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

http://gawker.com/parks-rec-exec-found-dead-from-apparent-overdose-1686895611

Which wouldn't be so bad but you couldn't help but link to

http://defamer.gawker.com/its-because-youre-a-cunt-harris-1168629718/+johncook

Really?

link maybe automatic, related story, tag or whatever.

The "obit" doesn't seem so bad.

A lot of gawker is gossip, never going to be the classiest website.

Oh yeah the link is in the text /illiterate

if you include the link you're shameless. if you don't you're whitewashing your record. kind of a no win situation

Ehh idk, pretty sure you could choose not to hyperlink that shit in an obit, and I know that gawker is the new cool kid ILX crew, but fuck that noise.

i think it's sad that ppl think gawker is cool -- like the ppl who write for it seem like a mix of college student newspaper dorks that felt they were "edgier" than their peers but not extroverted enough to be sketch comedy dweebs

gawker media, jjjusten wants a word with you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64sy-053698

reading this thread i thought it was going to be like, one of those embedded links with an image. that would have been pretty hilarious/fucked up. but a hyperlink in the text? meh

if you include the link you're shameless. if you don't you're whitewashing your record. kind of a no win situation

It isn’t white washing if it’s a minor story. And it was an extremely minor story.

the new cool kid ILX crew lol

new cool kid ILX crew needs to be doing more to prevent plushie-fucking garbage like this imo

http://io9.com/10-superheroes-who-can-never-have-sex-5015295

The first two grafs of the Hulk item are a good an argument as any that comic books and comic book movies should never be consumed by anyone over the age of 14

it would have been really disingenuous to write about his death but pretend like we have no history with him

new cool kid ILX crew needs to be doing more to prevent plushie-fucking garbage like this imo

sure we'll do this right after you storm into will dana's office and put your foot down over the new U2 album getting 5 stars

agree that it was such a minor story that it'd of been fine and a scosh classier to not include it

lol @ plushie-fucking garbage

In the future all celeb obits will include a disclosure about the writer being blocked on Twitter by the deceased

i still dont REALLY get this complaint but im glad you posted about it here and on facebook

frankly it would be really weird and shady to pretend we (or really a couple ex employees) had never gotten in a stupid fight with this guy? its not that the story is or is not newsworthy its that we were directly involved as an institution. better to err on the side of transparency

and even then i guess i dont quite get it. are obits supposed to be safe spaces?

are obits supposed to be safe spaces?

yes

it's called 'decorum' usually

It's bad form to call out or air the dirty laundry of someone who is no longer around to defend him/herself. And I'm sure it's pretty much the last thing anyone who cares about that person wants to read about when they're grieving.

I mean, write an article or a book or whatever after some time has passed and tell the world how much of a d-bag the person was if you need to, but slipping funeral atendees pictures of the deceased with his mistress just makes you look like a ghoul.

When Norm McDonald dies does Rolling Stone have to print that he tweeted a critique of their Best SNL cast list?

i don't think mentioning gawker's history with the guy is nec. a bad thing but the way it's inserted into the article is really weird to me, like it's vague enough to invite you to click on it, had it been prefaced with something like "we should note in the interest of transparency that we engaged in an angry blah blah blah...." i would understand more

i still dont REALLY get this complaint but im glad you posted about it here and on facebook

Maybe Gawker can run an article about it and link back to it when we die

take it to kinja

xp: lololol

"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism." - Graham Greene

^^ GG firing shots at gawker over ethics in journalism

lolololx2

clearly the gawker keepin' it negative dickhole cool kid crew should run ILX

clearly they should

― carne asada, Saturday, January 17, 2009 2:38 PM (6 years ago)

i think it's sad that ppl think gawker is cool -- like the ppl who write for it seem like a mix of college student newspaper dorks that felt they were "edgier" than their peers but not extroverted enough to be sketch comedy dweebs

― Mistah FAAB (sarahell), Friday, February 20, 2015 4:01 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think gawker is cool. i guess i buy into their self-image of bravely flaunting politesse standards of establishment journalism, and the writers not caring who they piss off definitely makes for interesting reading. disrespecting the death of some random tv producer i've never heard of doesn't necessarily quality as "brave," but idk it's hard to care either way. i like how the nothing gets the gloves off on ilx like obits

We are clearly in need of higher standards for reading.

comic books and comic book movies should never be consumed by anyone over the age of 14

― pro stroke Johnny Gill songs would rub you the right way (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, February 20, 2015 7:50 AM (5 hours ago)

i hope you are consistently making this argument on all the relevant ilx threads, sugar

i see people get all excited about these movies and then I see this woman is describing a scene in which the Hulk gets a boner

not to be trenchant or anything but everyone lies in obits it's the american way. *thanks obama for gawker*

i mean gawker dudes, thanks dudes

i see people get all excited about these movies and then I see this woman is describing a scene in which the Hulk gets a boner

― pro stroke Johnny Gill songs would rub you the right way (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, February 20, 2015 1:08 PM (6 minutes ago)

you don't get boners?

