New Gawker is Here And Off to a Roaring Start!
Gawker is coming back, ladies and gents, and the bloggers are furious.
A few years after the infamous website was put out of business by a Peter Thiel-funded and Hulk Hogan-branded lawsuit, the website and its archive were bought by Bustle.com founder Bryan Goldberg, keen to dust it off and get it posting again.
There’s one problem, however. All the old Gawker people hate the new Gawker, and they are not shy to blog about it.
A post on Splinter News, a refuge for old Gawker writers, took a flamethrower to the new iteration after a number of its staff were announced on Wednesday.
“Here Are the Media Chuds Joining Fake Gawker,” snarked Laura Wagner in her Splinter post.
First, Goldberg: “a man committed to face-tuned photos of himself, creating shitty media companies powered by exploited labor, and spouting Richard Spencer-like bullshit about immigrant birth rates on Facebook.”
Next up, Carson Griffith, who joins new Gawker as Editorial Director. For Griffith, Splinter did some old school Gawkering, digging back into her old tweets.
They include some fun ones (screengrabs via Splinter):
Her bad tweets didn’t stop years ago, either. Behold this plagiarized mess from *this month*:
the editor of the “new gawker” has some interesting editorial standards!!! pic.twitter.com/9f8x3nuGaE
— tasbeeh herwees (@THerwees) January 16, 2019
Old Gawker would have written a great story about this whole mess, and ex-Gawker people loudly pointed that out. They — along with fans of the original site — vented on Twitter about the reincarnation:
honestly getting hired as editorial director of new gawker and not deleting your old tweets is disqualifying on its own
— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) January 16, 2019
Fake Gawker’s editorial director seems like a fucking gem https://t.co/c3aDBYAyHs pic.twitter.com/IsEZK3rauf
— Tim Marchman (@timmarchman) January 16, 2019
[irony voice] pretty messed up to go looking for someone’s transphobic/racist/tweets about their maid from years ago!!https://t.co/4DSA2c2zhw
— listen to VanderPod (@kath_krueger) January 16, 2019
dang why do we need new gawker when we have current splinter https://t.co/MLz8uCK5nD
— Scaachi (@Scaachi) January 16, 2019
Boy those maid tweets are really something https://t.co/LC2mOyIwSk
— Anna Merlan (@annamerlan) January 16, 2019
an entirely appropriate welcome mat for Fake Gawker https://t.co/hPiE1JZoFX
— bryson (@Bryson_M) January 16, 2019
lol how long until Twitter cancels fake Gawker’s Carson Griffith?
— Francesca Bacardi (@OriginalFresca) January 16, 2019
I had my issues at times with the old Gawker but the new, fake Gawker feels like something out of Pet Sematary
— Gady Epstein (@gadyepstein) January 16, 2019
— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) January 16, 2019
If you thought the new Gawker gambit was a risk *before all the old Gawker people decided it was the worst thing since secretly funded lawsuits*, you might suspect it’s dead in the water at this point. You might also wonder: what did Goldberg expect?
In any case, we agree with Sonny: they might as well go balls to the wall with the thing.
I mean, the people who loved the old Gawker are never going to accept this new thing anyway. Might as well go full heel with it.
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) January 16, 2019
