Digest 02/22/2023

What we can learn from the demise of Gawker 2.0 and why transphobia is also a labor issue.

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FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT: THE DEMISE OF GAWKER 2.0

There is an endless amount of lore surrounding the early years of Gawker. Elizabeth Spiers, Choire Sicha, Jessica Coen, and Emily Gould each had stints running the site and went a long way toward establishing internet writing’s irreverent, conversational tone. But the difference between Gawker, which launched in 2002, and the personal blogs that came before it wasn’t simply a matter of branding. Unlike your average blog, Gawker was a business. And that’s where my personal favorite anecdote comes into play: on Gawker’s first day, the site displayed a banner ad for the real estate group Corcoran at the top of the page, a placement that Corcoran not only didn’t pay for, but didn’t even know about. “At the time, there were no ads on blogs, no ad networks to service blogs and, as far as I know, no brands asking to advertise,” Spiers later wrote in a piece for The Washington Post. “The ad was just there to signal that the space was available.”

Which is a generous way of saying that it was fake.

In the piece, Spiers contends that the gambit worked: advertisers started calling and actually buying banner placements (though in 2003 the site was only making $2,000 a month in ad revenue), and the digital-native media business was born. But since BDG Media CEO Bryan Goldberg axed Gawker 2.0 earlier this month, I have to wonder. Given that we’re in yet another cycle of seemingly endless layoffs and shutterings, some are citing Gawker’s wind down as the latest example of the demise of ad-supported digital media — which is to say, the collapse of the entire business model that started nearly 21 years ago with a fake ad.

“Collapse” might be overselling the story a bit, but for outlets known for publishing weird, exciting writing — like The Awl, The Hairpin, The Toast, The Outline, Input, and, yes, both Old Gawker (at times) and Gawker 2.0 — it increasingly seems like no one knows how to successfully, sustainably sell them. As a result, these vital parts of the online media ecosystem are a dying breed.

Gawker Media’s Gizmodo also started publishing in 2002, and during those early years, founder Nick Denton continued adding new sites like Fleshbot (which covered porn) and Defamer (which covered Hollywood). It was rumored that he wanted to build a digital version of Condé Nast, which would make Gawker his New Yorker in that it doesn’t have a 1:1 relationship with a major ad-sales market (and allegedly loses a lot of money). Just like Vogue and Gourmet used to rake in ad-sales dollars from fashion and food brands, respectively, Fleshbot had the adult ad market (which, lest we forget, propped up the entire alt weekly universe until the Backpage fiasco) and Jezebel has a host of women’s products. But Gawker? Not so much.

Other similarly styled digital-media networks followed Gawker—some of them were even started by people who worked for Gawker! It’s not apples to apples, but: The Awl launched in 2008 with a photo of a Butterfinger in the prime ad slot, while two years later The Hairpin debuted with an Ann Taylor sponsorship. That’s a testament in part to the success publishers David Cho and John Shankman had with selling The Awl’s “indielectuals” (as Shankman aptly and hilariously called readers) to advertisers, but it probably is more about the power that comes from giving a brand access to the much coveted demographic of 18- to 34-year-old women. Though it never came to fruition, The Awl had plans to launch a parenting site (what could have been!), and The Wirecutter briefly ran under its umbrella, too. And we all now know that The Awl’s “Be Less Stupid” brand unfortunately did not sell as well as Buy This Product.

For Gawker, there was not only the lack of a natural ad market — it had the Gawker Tax to contend with, too. The Gawker Tax “represents the cost of selling these brands that any moment can blow up,” Denton wrote in a 2015 memo. “They can blow up because of internal dissension, they can blow up because of a story that goes wrong.” It’s one thing to get eyeballs on a site — and the ads that run on it — but whether it was Gawker Stalker, Brett Farve’s penis, Hulk Hogan’s penis, or outing a person that basically no one had ever heard of before, the blog had  a long history of getting those eyeballs in ways that brands didn’t  exactly want to be associated with. Denton estimated that the company missed out on $20 million in potential ads and other revenue that year simply because advertisers were put off by Gawker’s brand—. Of course, losing $20 million a year to the Gawker Tax probably looked cheap after the Peter Thiel-backed Hulk Hogan lawsuit bankrupted the company in 2016.

