[Fern_Blossom]

University of Maine professor Michael J. Socolow: "Gawker began as a crusade to save journalism"

Dying on the hill to keep a sex tape of a washout wrestler was in the name of journalism? There are real journalists out there that lost their careers fighting to publish real stories about political and corporate corruption, war crimes, human suffering and more. Not sex tapes. Gawker didn't have any real journalists. This was a group of frat boys enjoying causing mayhem in random people's lives as long as they got to profit from it. So no, you have no principles.

[rektide]

crucifying an entire enterprise & saying they "didn't have any real journalists," as you do, for one single place they pushed the edge too far is not a reductionism I could get behind.

it absolutely was journalism, of a very real variety, dishing all kinds of dirt on all manners of people we would never really know anything about.

it seems so exceedingly sad that people will take this example or that & use it to reject what an insanely rare view this was into the sometimes pretty weird ass lifestyles of the (tech) rich and (tech) famous. and sometimes some other random stories that came by.

[Fern_Blossom]

Here are some real journalists:

Marie Colvin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Colvin

Brian Barger: https://jacklimpert.com/2021/03/brian-barger/

Bob Woodward: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Woodward

Those are just three that popped in my head. War journalist, Iran-Contra, Watergate. Their work didn't contain where someone put their prick or what someone put in their snatch or ass during a vacation getaway. Galivanting Gawker as journalistic because it may have broken clocked onto a handful of stories while 99% of it was just trash means you have a pretty warped mind on what constitutes as information. Desire for "dirt" on someone's life, no matter how poor or rich, is a sign of a trashy person who religiously watches the Jersey Shore.

[rektide]

what sad gatekeeping of what is permissible to write about. i was more about the Valleywag days, not on Gawker, but there is legit public interest in just being nosey as shit, building a practice around it, & being non-discerning in what you publish.

most media coverage is polished & spun. having a raw read on what important people are like, what they get up to: that is a worthy thing for the world to be tracking, to have some sense of.

you seem just to not like it. and be willing to judge on ultra simplified shallow assessment, of the lowest easiest to hit points, without respecting that even low journalism has a function & role. you revert to slandering & badmouthing at the end to impress your "moral" point ("a sign of a trashy person who religiously watches the Jersey Shore") which reads to me as narrow minded in it's refusal to consider gawker's truth telling value & heavy handedly belttilting in it's moral judgementality. I expect at least some sign of recognition, some acknowledgement of the value of showing the unfiltered truths. we people imo were greater for having some ability to see the unseen background of the valley's famous, it seems obvious & clear to me, even though it was often an inglorious reality. without this we have no context. we have only the manufactured, the presented, the PR. the world needs more than prescriptivist upstanding reporting, in part because the world is just too interesting & weird & odd, and that's okay too be part of the story too. even when it's not spit and polished great stories.

there's countless stories of internal Google etc dramas, the weird execs & their odd lifestyles behind these shifts, how they allies & clashed that Valleywag/Gawker gave that no one else would ever have brought to light. an extremely informative moral service. because the point was to be undiscerning. the point was to tell, to fill in some of the background in the paintings. that seems to be too much for many. people don't like hearing this part or that, like you seem to oppose. I don't get how people can turn their nose up at this stuff. they probably judge only by what few small sensationized examples they know: they probably aren't fit to judge, don't know what they were missing. unlike jersey shore, unlike most celebrities, these are real people with colossal power being described. having some context, some view, meant everything, made the companies look like a collection of people. something no one else does. and that was taken. by the powerful. worth mourning.