Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/11/blogging-is-hard-learns-gawke.html
…
7 Likes
So Gawker’s new bosses learns blogging is hard?
(sorry if that’s pedantic, just trying to help out at my very most favorite blog)
12 Likes
“Anyone can write a good blog article that’ll drive views and engagement”, he said. “I don’t know why we pay these lefty slackers when we can just do it in our free moments”, he said…
24 Likes
If anyone is interested in seeing the kind of high quality “stick to sports” journalism that a herb like Spanfeller is going for, behold these actual sentences written by someone and posted on an actual commercial website and not a junior high paper:
The day the worst team in football won its first game of the season, the best one lost its first.
The precocious talent of Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson picked apart the tightest defense in the NFL handing Tom Brady’s New England Patriots a 37-20 drubbing in the late game Sunday night.
Jackson ran for 61 yards and two touchdowns and went 17 for 23 for 163 yards and a score, leaving the Pats grabbing at air.
I mean, that’s not even a proper use of the word “precocious!”
14 Likes
“Shaq Chat” is maybe the worst cover line ever? It makes the puff you find on an inflight magazine sound positively erudite.
I don’t have a ton to add here except that Undeadspin is my new favorite Twitter account.
6 Likes
What happened to Deadspin is a pathetic and horrible story. I hope there’s another chapter that features the writers and editors who drove the enterprise and lacks the vulture capitalists who dismembered it.
There’s a Twitter feed with updates from the former staff, and I made a page from the last legit masthead of Deadspin so I can keep up with what everyone is up to.
8 Likes
Shouldn’t that read, “So Gawker’s new bosses learns blogging is hard”?
(sorry if that’s pedantic, just trying to help out at my very most favorite commenter)
4 Likes
(This is getting silly, but is that “s” at the end of learns struck out? If so, you’re pointing out that same problem that I was trying to point out.)
4 Likes
The full extent to which Yahoo misunderstood
the internet is breathtaking. They made so many decisions (like that magazine) that were so backward that it’s hard to imagine what they were thinking.
8 Likes
Oh sorry, I thought that you were correcting their sentence construction. I am chastened.
4 Likes
No prob, I should’ve been more direct in the first place about what I was saying.
Anyway, here’s hoping Rob fixes the headline and then just deletes our distractions.
And I surely don’t blame him for the mistake – after all, blogging is hard! 
8 Likes
So these managers fail to reach the journalistic standards set by Gawker, do they.
That’s a bar so low that you have to dig for it, and they still couldn’t clear it.
8 Likes
So you’re saying you derived no pleasure from watching Hulk Hogan do the sex thing?
4 Likes
Just to be clear–these are the kinds of stories that are going to go either uncovered or with far less thoughtful coverage with sites like Deadspin (and SI) zombied:
There’s a reason that Thiel wanted this kind of writing to go away, and a reason that brain-dead private equity managers would rather not have it around.
12 Likes
While I had problems with many of Gawker’s editorial decisions over the years, going where other media outlets wouldn’t sometimes yielded good muckraking journalistic results.
The most famous example is the story about the late Rob Ford’s crack habit when he was mayor of Toronto – despite knowing a lot about it and the existence of the video showing him smoking in it, no mainstream media outlet would have published a story on it until Gawker broke the story.
15 Likes
Last Monday G/O Media informed the kinja supported commenter sub blogs that they would be deleted forthwith. Within two hours, all of the sub blogs had bolt holes set up on reddit, discord, and blogspot, and shortly after that (afternoon), management informed everyone that “due to feedback” they were reconsidering their decision and allowing the commenter blogs to remain. For now. Most of the sub blog commenters also drive a lot of the main page traffic, and I guess they realized that there would be a massive drop in commenting and traffic on the remaining pages like Gizmodo, Jezebel, etc. Numbers are already dropping significantly.
12 Likes
Those photos look like an Epic Rap Battles of History video thumbnail.
1 Like
Cuz, ya know, the audience demos at Forbes would be the same at Gawker!
…right?..
/s
5 Likes
Anyone else here think Maidment looks like a chameleon about to shoot its tongue out?
1 Like
Much of Gawker Media was the worst of the worst, but they were willing to cover stories others wouldn’t touch. While they had some important sub-sections that offered value and voice to certain groups, there was a lot of gross in there too. Some pieces will be missed, others not so much. I think their presence was suffocating the market a bit, maybe this is a good thing?
Blogging about something you know and love isn’t as hard as running a clickbait blog advertising engine that masquerades as a wide casting news outlet. That seems like a lot of work and reduces the quality across the board.
1 Like