For a time it seemed like things were actually working at Gawker 2.0. The site carved out an unexpected niche for literary criticism, and it never published any dick pics. When BDG had a round of layoffs late last year, cutting Input completely, Gawker 2.0 was left unscathed. But as Study Hall reported at the time, BDG had no real plan for selling sites like Input—nominally a tech site, but with a wide, weird remit that made it delightful to read—or Gawker 2.0. Goldberg rather brutally told Axios that the site was like an early stage startup, and “now just isn’t the moment to push millions of dollars into a pre-monetization product.”

The answer, of course, is getting people to pay for content, which is increasingly what legacy print publications are doing with their digital operations. Newsletters have also allowed some writers to be their own outlet that publishes weird, quirky writing that (maybe) pays okay — but for the most part, you need to already have an audience to make a paid Substack work. There’s a limit, too, to how many $5/month individual newsletters any one reader will pay for (to say nothing of subscriber-based newsletter publications like Study Hall). Maybe a savant will loop up the best of the personal newsletters, throw a new name and a fake paywall up top and let the rest sort itself out later.

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TRANSPHOBIA IS A LABOR ISSUE

It turns out being forced to accept bigotry is more than a social justice issue. A group of New York Times contributors working with the Freelance Solidarity Project (FSP) who sent the newspaper a letter criticizing its editorial standards and coverage of transgender communities last Wednesday have yet to receive a direct response from the paper of record. However, theTimes did acknowledge a second, related letter sent by GLAAD, which coordinated its campaign with FSP but did not rely on the express support of the Times’ employees and contributors.

“The uptick in reporting that undermines trans people’s bodily autonomy and healthcare access over the last year is the root cause for us drafting this letter,” journalist Harron Walker, one of the FSP letter’s organizers, told Study Hall. “But the many fear-mongering, sensationalistic reported features of late that we spotlight in our letter strike me as so much more insidious, precisely because, as reporting, they are intended to be read as objective, factual, and free of any bias.”

Both letters criticized the Times’ reporting on transgender youth and transition-related medical treatments, but the contributor letter, which has received more than 1,000 contributor signatures as well as more than 20,000 from “media workers, subscribers, and readers of the New York Times” has clarified the labor issue at the heart of the clash over the paper’s inconsistent editorial standards. As journalists like Tom Socca and James Factora have pointed out, legacy media outlets’, including the Times, use of misleading statistics and hyperbolic language about the number of people, especially children, who are actively transitioning has also helped lobbyists push anti-trans legislation in at least a dozen states.

Meanwhile, reporters noted that theTimes’ response to the GLAAD letter not only conflates the two letters but  also conveniently emphasizes the paper’s stance on employees participating in “protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.” The response, which claimed criticism about their coverage was “demonstrably false,” doesn’t correspond to GLAAD’s organizing or demands.

“In journalism, media, and lots of other cultural industries, being involved is treated as a privilege,” Eric Thurm, campaign coordinator for the National Writers Union and FSP’s communications chair, told Study Hall. “Assuming that we benefit from this radiance of the institution just has the effect of reinventing all sorts of inequalities that were involved in creating the institution in the first place.”

As Semafor reported, the letters also caused friction among members of the The New York Times Guild after its president, Susan DeCarava, sent her own missive that cautioned the newspaper’s leadership against encroaching on employee’s federally protected rights to criticize their employer. Others denounced NewsGuild national president Jon Schleuss, who tweeted in support of the workers who signed the letter. In each case, detractors said the two union heads had overstepped when they involved themselves in the drama, according to Semafor.

In our own August 2022 feature, Study Hall detailed how dog whistle reporting on the trans community has become a regular and easily recognizable form of clickbait at legacy media outlets. — Evan Kleekamp

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EVERYTHING ELSE

—If you’ve been dying to know what’s going on with Caroline Calloway, well, you’re in luck! The aspiring memoirist who may or may not be a scammer is the subject of a new harrowing VICE documentary. Spoiler Alert: the “Snake Oil” saleswoman trolls her own subreddit.

—WNYC canceled Melissa Harris-Perry’s “The Takeaway.” In a tweet, Harris-Perry said, “This team is exceptional. Cancelling this show in this way is an act of institutional cruelty and abuse by the executives of WNYC. I will stand for them until the end.”

—New court filings shed light on internal disputes at Fox News during President Donald Trump’s ill-fated attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The filings, which are part of a Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit  against the network, reveal that Rupert Murdoch, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson all had doubts about the validity of the election fraud conspiracy.