![]() But it was the first to do so in the format that now seems completely natural for it: an endlessly scrolling, eternally accessible record of prattle and wit and venom that felt less like a publication than like a place. Gawker wasn’t the first publication to treat gossip as an intellectual pursuit. The noblest version of Gawker’s premise was - as its founder, Nick Denton, repeated many times - that the version of a story journalists would tell each other over drinks was always more interesting than whatever was actually in the paper. ![]() But the “media” qualifier was always secondary to the gossip core. ![]() What Gawker was depends a lot on whom you ask, but at the start it was a media-gossip blog Elizabeth Spiers, its first editor, covered the people and politics of the still-powerful institutions of New York media - Condé Nast and the Times in particular - with equal parts obsession and skepticism. It managed to be, in a way it never had been, the kind of place about which you could say, “I could see myself being here in ten years.” Which I did often enough for it to seem funny now, since I myself would end up dramatically quitting in the summer of 2015, a little more than a year after being promoted to editor-in-chief and a little less than a year before the company would declare bankruptcy and auction itself off to the highest bidder. Just over a decade old, Gawker still thought of itself as a pirate ship, but a very big pirate ship, ballasted by semi-respectable journalism, and much less prone to setting itself on fire than in its early days, when its writers had a tendency to make loud and famous enemies and when its staff was subjected to near-annual purges - unless they were able to dramatically quit first. For a certain kind of person, at any rate - ambitious, rebellious, and eager for attention, all of which I was. It feels a bit strange to say this now, but in the spring of 2014 there was no better place to work than Gawker.
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