there.

We don't talk about FleshBot.

The Vane was the one I was thinking about recently...was that the name? Of the Gawker weather blog? God it was good.