Whiney gets a boner every time he gets the opportunity to neg on pop culture he doesn't approve of.

how exciting

i can't help but be a little curious why a small business owner in the midwest is outraged about an obit published by a young hip but increasingly conservative new media outlet about a sad comedy ca druggy with a tumblr book deal in which there is what seems like a minor concession to past beef. small world i guess?

Mumble! Sigh! Sob! Comics aren't just for adults anymore!

Sorry, couldn't think of better sound effects for stereotypical alt commix.

don't care about this controversy but can't wait to make good use of this thread in the future

just what we need -- another cis-het white man talking about the hulk's boner

*tumbls furiously*

comic books and comic book movies should never be consumed by anyone over the age of 14

― pro stroke Johnny Gill songs would rub you the right way (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, February 20, 2015 7:50 AM (5 hours ago)

what about Kevin Smith movies

Hey hip-hop nerds. What kind-of hip-hop is this?

will do

don't you live in greenpoint where's it's like 90% polish people and upwardly mobile white twentysomethings pretending to be broke? who are you scared of there?

― imo phillips (Whiney G. Weingarten), Saturday, February 21, 2009 11:34 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

are you scared of getting a seitan taco from the taco truck?

― imo phillips (Whiney G. Weingarten), Saturday, February 21, 2009 11:35 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

best thread ever

"grim reapah!" burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb never fails to brighten my day

omg

you can tell, that “dead inside” voice is in his email too

http://giphygifs.s3.amazonaws.com/media/3oyix5n8juXzq/giphy.gif

Isn’t forbes the OG legacy media company to be transformed into a soulless content farm?

― treeship., Monday, November 4, 2019 3:29 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Btw, when I worked at Br1t@nn1ca, we had a CEO who would constantly cite Forbes as a model for digital-media reinvention. I always thought it just revealed the narrowness of his interests as an MBA.

why do these ghouls who take over legacy enterprises never want to do anything that respects the fucking legacy

it's always hidebound small thinkers used to the fat days who don't see the opportunities they're sitting on, replaced by bloodsucking voids who can't think of anything to do but make everything into AOL

can’t believe deadspin’s whole staff resigned three times in a week

lol yes

HR up to their necks in exit interviews.

He had apparently been writing the zombie-like recent content lol

― Jordan Pickford LOLverdrive (Neanderthal), Tuesday, November 5, 2019 12:15 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

seriously?

People on my FB feed are still constantly reposting "content" from zombie "Newsweek" when it flatters their politics

Proponents of the content farms claim that from a business perspective, traditional journalism is inefficient.[1] Content farms often commission their writers' work based on analysis of search engine queries[1] that proponents represent as "true market demand", a feature that traditional journalism purportedly lacks.[1]

seriously?

scroll up three days

i read that he was reposting old content without acknowledgment. i didn't know he was personally writing articles like this:

https://deadspin.com/springboks-kill-lions-1839563281

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

why do these ghouls who take over legacy enterprises never want to do anything that respects the fucking legacy

because they are attempting to strip-mine the enterprise and sell it

seems like an unpleasant line of work

they find the six-seven figure salaries pleasant

they might also find a bit of pleasure in the act of desecration. maybe that’s what gives private equity its libidinal charge.

the sports car with an elevator to stow it in your garage above your other sports car probably is enough

saw this on a photo of mitt romney’s garage

xp

The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows. It is not through a desexualizing extension that the libido invests the large aggregates.

https://twitter.com/UnDeadspin

https://www.thedailybeast.com/go-medias-private-equity-boss-mysteriously-scrubbed-from-site-amid-deadspin-turmoil

https://newrepublic.com/article/155627/death-rude-press-deadspin-splinter-blogs

prefacing this by saying that the vulturing of journalism and media by private equity is bad.

