Lifehacker calmly writer9/9/2023 ![]() ![]() Sometimes they’re supportive and loving but sometimes they’re mean. I think it boils down to the fact that people are mean. ![]() Why are online comments so misogynist? There’s racism, there’s misogyny, there’s many nasty thoughts. But generally discussions augment the stories and that’s why people spend longer on a Gawker story and are more likely to be engaged than they are on other news properties. And I think most people agree that our comments, they’re not perfect, the occasional troll makes his or her way in. The basic idea of the comments on Gizmodo and Lifehacker and Kotaku and the other Gawker properties is that they should reflect a conversation between the writer and readers. Sometimes I feel like the only people left on Twitter are the trolls. And the internet, internet forums, internet comments, essentially social media environments, give the opportunity to more people to contribute to a story and contribute to our collective understanding.īut so much online commenting is just trollery… And often those trolls do crowd out civil discussion. I think the role of journalists as gatekeeper is more challenged now than it has been. And I think it’s healthier when not just their viewpoint but the viewpoints of their sources, the viewpoints of their subjects of an article, viewpoints of experts are all given equal weight in an article. I don’t believe that journalists have any monopoly on understanding. Why? Comments and online discussion have been my obsession for several years. You’ve invested a lot in your online comment system, Kinja. Not necessarily through conflict and trollery, but through civil disagreements online which further everybody’s understanding of an issue. And my personal interest is to find a way online to allow writers and readers and subjects and sources to debate and develop a story together. I think that’s one thing that’s going to happen. The more specialized, more focused publications will be the ones that prosper. Facebook will be the only general news brand, and maybe another social network or two. ![]() What will the media landscape look like five years down the road? First of all, I think that properties like Gizmodo and Lifehacker and Deadspin and Jezebel have a much better chance of prospering in this new world than general news brands, news and media brands. We have become not just proponents of radical transparency we are living radical transparency with pretty much every single aspect of our financial lives and existence being now public. And then I have an apartment with a mortgage, and that’s it. So my net worth is entirely pooled up in the value of Gawker Media Group. And I and the other founders took very low salaries for nearly a decade. We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and we didn’t take any outside capital. My net worth is tied up almost entirely in stock in Gawker Media Group. Did the Hulk Hogan lawsuit cost you personally? The company’s actually not majority owned by me anymore. You had litigation insurance, which you’ve used up. So I think as long as readers-whether they admit it publicly or not-as long as readers have a hunger for true, critical, funny stories about how the system works and about the concentration of money and power in modern society, as long as they have that appetite, then a site like is going to have a continued purpose. And it underlines why continues to have such an appeal. I think the Peter Thiel legal campaign, a secret campaign to set up critics demonstrates why independent media is so important. It’s only really because media people are so obsessed by that it’s had such an outsized share of attention. Is as we know it, the site that drove a certain type of internet culture, a thing of the past? Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Deadspin, Jezebel represents about 90% of the audience of the group. Generally my view is that, let’s just have it out. Their friends know, their family knows, but out of some misplaced sense of decency nobody talks about it. Usually if someone’s gay it’s a pretty open secret. I think it made me satisfied.ĭo you feel like you have a rosebud? You mean something driving me? Maybe because I was gay, I grew up hating open secrets. I don’t know whether Gawker ever made me happy. And I am happily married to somebody who despises news in all its forms. Has the fate of the Gawker empire become less central to your happiness? At my wedding, I think I actually said that I always thought I’d be successful but I never expected to be happy. The British press certainly seems more rambunctious than the American newspapers. And concerned less about getting the story out. Do you ever feel like American journalists are too soft? I’m not the only one who has noted that the American newspapers-maybe because they have been local monopolies-are concerned more about respectability than their British peers. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |