Study Hall Digest 3/25/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Does the “Filthy Spirit of Gawker” Live On?

Dan Peres, newly-appointed Editor-in-Chief of New Gawker, has confirmed what everyone already knew, which is that Gawker 2.0 will not resemble Gawker the First. “In the later years they probably took things too far,” Peres told the New York Times, which announced his hire. “There was a lot of gratuitous meanness and sort of misguided decision-making.”

The departure from the original clearly takes its cue from the lawsuit that sunk it, but it’s also a response to the general atmospheric shift away from mean media, even in the remaining publications of Gizmodo Media Group.  The popularity of snark as a reporting vehicle has not waned, but the underlying editorial mission of journalistic snark has undergone a Post-2016 Earnestness reboot. The modern-day snark deployer must now ask themselves: What is the aim of snark? Who is on the receiving end? What larger purpose is it serving?

“I have a simple editorial litmus test, which is: is it true, and is it interesting?” Nick Denton told Politico in the heat of the Hulk Hogan trial in 2015. It’s difficult to imagine such a basic litmus test — one that fails to ask, “Is it morally right?” —  now guiding an ostensibly progressive newsroom.

Remember: the amoral litmus test sometimes produced egregious results during Peak Gawker. Tormer Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio (most recently seen working with ??? Civil) wrote sneeringly of a “train wreck of a woman” — a private citizen — who got blackout drunk and “had sex” with a stranger in a public bathroom. The 2008 story is stunning in its cruelty. Revisiting it now is a bizarre experience in that its cruelty feels utterly outdated, a slimy time capsule that will never be buried thanks to the internet’s permanence. In 2010, Deadspin published video footage of a different woman having sex in a sports bar. When that woman emailed begging for it to be taken down, she was treated cruelly, though the post was later removed.

Oh yeah, and Sam Biddle’s infamous blog post about a communications director who got on a plane and tweeted a clumsy joke that read as racist — a story Biddle described as “delicious” and which subjected the woman to severe bullying and caused her to lose her job. And then there’s the questionable story to (literally) end all questionable stories, the one that outed PayPal founder Peter Thiel as gay, an editorial decision that — whatever you think of Thiel and however you feel about billionaires destroying media companies — is in itself only debatably appropriate. (Did anyone actually want to see a Hulk Hogan sex tape, in the end?)

Aside from Thiel, whose funding of anti-progressive causes arguably makes him a justifiable target, it is immediately clear none would pass a 2019 editorial litmus test. Are they true? Yeah. Are they all interesting? One can at least see how a harried editor running an edgy click factory could make the case that they meet that standard. But they’re all morally indefensible, not because they’re mean, but because their meanness does not serve a greater purpose beyond itself, taking down regular people with little power whose crimes are drinking too much and failing at the right tone of dark humor. There are bigger targets these days. There always were.

Typing “spirit of Gawker” into Twitter search yields a long scroll. Some tweets are celebratory and nostalgic, fist-pumping at a writer’s brazenness, and others dripping in disgust, bemoaning a writer’s callousness and thirst for clicks. One tweet I came across attributed the snarky tenor of a Jezebel piece criticizing transphobe Jesse Singal to the “filthy spirit of Gawker.” But Singal is a prominent journalist for a prestige publication who churns out harmful work to a vast audience. The Jezebel piece in question, by way of a troll-y headline that drew the ire of Singal defenders (“What’s Jesse Singal’s fucking deal?”), did the important work of grappling with Singal’s work and behavior in his capacity as an authority.

When Deadspin told Ted Cruz to “eat shit,” a Twitter user called it the “spirit of Gawker.” When Splinter journalist Samer Kalaf published Bret Stephens’ condescending emails and took him to task for his past racism, a National Review podcaster tweeted that “the spirit of Gawker lives on.” But Ted Cruz is a powerful politician who frankly should go eat shit, and Bret Stephens is a climate change-denying bigot who should also go eat shit.

Old Gawker would have published the Singal story and the Stephens story, and it would have told Cruz to each shit. In fact, it did often take powerful people to task; its value was in its willingness to throw punches at beloved figures like Louis C.K. that the more traditional outlets wouldn’t touch. But it would also throw punches at the nobodies. Each of these post-2016 stories,  infused with the “spirit of Gawker,” are also underlit by a moral clarity that the late blog lacked, especially in its later years.

There seems to be an increased awareness that our public actions reverberate and that real people suffer under snarky blogs — see the lengthy debates over online shaming. The 2016 election seems to have jolted us with an awareness that things that are good for a quick laugh, like an orange, barely literate reality TV star running for president, may have more than a hint of seriousness to them. Now, even our snark is infused with an anxious earnestness. That earnestness can be tedious, but if it means powerless normals are left out of the line of fire, maybe it’s an improvement on the lawless amorality of old. I guess we’ll see what the new, no doubt earnest, Gawker has in store.