that said, pieces like the new republic one above never sit right with me. in most pieces that make this argument -- and there are quite a lot of them -- a lot of things are conflated under the same category, in this case "rudeness." some of those things are actively good, like investigative journalism, challenging the powerful, etc.; some of which are neutral, like saying the word "fuck"; some of which are just unpleasantness without any particular moral imperative, not punching up so much as punching everything in punch radius; and some of which are actively bad, like toxic work environments, harassment (I'd say it's bad timing for this to run on literally the same day as an expose on the years-long sexual misconduct coverups of one of the rude media outlets mentioned therein, if that weren't, like, the fifteenth such expose of it), and other things that bring about the opposite of "a more just world. there's a flailing attempt in the last third to make a distinction between good rudeness and bad, supposedly in its relationship to power and privilege; but if your "endangered rude media" includes h. l. mencken and vice, maybe it's not all that distinct from the "anti-PC media" after all.

and then the whole thing is held up as an all-or-nothing binary, with a correct side: us vs. them, snark vs. smarm, "endangered rude media" vs. "bootlickers and civility police." any attempt to tease the components apart again puts you on Team Fuck You.

which components need to be teased apart?

The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice... and so on

This apologia was singularly unconvincing to me. Its premise is asserted in several ways that attempt to be clever and even a bit dazzling, but its argument, when closely examined, is overwrought, superficial and weak. iow, it's a load of crap and also very bad writing.

Pareene seems to actively tease the components apart?

And even worse things have survived. Much as there is a parallel right-wing media that’s insulated from market forces by the ideological mission of its wealthy funders, there is another media that superficially resembles the endangered rude media, but effectively pursues the opposite agenda. It is the anti-P.C. media, where the audience’s vicarious thrill comes not from watching scrappy underdogs heckle their supposed betters, but from watching guys sitting comfortably atop social hierarchies belittle and dominate their lessers. The difference between a rude press and an anti-P.C. press is in each enterprise’s respective relationship to power. The anti-P.C. press certainly delights in titillating its audience, but it always, unfailingly, endorses a completely servile relationship to authority. The very idea of standing up to your boss is described as childish; the mature thing to do is accept domination and even abuse, unless and until you yourself manage to accrue some power over others.

seems pretty 'bootlickers/civility police'

i'd prefer 'fearlessness' to 'rudeness'

the whole section seems hastily tacked on to address the obvious counterargument that barstool, 8chan, donald trump, etc. are also known for being rude, but it doesn't explain how the likes of Mencken, who... does not have a particularly great or consistent record on relationships to power, or groups lower in the social hierarchy, and Vice, the incubator of Gavin McInnes and others like him, wouldn't fall into the non-"anti-PC" category. so why include them at all? those are just the obvious examples, but earlier the article mentions rolling stone with an aside about how wenner's friends were exempt from its rudeness -- how exactly does that square with "skepticism about power"?

s/triple negative/something that isn't a triple negative, you know what I mean

that's reasonable! i think it leads us into a punching up/down thing which pareene should have better addressed

He never says rudeness means inherently good/on the right side - but the existence of those publications gave a place to people who were good/on the right side but weren't going to have a voice at anything that had some kind of establishment credit. The dismantling of that means you're still going to get offensive media but not critical media.

Rolling Stone certainly published a great deal critical of those in power throughout the '70s and '80s. I never saw a Vice magazine in print, so I only know them from making fun of gentrifying creeps via Dos and Don'ts but yes they seem mostly terrible.

Annnnd...

Our statement on the recent lawsuits involving G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller. pic.twitter.com/ZiuhXunUKS

— GMG Union (@gmgunion) November 8, 2019

When pressed about diversity during a town hall meeting in April, Spanfeller allegedly said, “Haven’t thought about it, but I hear you guys. Obviously, diversity is important, I get it.”

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmj9ve/lawsuits-go-media-ceo-jim-spanfeller-fostered-hostile-work-environment-for-women

this thread put it better than I did, probably:

i think there has to be a way we can mourn the eroding of "rude press" that interrogates power, while also remembering that the people in power at those bastions of bravado and rudeness were often men who let stuff like eric sundermann and other shitty media men run unchecked

— jgz (@jennygzhang) November 8, 2019

specifically the "maybe the only difference now is that only the top dogs are allowed to be shitty to their subordinates" part

Someone linked to this David Roth interview on the politics thread, but I thought this was an important point about Spanfeller's intentions:

I don’t even think he’s a Republican. I think he’s like an As the father of daughters… type Dem. Initially when we were trying to see if we could still figure this shit out… We thought that they were mad about the Trump stories like getting booed at the World Series. Dan McQuade did a blog that night with the video and a few paragraphs and it did like 750,00 uniques. It was fine, it was perfectly amusing, it didn’t have any editorializing in it. Then I wrote the next day, it had a lot of editorializing, but I made sure to get World Series in the headline. They were like both of those are fine, it’s not a Trump thing. He doesn’t like Trump. The stuff that made him mad were silly posts. I think the idea was if you want us to sell this to advertisers they want to know they can go look at the front page of the site and they’d understand it and get why it’s sports.

