Gawker is on fire

For a little while now, I've felt that Gawker has become consistently the best website that I regularly read. That's been a bit of an odd feeling for me. Traditionally, I have been a skeptic. I care about compassion and about basic human kindness, and there was a time when Gawker really had descended into being the indiscriminately bitchy gossip house it had long been accused of being. But it's gotten better, even as it's centrality (in terms of media attention if not pageviews) has ebbed. They're consistently putting out excellent stuff. More importantly, they're consistently putting out necessary stuff.

This past week, this terrible and wearying and soul-destroying week, has demonstrated just how thoroughly broken American media is. I use media there in an expansive sense, and I can't help but be disgusted not merely by the obvious targets of the New York Post and cable news but also a lot of the websites that are having fun at their expense. (Twitter is undergoing one of its cyclical spasms of self-congratulation for being a "truth machine" at the same time as totally unfounded speculation gets pumped out through it every minute.) Media criticism is cheap, but good media criticism is rare and difficult. And it's here I think that Gawker has really distinguished itself.

I'm on record as saying that Tom Scocca is a national treasure. And John Cook, whose work at times fit uncomfortably with what else was going on at the blog, has really come into his own as its head. I think he's assume a kind of grand old man status there, while maintaining a deeply black anger at all of the repugnant stupidity in our professional media. The guest posts they run, while a target for the (increasingly deranged) commenters, are often well-curated and moving. And I do dig a lot of their reporting. I still worry about the proud disrespect for traditional journalistic ethics; Nick Denton has always publicly espoused a kind of mannered amoralism that seems to deny any responsibility for the actual impact of Gawker's work on actual lives. That's a mistake, I think, and one that clashes with their power and precision in tearing into the failures of traditional big media. That contrast is one that I still don't think Gawker Media, as an entity, has a particularly coherent attitude towards. But there's no question that the bad old days when Gawker became enamored of its own power to harm are gone, and that what is being published there now is far more sharp and far more useful. I confess to not having much positive to say about the weekend crew, but you can't win 'em all, and I believe that there's an internal commitment to improvement and to accessibility now that makes me happy.

(I've always suspected that Denton's much-professed lack of any morals was something he advanced himself for show, and that there's actually a lot of conscience in there, but I've been assured by someone that this is not the case, and she would know.)

A separate question to quality is profitability. I've always heard that Gawker Media is, in the context of "content generation," quite profitable. In a superficial sense, it's clear that they've got a Steven Soderbergh model of web publishing: subsidizing the deeper, unique-to-Gawker stuff with linkbait curation stuff, mostly posted by Neetzan Zimmerman and Caity Weaver. Lots of places are attempting to pull of that balance. Gawker's is just particularly shameless, and because of that, particularly honest. (I have often wondered if Zimmerman's explicit direction is to cruise Reddit and Tumblr and similar to find clicky content.) I admit that a lot of what gets put out in the revenue-mining posts is garbage, but it's the kind of garbage that suffuses the Internet, and if it subsidizes Scocca and Adrian Chen and your occasional Rich Juzwiak "pulling back the curtain to reveal Gaytown to all you secretly turned-on straights" piece, I'm all for it. I mean, Buzzfeed's "16 Sluttiest Cat Gifs" mostly goes to subsidize Ben Smith taking lunches with Reince Priebus, and Business Insider's "12 Times Business Insider Literally Just Copy and Pasted Somebody Else's Work" subsidizes Henry Blodget. I know where I'm happier to generate ad revenue. The reality is that if you don't have a paywall or subscription service or similar, you have to be publishing all the time to make the money work, and that means that even the best aren't going to have a great percentage.

Worth saying, by the way, that really good investigative and media criticism stuff can drive ad revenue, too. If I remember correctly, Chen's Silk Road piece, for example, did huge numbers.

Then there's the format. I think it's there that Denton's particular genius for this biz has been, if anything, underdiscussed. It appears that the Kinja rollout at Gawker is imminent. You can check out most of the other Gawker Media blogs to get a taste. I'll say right off the bat: I deeply dislike the new format, which seems to take the new fetish for space-wasting and lack of navigability to the furthest extent possible. But in the web writ large, the "clean" look and tablet optimization looks to be here to stay, at this point, and I'm fighting a losing battle. More interesting to me is the way in which Kinja is a participatory model. You can start a blog at any of the Gawker sites. It's not functionally any different from starting your own Wordpress or Tumblr, I guess, but it's a clear attempt to make people feel like they have a personal stake in the websites. Commenters can also annotate images and, I believe, sometimes the text of posts themselves. The goal seems to be to generate loyalty through personal investment.

What's so interesting about that, to me, is that it's almost the opposite of an old Gawker model. Back when Gawker was at its most zeitgeisty and prominent, they had a system designed to make commenting (and by extension, reading) feel like being part of an elite. The gating that was employed to distribute commenting privileges, and featured commenter status, gave the website a way to dole out rewards, and in so doing condition people to keep coming back. Denton was like a new media BF Skinner. I found it all kind of obvious and crass. I mean, they literally gave out gold stars. But I couldn't deny that it was effective. Despite my lack of conscious attachment to such a cheap and meaningless symbol, I admit, when Cook destarred me, I felt a twinge of real unhappiness. (In his defense, I think I called one of his posts a piece of shit.) When I realized that I cared, I laughed out loud. Denton, you motherfucker! You got me!

The thing about velvet ropes, though, is that they keep people out. The elitist model works well for getting a smaller number of people to feel an attachment to your enterprise, but for a model that runs on pure weight of numbers, like the online ad revenue model does, it's ultimately self-defeating. So that version of Gawker evolved. Kinja, I suppose, is a matter of taking the new openness to its logical ends. I'm not a fan thus far, but we'll see.

Excellence has many parents. One of the easier ways to misunderstand the world is to look at what's being produced and assume that it's the product of somebody's plan. We understand that failure often arises without anybody's intent, but in my experience, excellence too is unplanned. Will they keep it up? Who knows? I'm enjoying it for now, and more, I'm happy that there are people out there who are writing intelligently about all the reasons we have to feel bad.