Like a Bat-Signal to the media industry, Gawker’s long-dormant Twitter feed sprang to life one recent morning with a request: tips@gawker.com. “IT’S ALIVE,” Gawker and Deadspin alum Timothy Burke responded to the account’s first tweet since 2016, the year wrestler and reality star Hulk Hogan, backed by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, successfully sued the gossip site into oblivion for publishing his sex tape. Gawker is now set to return in early fall, a source with knowledge of the plans said, under Leah Finnegan, a former features editor at the site and one of its most caustic writers, who followed up on Twitter with an ask of her own: “only good stuff please.”
The resurrection of Gawker under Finnegan is being closely watched inside the New York media bubble, which its earlier iteration both catered to and gleefully punctured. “Nostalgia is a hell of a drug,” said former Gawker editor in chief Gabriel Snyder. “When Gawker alumni talk about how great Gawker was, I think they’re often talking about how great their Gawker was,” added Snyder, one of 14 editors in chief of the original website. “There isn’t real clarity in my mind of what it would even mean to bring Gawker back in 2021,” and “anyone who is going to do it would have to do a lot of defining.” That being said, Snyder notes that Finnegan has long been “one of the keepers of the Gawker voice.”
“The choice of Leah Finnegan was shocking to me in the best way,” Foster Kamer, another former Gawker editor and writer, told me, describing her as a “recalcitrant, creative, brilliant editor” with “a real pugilistic streak,” someone capable of taking on the kind of nebulous stratosphere of power that Gawker did in its heyday. “You have to be excited about even the aspiration to follow that up,” Kamer added. “Leah is the one person who could lead Gawker into its next era,” said Discourse Blog publisher Aleksander Chan, a former Gawker writer who went on to become the editor in chief of Splinter, which was seen as a successor to Gawker before it shuttered in 2019. “I don’t know what this is going to be, but I trust Leah.”
Finnegan, who previously served as executive editor of The Outline, following stints at The New York Times and HuffPost, declined to divulge any plans for Gawker 3.0—“what if Business Insider steals them?” she quipped in an email—and suggested the growing staff is currently “just writing little drafts on Post-it notes” in preparation for the launch. In the meantime, her team is starting to come into focus. The staff—all women thus far—includes Kelly Conaboy, a former Gawker writer and most recently a writer-at-large at New York magazine’s The Cut, who joins as senior staff writer; Jenny Zhang, a staff writer at Eater, as staff writer; Tarpley Hitt, a Power Trip reporter at the Daily Beast, as staff writer; and Brandy Jensen, who worked with Finnegan at The Outline, as features editor. Two other former Gawker writers have signed on: Dayna Evans, the current editor of Eater Philly, will be a fashion columnist, and Allie Jones, who writes a celebrity gossip column for The Cut, is joining as a contributing writer. Sarah Hagi, a culture critic and writer, and Claire Carusillo, formerly a beauty columnist at Man Repeller, are also joining as contributing writers.
Last week, Tammie Teclemariam, the food and wine writer who set off the implosion at Bon Appétit last summer by resurfacing the resignation-prompting photo of editor in chief Adam Rapoport in a racially insensitive costume, announced plans to join as “the food critic (or something).” (Bon Appétit, like Vanity Fair, is owned by Condé Nast.) Teclemariam, whose wry tone is in many ways reminiscent of Gawker’s at its height, has become something of a media-industry whistleblower; announcing her hiring, she praised Finnegan, “who promised to teach me how to be mean in more than 240 characters.”