Even Barry Petschesky's NYT op-ed took this righteous, high-minded "Sports is about more than just the game" angle, and I'm not sure that Spanfeller and Maidment actually objected to that? They just didn't get the idea that the site had a ~personality~ that was a huge basis for the audience it attracted.

More:

I think some of it too was the types of sites that he wants, and the extent I’m able to figure out any business justification for what he did is this: It’s that he is not a reader. He doesn’t have a very advanced idea of why people would read websites. What he’s trying to do is get these mushy, normal, middle websites. And you’re allowed to write them as well as you want. He’s not mad if you do a good job on a blog post. But he doesn’t care if you do a good one either. You just have to stick within that. He’s trying to sell this stuff to advertisers that he imagines that are even more conservative than him. So with politics I guess a Splinter headline that’s really sharp-edged or any of the stuff that he would actually see, because I really don’t think he read any stories on any sites -- if he saw that he was like you’re fucking it up because the people I’m trying to sell ads to are like banks or insurance companies. If you have a post that’s like health insurance is a fucking racket and it should be Medicare for All immediately, then in his mind, and this is the closest I can come to figuring it out, he’s like well how am I going to sell that to Etna?

i think that any venture capital owner who doesn't get the spirit or purpose of a thing they own (which is to say all of them) is perfectly capable of literally meaning they want the writers to stick to sports, literally.

I guess that's true, but I feel like the perspective it's coming from is this dumb, weak "Let's just make this easier for all of us."

i get what yr getting at but he has a bunch of ideas in there re: management that make me think he's working thru it still/is still too close to it.

there's the "make life easier by not doing dorky posts about cats,"

there's the literal "stick to sports you chuds,"

there's "stick to sports so we can monetize you for the algorithm better you chuds"

there's the "BECAUSE I SAID SO" angle that Greenwell showed in her exit piece & everyone else kinds of hints at

there's the fact that they are big stupid venture capital shitlords who never deserve the benefit of the doubt

If I wan't invested in GMG or the people who write for it I would always assume some combination of the last three, probably in reverse order, before i assumed there was any grey area in "stick to sports"

the intersection of sports and culture at large was 100% their brand. Deadspin didn't really care much about the actual analysis of sports, like why is this particular offensive formation suddenly very popular or how does this college prospect's game translate to the pro level. The Ringer and ESPN among others are much better at that. but every day basically there's some sports story that crosses over into larger issues of race, gender, class, etc. and that was Deadspin's bread and butter. I would've loved to see what they had to say about the response to the Myles Garrett-Mason Rudolph brawl last night, for instance.

Deadspin dot com had 2.2m unique visitors in November, according to Comscore. It had 19.9m unique visitors in October, its best month in at least 3 years. Looks like the “force all your employees to resign” strategy is going swimmingly.

— Kevin Draper (@kevinmdraper) December 17, 2019

News: G/O Media is moving Deadspin to Chicago and suspending negotiations with unionized employees. Here's the letter from Jim Spanfeller. pic.twitter.com/x3ymCOCbmI

— Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) January 10, 2020

from the replies

https://www.theonion.com/im-moving-this-miserable-periodical-to-the-yukon-1819584756

are you gawker dudes familiar with The Small Bow?
http://thesmallbow.com/

“The steps are in order for a reason,” is a particular refrain among 12-Step devotees, specifically for selfish scaredy cats like me who cannot see how unnecessary amends could cause more pain for someone else. I didn’t send a mass email, but I forged ahead on a few sloppy attempts at undercooked apologies. Believe me, it’s better to wait.

While I wait, I keep updating my amends list each year which is filled with the usual people who suffered because of me: ex-girlfriends who deserved truth and compassion but got emotional abuse; ex-employees who I betrayed; company investors who got burned; a sister who sensed my absence; parents who did the best they could.

Then there’s another list a little more unique: work-related hazards and hurts tied to my years of vicious, contemptible blogging at Gawker Media for many of their sites. Both of my sponsors have suggested most of this list falls under the “living amends” guidelines–where the only thing to be done that isn’t harmful to myself or them is to write out an imaginary letter to the Universe or offer up a thoughtful prayer. The real amend, both sponsors said, is that I leave them alone now and forever. I must still be accountable, this is simply an added level of consideration for myself and others. It’s important to be ready though, just in case.

i posted about it a couple of months ago

ah, okay; my bad. that's probably why i know about it!