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. “The Bryan Goldberg of it all is the $64,000 question,” as Kamer put it.
GAWKER SUED HOW TO
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.”Įven with a stellar new stable of writers, there’s skepticism among some Gawker alumni around the person funding for it. Sarah Hagi, a culture critic and writer, and Claire Carusillo, formerly a beauty columnist at Man Repeller, are also joining as contributing writers. 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. 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. In the meantime, her team is starting to come into focus. “I don’t know what this is going to be, but I trust Leah.”įinnegan, 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. “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. “You have to be excited about even the aspiration to follow that up,” Kamer added. “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. “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.” “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. “Nostalgia is a hell of a drug,” said former Gawker editor in chief Gabriel Snyder. 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.
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.” Like a Bat-Signal to the media industry, Gawker’s long-dormant Twitter feed sprang to life one recent morning with a request: “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.
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