![]() ![]() ![]() Imagine a group of reporters gazing upon a lavishly decorated Barneys display window. While Gawker did not have a real editorial direction, it did have a sensibility. In a place where the New York Times would see it! It was better than having a byline in the New York Times it was having the chance to say fuck the New York Times. But to the sort of person who was cut out to be a Gawker writer, it was just right. This site contains the very best and worst things that many writers have written. Every day, a page to be filled every day, a chance for greatness, or idiocy. Gawker was anarchist journalism at its finest. When the writers were great, the site was great, and when the writers were less than great, you get the idea. With a little cherry-picking you can make it seem like our focus was just about anything. Most attempts to explain this publication’s editorial direction tell you more about the person doing the explaining than they do about this publication. Who will we state our unsolicited thoughts to now? The sky, I guess. Instead of just muttering your thoughts to yourself like all the other hobos, you could put them here, where potentially millions of bored people would read them and yell at you. News and inside jokes and essays and whatever idea had popped into your mind last night unbidden. Serious things and non-serious things could sit side-by-side. It was a page large enough and deep enough to accept whatever you wanted to put on it. Gawker was just a giant, empty page waiting to be filled, every day. Gawker was one of the few places ever to exist that offered both a large, steady audience and almost complete freedom. If you want complete freedom to write whatever the hell you want, you write on your personal Tumblr, where the whole world will ignore you. If you want a lot of people to pay attention to you, you work at a place where the individual writer’s voice is completely subsumed into the institutional voice. Most journalism jobs exist on a continuum between audience and freedom. I hope you find it somewhere at least once before you die. If you are very fortunate, you may one day find a place where you can be as inane, brilliant, cockeyed, or stupid as you wish, in front of the entire world. If you are very lucky, you might find a place where you can do what you want. Wherever you go in this life, there is some jerk telling you what to do. ![]()
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