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

it is ugly as hell and there was nothing i wanted to click on, but i did not get a pop-up asking me to subscribe to a newsletter, so that's a W

Navigation bar looks good on my phone

https://i.imgur.com/fLnbukt.png

The color fonts are a no from me, dawg

It’s the kind of thing that would look better in a 1990s issue of SPY than as part of gossip website design

In any event it’s hard to gin up the interest to read my-Gawker

(Though I trust that frequenters of this thread will cry out if it’s worthwhile)

-NASA-ASKA

*nu-Gawker

I kind of like the trashy mismatched design on desktop. Shame the headline writers are bad

very "alternative student newspaper, can you believe the university gave us a budget for this" vibes so far

Lol

Got some serious Clickhole vibes from that nu site.

semi related there's a pretty good interview with drew and AJ on the defector pod

https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-distraction-a-defector-podcast/episode/i-was-a-huge-failing-upward-guy-with-a-j-daulerio-200229527

Looks better on mobile than desktop (though still with the underboob header), the really celeb gossipy part (Divorce Watch) feels out of place today with every celebrity's omnipresent social media presence delivering gossip and drama to you.

the website i miss isn't gawker but the awl.

kelly conaboy is writing for this new gawker. she wrote a few really funny pieces for the awl so that makes me feel more positive toward this new gawker.

yeah the Awl was something special

nu-gawker has the early 90s print magazine experimental design aesthetic imo

says something that there's really nothing to say about the content

"Looks better on mobile than desktop" this is widespread lately and I hate it. mobile first design but your shit still better look good on a goddamned normal screen

If they're not going to do a post on the crepey J** T****tino poem, what is even the purpose of this site

there probably is a post about it, you just can't find it because of the awful shit design

have to settle for this sorry:

https://digg.com/2021/creepy-jia-tolentino-poem-nicholas-rombes-3am-magazine

they made a movie

this dude is a down bad rombes

(tortuous attempt to pun on "bad hombre")

the header/logo is like the underboob of headers

The former staff of Deadspin launched @DefectorMedia a year ago. Now it has 40,000 subscribers, no ads, a >$3 million run rate, and 23 employee/owners. “This rules”, says editor in chief @ToLey88. https://t.co/BegJhQ1vrt

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) September 2, 2021

A big test comes next week, when many of those 40k subs decide whether to renew. But Ley is confident many of them will, and says Defector is set for another year at a minimum. We have a detailed convo about running an employee-owned, reader-supported site. Also: “Slack Law.”

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) September 2, 2021

I'll be renewing.

Here's more details from their end about it all

https://defector.com/one-year-of-defector/

We used about half of that $3.2 million to pay salaries and benefits for Defector’s 23 full-time employees. Another big chunk of money, a little over $500,000, was spent on creating and maintaining what a cool guy with a powerful business mindset would probably call our “tech stack,” but which I will simply call “all the shit that makes the website actually work.” That includes the website itself (lovingly crafted by Alley Interactive), the paywall technology (operated by Pico) that we use to make sure people actually pay up in order to read the site, the newsletter platform (Mailchimp) that we use to deliver a daily newsletter to Pal-level subscribers, and the company (Stripe) that processes all of subscriber payments. Taxes, HR, insurance costs, accounting services, and legal fees all added up to another few hundred thousand dollars. Our last big expense was the approximately $100,000 we spent paying freelance writers and other contractors who made art or helped produce video and audio content for us.

did gawker/deadspin revolutionize the "article in the form of a fake interview that imagines a slightly uncooperative/pass-ag interviewer" or did they just run it into the ground

good for them though i'm thinking about subbing finally, probably get more out of it than my athletic sub

i associate that style with Pass Notes in the Guardian but i imagine they weren’t the first

i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/07/free-blockbuster-the-unlikely-return-of-the-vhs-tape

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