Gawker was once one of the most infamous websites in US media.
It began life as a scrappy outsider that turned blogging into a business as a purveyor of irreverent, anti-establishment snark against the rarefied world of elite US media in New York. As it grew it actually turned into a genuinely influential news organization before a spectacular 2016 collapse when it lost a privacy lawsuit for publishing a sex tape featuring the wrestler Hulk Hogan.
Now, six years after that ignominious death, a new version of Gawker has made an unexpected resurgence.
Since a quiet relaunch a year ago, under entirely new owners, Gawker is once again starting to attract interest and readers – still purveying snark, still relying on attitude against elites – but without the edge of nastiness that got its original iteration in such trouble.
Over the past week, the site has run stories that much of the media would sooner swerve: alleged anti-British, anti-Royal sentiments at the New York Times; whether it was wrong for Meghan and Harry to hold hands at the Queen’s funeral (“Even for a family filled with perverts, this is beyond”); and if the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills are “too mean, too callous, too focused on tedious drama” to merit a show.
The rotation of subjects, relatively ideologically unrestrained, marks a return for an organization that had been dead. Purchased by Bustle media and led by a new editor, Leah Finnegan, Gawker’s reboot has added (or returned) a welcome blast of satire to a US media landscape that often lacks it.
According to James Brown, founder and editor of Loaded, a British magazine that started the lad-mag revolution of the 90s and whose account of that era “Animal House” has just been published, the mainstream US press has all-but abandoned satire.
“It seems now that social media is so flooded with humor and irreverence that people no longer see it as having a place in the mainstream media,” he told the Guardian. “Editorials are uptight, and comedy is seen as in a field outlet of its own.”
“People are too worried about how they will be perceived, and they’ve ceased to be playful, so anything that starts to be like that again is welcome,” Brown adds.
Founded by former Financial Times reporter Nick Denton in his living room in 2002, Gawker was initially just two blogs, a media gossip site (Gawker) and a technology blog (Gizmodo). The company had two freelance bloggers who were paid $12 per post.
Over time Gawker – and a host of other plucky blogs – helped revolutionize US publishing. It added to its stable with sports (Deadspin), tech (Gizmodo) and gaming (Kotaku) sites. Online outlets like Vice, Buzzfeed and Vox followed, giving reporters a way into a business that was dominated by staid organizations that had yet to adapt to the democratization of access proposed by the internet.
Denton told the New York Times in 2015 that what journalists put in their stories is inherently less interesting than what they say after work. The publisher, the Times said, “has probably done more than any individual to loosen up the mainstream media. His various websites have stood for nothing if not the proposition that decorum should never stand in the way of entertaining readers.”
“By Gawker’s definition, if it’s interesting, it’s news,” the Times added.
But that definition came unstuck when Gawker’s interests crossed over into sexual preference. Gawker outed a publishing executive at Condé Nast, triggering a wave of ire. Then, in 2007, Valleywag, a tech-focused subset of Gawker, outed the technology baron Peter Thiel without his permission.
Thiel then bankrolled a privacy lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan, a 6’7”, 300-pound wrestler named Terry Bollea after Gawker published a 40-second video of Hogan having sex with the wife of a radio DJ named Bubba the Love Sponge.
Bollea’s attorneys argued that the wrestler’s sex life was not a newsworthy subject and publication of it constituted an invasion of his right to privacy. Jurors agreed, and Bollea was awarded $140m, later reduced to $31m in a settlement. Faced with the huge fine, the site shut down.
Gawker’s new editor, who was not made available to the Guardian last week, has said that new Gawker will be the same but different. How far Finnegan wants or is able to go in Gawker’s revitalization is open to question.
“The current laws of civility mean that no, it can’t be exactly what it once was,” Finnegan wrote in a note to readers last year, “but we strive to honor the past and embrace the present.”
But Finnegan conceded she had reservations: “The Gawker name was toxic, but also weirdly revered; an intractable combination. It could not be brought back because it could never be what it once was, and also because what it once was was sued out of existence by a professional wrestler five years ago.”
According to Ryan Thomas, professor of journalism and media production at the Edward R Murrow college of communication at Washington State University, the alignment of economics, technology and dissatisfaction with mainstream media coverage enabled the success of the original Gawker.
“A lot of the Gawker-type sites that came about as a result of the blogging boom has old roots in the function that some radical or experimental magazines have served,” Thomas says. “There’s always been a need for journalism that challenges, pushes and to some extent holds the mainstream accountable.”
But Gawker also re-enters the publishing sphere at a moment when outlets like Puck or Unherd, or organization-less platforms like Substack, are offering consumers direct access to opinions or voices that they chose to consume. Simultaneously, Gawker’s one-time fellow travelers, Buzzfeed and Vice, have been cutting back on original reporting.
“I have questions about the sustainability of all this but we’re seeing the individualization of journalism. It’s become very personality-driven,” said Thomas.
“People have created a lot of clickability of what people are mad at today. It’s a feedback loop and there are limits to that because at some point there does have to be original content created,” he said.
