An Open Letter to Jim Bankoff: Give Me Gridskipper

Over a year ago, I sent an email to Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff proposing that his company give me Gridskipper, the travel blog launched by Gawker Media and edited by me. Toward the end of my tenure, the site succumbed to one of Nick Denton’s minor bouts of psychosis and pivoted from a successful travel blog (in that very modest scale of success) to a kludgy map-based monstrosity powered by, if you can believe it, a larval form of Kinja. This experiment produced lots of interesting maps that immediately malfunctioned if Google tweaked their map API or anyone at Gawker looked at a server funny.

Gridskipper ended up at Vox after Gawker failed to sell it and Denton instead gave it to Curbed, which itself was then sold to Vox. Over these periods, Gridskipper languished in various forms even lower on the karmic wheel than a Gawker blog, such as a Hamptons blog for instance. After being mothballed at Vox, it was considered for a relaunch as a longform feature travel site powered by a bank, but then Vox decided to go with a brand new brand for that site, which also didn’t last long.

So: as I proposed to Bankoff, I just want the name, brand IP (chuckle), and social media handles, for which I am willing to pay the deceased asset market price of zero dollars, or maybe a few bucks to process paperwork or something. The archives, if they even exist, are a black hole of inaccuracy and technical debt, so they can stay in the grave. (Though I wouldn’t mind resurrecting my “best macaroni and cheese in New York” three-map tour de force considering it probably took a decade off my life to research.)

I have some fun ideas for what I could do with Gridskipper as a site and as a business, and it has a natural media-business-news-nostalgia hook built in for PR purposes (both for me and for Vox). And who could resist that logo treatment. Bankoff never responded to my email proposal, probably since he generally looks for more than a single zero in a deal memo. But I implore you, Mr. Bankoff and team, consider unshackling this poor dead site from your catacombs. In this era of global disruption, fear, uncertainty, and upheaval, the people cry out for new aspirational travel content that doesn’t really stay in its lane! Give me Gridskipper, and I’ll invite everyone at Vox to the relaunch party at the Magician!