Gawker schadenfreude of a personal variety
December 4, 2007 | Comments Off
Nobody holds a grudge like a Southerner, but in general I prefer to seethe offline. Where the Chinese wall between my personal grievances and my reactions to someone’s ideas or projects breaks down, I just stop talking about him or her altogether. Online, I mean. Anything’s fair game over drinks.
But I’ve got to say, there’ve been noisemakers going and confetti flying round the clock at my place since the recent Gawker exodus, and the reasons are at least partly personal. I would call Nick Denton a stand-in for all that is farcical and plastic in the New York media world, but that wouldn’t be fair. We must always remember to save room for [redacted].
I love how he tries to spin the departure of everyone who’s been writing at the flagship site for more than three months: “[T]his change of the guard does give us the opportunity to accelerate the transformation of Gawker from cute blog to fully-fledged news site.”
“Yeah, dream on,” I said to a friend.
“Well, remember,” she said, “there’s FOX.”
I first met Nick Denton in 2003, at a New York Magazine photo shoot. After he greeted everyone else in the room, I introduced myself and held out my hand.
He looked me over, blinked a couple times, and then turned impatiently to the photographer. “I thought this was going to be media people,” he said.
I almost burst out laughing, it was so like a parody of media parodies.
Photo of Denton swiped from Cyberstyle.