Even with a stellar new stable of writers, there’s skepticism among some Gawker alumni around the person funding for it. “The Bryan Goldberg of it all is the $64,000 question,” as Kamer put it. Goldberg, founder of Bustle Digital Group—and himself something of a Gawker villain back in the day—already oversaw a bungled Gawker relaunch (a.k.a. Gawker 2.0) around 2018 after buying the site at a bankruptcy auction. “What are the boundaries? Have boundaries been established? And what’s the mandate?” said Kamer. The new Gawker, Snyder added, “is going to have to coexist with what seems to be the tried-and-true model for building a BDG publication,” such as Elite Daily and Bustle. When I asked Finnegan how she expects to navigate the potentially stricter editorial constraints under BDG, compared to the free rein Gawker once had, she replied: “Sadly I’m not allowed to answer this question without Bryan Goldberg’s written approval and he’s unreachable at the moment on some rich-person island.” Still, Finnegan has firsthand experience of how BDG operates given that the acquisitive media company purchased The Outline in 2019, only to shut it down the following year. Joshua Topolsky, The Outline’s founder, has since become part of BDG’s top brass, overseeing content and strategy for its Culture & Innovation group; he’ll likely be involved in the relaunched Gawker. (A BDG spokesperson did not make Goldberg available for an interview.)
It remains to be seen whether the Bustle-owned Gawker will similarly piss off those in power, and at times, swing the sledgehammer back at itself. Under Nick Denton, Gawker operated in the spirit of radical transparency—which is why you’d have Finnegan, for example, live-tweeting what he was saying during a contentious staff meeting. At its best, Gawker was light-years ahead of much of the media in taking aim at Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Jeffrey Epstein and provided rare insight into New York media, articles read by both its lowest ranks and the plutocrats in the headlines. “Gawker was always one of the places willing to ‘go there,’ write the open secrets,” according to Chan. “It was able to both set the agenda and predict the agenda.”
But Gawker could also punch down, something that happened more often in its later years, by which time the blog as an insurgent had itself become an established character. “Punching down was often never a good look for Gawker,” Kamer noted. It felt that way, Snyder recalls, “when there was blood on the floor of the Condé Nast tower,” referring to a controversial post about an executive’s private life—the removal of which caused the site’s then editor in chief Max Read to resign in protest, and other staffers, including Finnegan, to take buyouts. Days after the blowup, Denton announced his new vision for Gawker, reportedly telling those who remained that he wanted it to be “20% nicer.” (I asked to interview Read for this piece, but he told me he’s “suffering from a serious brain injury that has erased my memory of everything that happened between the years 2010 and 2016.”)
What role could Gawker still serve in 2021? In an email, Choire Sicha, one of its former editors in chief now spearheading newsletters at The Times, told me he’s still trying to figure that out. “Gawker’s job (that it usually failed at) was to tell the stories that people didn’t want told. But now we have lots of people doing that. Don’t we? Or are we kidding ourselves?” Snyder noted there’s no shortage of platforms willing to host such content, either: “Anyone can set Twitter on fire with a Medium post if they’ve got a juicy enough story.”
“Right now, there’s a conflicting feeling of the landscape being crowded but also homogeneous,” Chan says of media in 2021, an industry dominated either by “huge titans of industry that are all doing the same thing” or “personal-brand journalists who have the following to break away” to places like Substack—a platform Kamer thinks “will be nothing but a wellspring of great material for Gawker,” one “littered with people who were insurgents in media in 2005” who have since become rich targets. Snyder is of the opinion that the world needs something like Gawker but isn’t sure it needs to be called Gawker, which was something he told The Guardian ahead of Goldberg’s first attempt at revival. “There are a lot of pros in using the name,” he told me, SEO value likely being among them. “You probably wouldn’t write a story about the prelaunch of a site like Gawker,” he notes. “But it comes with so much baggage.”
I canvassed various Gawker alumni, several of whom said they are watching with anticipation but had little specific to say about the revival other than, as Emily Gould put it in an email, being “glad anyone has a media job right now, get that money.” When I asked Tom Scocca, Slate’s politics editor and a longtime member of the Gawker universe, what he thinks about the site coming back, he told me: “I’m in the middle of rewatching Avengers: Endgame with my kids after seeing Infinity War and it’s interesting to see the Marvel factory struggle to pin down what a happy ending could possibly work like after brutal arbitrary slaughter followed by five years of trauma and loss.”
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