His employees see it as a kind of revenge move by someone who was a constant target of spitballs from the media cool kids. (The company wouldn’t share Gawker’s early traffic numbers.) His purchase, he added, had been motivated by a mix of business opportunity and the psychic satisfaction that goes with owning a site that once scorned him. He said that he thinks Gawker can ultimately become a profitable business, and that it can ultimately attract 10 million unique visitors a month. It was a difficult run, all “self-inflicted,” Ms. Denton over his decision to take down a story outing an obscure media executive as gay, and live-tweeted their dispute. She was pushed out at Gawker after she confronted Mr. After running The Daily Texan, the student paper at the University of Texas at Austin, she landed - and then lost - jobs at Huffington Post and The New York Times. Finnegan has come to this role after a career of starts and, mostly, stops. Denton told me in a text: “Finnegan’s take on Gawker not my thing, back in 2015. Finnegan responded that she was speaking “my truth.” (Asked about the new version of the site he founded, Mr. That marks a notable change from her time as the features editor of Gawker, in 2015, when her indiscriminate brutality included describing an infant as “hipster scum.” That one prompted a rebuke at the time even from Gawker’s rather coldblooded founder, Nick Denton, who wrote in the site’s comments section that the headline was “just nasty” and that she would regret it. “I’m not interested in ruining people’s lives,” she said in a flat tone. Finnegan at her office, but she works from home and so I found myself at the small dining table in her second floor walk-up. She also listed, in a document intended for freelancers, the sorts of things Gawker was no longer interested in, including articles that are “sanctimonious,” or “cruel,” as well as any piece that uses the word “neoliberal.” That is to say - quite a bit of what Gawker used to be. It evolved with the internet, moving from a kind of gleeful nihilism to a brand of self-righteous left-wing politics, breaking some news and shaping online discourse along the way. But she and Gawker both seem to be reformed - and the question now is whether there’s space for a more forgiving website in this confrontational moment.įrom 2003 to 2016, Gawker sometimes spoke truth to power, and other times exposed people’s private lives or sex tapes for no reason. You could say the same about her website, which symbolizes, depending on whom you ask, either the absolute worst of journalism or the best of the open internet. BEST RESTAURANT IN NEW YORK GAWKER TVFinnegan, 35, is like one of those reformed extremists from TV terrorism dramas who you think just might return, at any moment, to their old ways. “I was absolutely a terrorist,” she said in a level tone, before inviting me to her walk-up apartment in Park Slope for an interview. She didn’t remember the details, either, but shared the general recollection. I couldn’t recall the details but worried she’d expect a hit piece in revenge. When I started talking with Leah Finnegan, the editor of the newly restarted Gawker, I asked her whether there wouldn’t be a conflict of interest: She had been inexplicably mean to me on the internet sometime around 2013.
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