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

I was gonna say I figured only the writers who also
do TV and maybe pods get the big bucks but shit, they kinda all do TV and pods nowadays

I occasionally see a mention of or ad for podcasts from local newspaper people or former sports talk radio people and it seems a lot like they have listeners in the dozens.

my neighbor is a sports radio guy. the conglomerate that owns pretty much all the stations basically fired/laid off the full staff of three different stations and then un-fired most of the sports guys within a week after public outcry. I really think they had no idea what people cared about listening to, wanted to keep something and didn’t know what, and just canned everyone to see which fanbase yelled the loudest

Defector should sponsor a Chrome extension that changes deadspin to defector.com for people who still start typing it out of habit

Noticed this in a Defector story:

https://defector.com/defector-a-roaringly-successful-website-beloved-by-several-thousand-people-is-now-offering-special-holiday-gift-subscriptions/

More than 30,000 of you have purchased subscriptions to this site since it was announced, and that’s allowed us to do the work we’ve been doing.

Way upthread from Silby:

if all the contributors on that masthead become full-time employees they need like 13,000 annual subscribers at $69 a year to pay them all $50,000 a year, plus a bunch more to pay for the CMS and so on. That'd be a very high conversion rate of the erstwhile pre-ratfucking deadspin audience, but it's also not an objectively large number of customers.

So it seems like they've more than doubled this goal, and 30,000 at $69 comes out to over 2 million dollars, though the subscriber number is larger than that. Plus some subscribers are paying more than the basic $69 a year. Not bad.

and they do have ads so

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/business/media/apple-gawker-tim-cook.html

Two Gawker veterans sold the idea to Apple TV+, the new streaming service: Cord Jefferson, who left the site for a career writing for TV, and Max Read, Gawker’s former editor in chief. Apple hired two more former Gawker editors, Emma Carmichael and Leah Beckmann, as writers, and they had completed several episodes, people close to the production said.

Then, an Apple executive got an email from the company’s chief executive, Tim Cook.

Mr. Cook, according to two people briefed on the email, was surprised to learn that his company was making a show about Gawker, which had humiliated the company at various times and famously outed him, back in 2008, as gay. He expressed a distinctly negative view toward Gawker, the people said. Apple proceeded to kill the project.

Whoops!

interesting stuff at the end of that about appletv’s struggle to develop any big tv shows of merit and how that relates to their squeaky clean corporatist bootlicking culture

and of Apple News, a well-curated, if unexciting, app that is reportedly where President-elect Joe Biden gets his information.

how is that not surprising

But now, from beyond the grave, Gawker is revealing another reality in this era of media consolidation: that the chief executive of one of the biggest companies in the world, who testifies before Congress and negotiates with China, also decides what television shows get made.

I do not see how this is actually any different than the head of 20th Century Fox finding out someone hired a bunch of people who tried to tank the studio to make a series about their efforts. Casting this as a First Amendment issues is, if I’m being generous, disingenuous. No one deserves to have their television show produced.

I think the issue is more that the information that we get is increasingly dispensed by fewer and fewer companies, which is a serious problem.

I think the issue is more that the information that we get is increasingly dispensed by fewer and fewer companies, which is a serious problem.

Really? Information? I feel like information is more democratized than ever (a serious problem during a pandemic).

Last thing I want is new information, I’ve had plenty

in one way this sucks but in another way i was spared a tv series about gawker

yeah it was bad when that article framed it as “first amendment issue” (?lol)

Max’s most recent thing in BookForum is tedious in any that I was genuinely concerned about him.

lol @ "Scraper"

I do not see how this is actually any different than the head of 20th Century Fox finding out someone hired a bunch of people who tried to tank the studio to make a series about their efforts.

This is more like 20th Century Fox killing a series because the show runner once worked for someone who was critical of 20th Century Fox 10 years ago.

Things can be completely expected and still frowned upon.

So all of you saying that all of the news sites that have gone under or consolidated in recent years is a good thing?

Yes, that is what we are saying and not that an entertainment show exists at the whim of the people bankrolling it and trying to get the dude you harassed for years to pay your salary is at best a reach

Like, it’s understandable that the Gawker alums might try to spin their experiences into Prestige Television but it’s incredibly dumb to think that Tim Cook wouldn’t be like “oh those people? fuck every single thing about them”

Or is the idea now that it’s okay to out someone if they make too much money?

The gawker crew’s adventures in outing really came back to haunt them over and over

closeted skeletons

Max would have been like 15 when Tim Cook was outed by Gawker.

still laughing about the first amendment thing

too many Cooks at the pitchin

please respect my first amendment right to monetize my professional downfall

there was nothing about the first amendment in the article!

Are you arguing that the quote i excerpted isn’t asserting that the Gawker people have the right to have Apple Pay for their series?

Or do you just not get inference?

not surprised apple killed this. apple tv is an incoherent brand, but this seems like the kind of thing they would not do, even if it weren't for a probably justified grudge held by the CEO against gawker.

i do think it's stupid to cancel cord jefferson's first show if you're lucky enough to get it despite the fact that your network is basically a failure. but apple does stupid stuff all the time so whatever.

"trying to get the dude you harassed for years to pay your salary is at best a reach"

it's also ... not what happened?

Are you arguing that the quote i excerpted isn’t asserting that the Gawker people have the right to have Apple Pay for their series?

― DJP, Sunday, December 13, 2020 11:16 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Or do you just not get inference?

― DJP, Sunday, December 13, 2020 11:17 PM (twenty-four minutes ago)

no your analogy was just laughably facile

I am also not surprised cook killed this. if I were he I'd have killed it too obviously. but it would have been funny if he never found out!

sounds like they already had a few episodes in the can, not exactly a tight ship over there (i know apple tv is this ridiculous boondoggle but still.....)

or maybe just a few finished episode scripts idk

Well like defector it’s basically a turnkey proposition for *checks notes* ROKU TV?

xp didn't sound like anyone filmed anything

yeah i guess it was just the writing part
https://deezlinks.substack.com/p/q-and-a-with-cord-jefferson-to-really

"I’ve been in one writers’ room for my own show, Scraper, that we did from March to August, all over Zoom. We got the job done, and I was happy with the work that we did, but for me, one of the nice things about the job that I do is the camaraderie I get to have with people in the writers’ room and on set. When you’re not able to do that in person, you miss out on part of the joy, so I’m desperate to get back."

Gawker was 20% pioneering new media and 80% toxic gossip, class warfare, clickbait and gross public shaming of people who didn't rise to the level of public figure

I hugely admire Nick Denton, but everyone who worked for Gawker is tainted by its history. Glad that Apple did this https://t.co/qrrSYOexoE

— Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) December 14, 2020

No, many outlets do great journalism about class disparities (e.g., ProPublica, WNYC, NYT). But snarky pieces that generate clicks by making people angry and envious don't do anything to advance equality or inform readers.

— Ryan Radia (@RyanRadia) December 14, 2020

Many dumb people are still mad at Gawker.

I no longer want to know the dumb thoughts of dumb people

i don't know why everyone's assuming the premise of this show is "gawker was unambiguously good".

Giving Gawker the Good Night and Good Luck treatment would be hilarious, though.

Citizen Denton with Max as Joseph Cotten/Jedediah

if they do end up getting picked up by a different network, this will probably end up being a good thing for the show. i had appletv free for a month and there was nothing i would conceive of watching a minute of on it

Scraper on Quibi

toxic gossip, class warfare, clickbait and gross public shaming of people who didn't rise to the level of public figure

hmmmmm one of these things is not like the others

It’s only class warfare when non-wealthy people fight back.