RIP Long Live Death to Gawker

Only the truly déclassé ex-Gawker employees still talk about Gawker. Ugh, so boring! We’ve all moved on, haven’t we? Just let it die! I might, if I didn’t endure such insouciant griping a thousand times from various louche media types. Unfortunately for us all, this just makes it more funny and interesting to keep talking about Gawker, to me.

The New York Post broke the story of how Bryan Goldberg’s Hektik Mediengruppe had put Gawker’s relaunch on hold and laid off the staff; the New York Times dryly added “the site has resisted all attempts to bring it back to life”; and Adweek found their angle with ad buyers who were, shockingly, not forced to alter their nonexistent plans to buy tons of advertising on New Gawker. One adman did fantasize about a future Gawker that would be nice to brands: “Hopefully the staff will take time to innovate in the advertising space as well—that environment should be fun, irreverent and uniquely bold.”

Well not TOO fun or irreverent or uniquely bold, amirite. Given all the nonsense that plagued the early stages of Bustle Gawker, sure, who could have predicted it would keel over on the relaunch pad. I remain mystified by the five months when they had an editor in chief and other staff nominally present and working, and yet published not a scintilla of precious content. One assumes anything drafted or circulated for Gawker didn’t meet with Goldberg’s squamous and incoherent vision, but I would also bet that once he exacted his penny-ante revenge in buying a site that mocked him, the thrill was largely gone. After all, this was the guy who reputedly wanted to offer an “amnesty,” where anyone else that Gawker had historically insulted could ask that such offending articles be expunged from the site’s archives.

I can’t remember if I disclosed this elsewhere, but I did, of course, myself interview for an at-the-time unspecified editorial leadership role at Gawker shortly after Bustle purchased the site at auction. Clearly I’m very glad nothing came of that, nor would I go near the operation at its present home given this year’s events. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t relish a chance to play with Gawker in other circumstances, should the opportunity arise. I cannot imagine such an arisement, and like most people I figure the archives will remain online until their incremental programmatic ad revenue falls below server maintenance costs, at which point they will vanish forever.

But Gawker’s unlikely continued zombie existence is the best thing about it (for now). Clearly the narrative needs a conclusion, a final endpoint, just die already! How on earth is Nick Denton going to make his splashy American comeback with this ol’ corpse stinking up the place? But it’s subtly irritating and maddening and thus amusing to watch Gawker linger perpetually, neither dead nor alive, through sheer inertia “resisting” attempts to revive or kill it, becoming more and more the exact tragic messy media joke that would have made for a good Gawker running gag. Gawker is Schrödinger’s website, neither and both alive nor dead, may it outlive us all, amen.