And What of the “Ducaning”? (As It is Known in the SH Listserv)

For evidence of the above shift, see the very long Jezebel piece that includes a painstaking, inconclusive investigation into allegations that human #Resistance meme Lauren Duca sent harassing emails to coworkers some years ago. The piece kicked off similarly inconclusive arguments about the rightness or wrongness of the investigation. Did Duca deserve the expose or should we be focusing on the (inconclusive) Mueller report or whatever?

On the Study Hall Listserv as well as Twitter,some expressed frustration with Jezebel’s lengthy moralizing. “I think that story about her should be out there but there was this seriousness to the piece that it didn’t need,” declared one tweet. “I miss Gawker,” declared another. In a way, the post carries the Gawker torch by publishing something just because it feels the public should be aware, blurring the lines between gossip and reportage. But rather than being cavalier and snarky, it’s almost ponderous.

I get that 4,500 words debating the dumb emails Lauran Duca probably sent is a kind of hell (the hell we DESERVE), but I’m inclined to think it’s preferable to just gleefully vomiting shit onto the internet. I’m more sympathetic to objections that maybe none of this matters that much to most people and we should all log off and think about what we’ve done. Personally, I’m logging off to write my 4,500-word opus exposing everyone in New York media as a bunch of pathologically online dorks, beginning with MYSELF.

Longread of the Week: What kind of person takes a train from New York City to Los Angeles? Caity Weaver for the New York Times takes the trip, documenting both the hilarity of climbing over a toilet to get into bed in her tiny quarters and the quirks of the “train people,” for whom “small talk is as invigorating as a rail of cocaine.”

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Vulture takes a look at the podcasting industry’s boom and Spotify’s acquisition of Gimlet. Are we in a podcasting bubble? Well, there are over 600,000 podcasts and growing…

— Medium is seeking new partners to launch new publications. What could possibly go wrong except the company bailing on you with no warning and absorbing your fanbase? (The contracts, tellingly, are only for 3-12 months and you waive the rights to your proposal ideas). Take that money while it lasts, though!

— Kickstarter employees are unionizing, but not everyone is pleased with the effort because the employees are…not factory workers? A leaked memo shows senior staffers fretting that “Unions are historically intended to protect vulnerable members of society, and we feel the demographics of this union undermine this important function.” Unions are for everyone actually!!!

— Google has unveiled a new gaming platform called Stadia that will compete with the likes of PS4, Steam, and Twitch. The company has nothing but cash and videogames are still booming, but some are worried it will further cement the end of shareable games — i.e. physical objects you can buy and resell. Google is trying to get in on what Amazon’s Kindle pioneered: we’ll make content ridiculously cheap and easy to access, but you’ll be locked into our system forever.

— Bad Feminist Roxane Gay put out a bad job posting with bad labor practices: a full-time freelance position not unlike the one Epicurious editor David Tamarkin got dragged for last week.

— Conspiracy theories and extremism are thriving on Instagram and infecting the minds of the youth, with QAnon activists using the platform to recruit younger followers. Instagram says it’s on top of removing harmful accounts, but all the evidence points to the fact that…it is not.

— Netflix is churning out tons of content, but is any of it good? The Concourse notes it all seems to be pretty damn homogenous, reminiscent of the ‘90s dark days of television. So basically TV sucked, then it got really good (HBO’s golden age), and then it started to suck again. And remember, HBO is altering its business model to be more like Netflix.

— Jordan Peterson was hired then fired by Cambridge because he posed for a photo with a man wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with “I’m a proud Islamophobe.” That’s what it takes for Cambridge to recognize he’s a bigot??

— The family behind OxyContin, the Sacklers, are being turned away by fancy museums over the high-society faux pas of helping kill millions of people: the Guggenheim in New York and the Tate in London will no longer accept their donations. Wait until the museums realize who else all their rooms are named after!

— Laura Ingraham is broadcasting Talia Lavin’s face to her unhinged followers and calling her a “journo-terrorist,” which, as Lavin herself pointed out, is pretty near an incitement to violence. Fox has also gone after Lauren Duca, who, along with Lavin, is teaching a course at NYU. The Daily Beast spoke to both women about Fox’s bloodthirsty antics (plus the Jezebel report on Duca, to which Duca said, lol, she didn’t take her dick out or wear blackface so it’s fine!)

— Philip Morris has struck a $5 million sponcon deal with Vice to churn out vaping content on the theme of “change.” Vice obviously needs the money but hmm what do those tobacco advertising laws look like again?