Letters From Our Exes

While fearlessness at tackling any topic is its hallmark, Gawker was always terrible at talking about itself, especially at telling the world what it was for. Nick Denton didn’t give me much direction before he hired me to edit the site in 2008. The morning he met me at 210 Elizabeth Street, carrying his 27-inch iMac underarm from his apartment as my company computer, he showed me my desk, told me I was in charge, then disappeared for a week. I was terrified. Fans (and enemies) of Gawker typically haze new editors by demanding an explanation of how they plan to carry on the traditions of the editors that came before and aside from what I’d mumbled through during my job interview at a SoHo bar a few weeks prior to that morning, I had bupkis.

Trying to get my bearings in those early days, I began darting at random through the Archive.org history of Gawker.com until that notion of a Gawker monolith I had shared with other outsiders faded away: The site was barely recognizable from year to year, through redesigns and editorial personnel changes. Much of this traces directly back to Nick, because whatever vision he had for Gawker, at least as communicated as instructions to his editors, was varied, changing, and often contradictory. (A.J. Daulerio wrote the best artifactof Nick telling a new editor about what Gawker should be.)

It did not help, too, when your boss and owner liked to issue sweeping anti-manifestoes like “We don’t seek to do good.” When tasked with writing a new tagline for the site, my favorite contender, “Honesty is our only virtue,” lost out to my clunkiest and most didactic suggestion: “Gossip from Manhattan and the Beltway to Hollywood and the Valley.” The vacuum most organizations would have filled with a rousing (and mostly untrue) mission statement created a situation of asymmetrical branding that contributed to Gawker’s demise: Those with the strongest idea of what Gawker is tended to be those who hate it the most.

But for what it’s worth, this anarchic rudderlessness, this lack of myth-making bullshit, was also Gawker’s greatest strength. Gawker was only whatever the people running it at the time wanted it to be, and Nick’s best idea was to continually stock the site with people who wanted to do good, despite what he liked to say. That openness and flexibility is why Gawker was able to make itself home to a generation of writers and editors who will continue to populate your smartphones and magazines long after the site ends. If you need a reason, those people are why Gawker is great.