But in reality, written journalism has a lot in common with television journalism: it will be enjoyed or despised when it comes out, and then everyone will move on. We are all secretly precious, harboring hopes that our wise words will be pored over by future generations. The sooner a writer understands this, the better. Furthermore, the vast majority of everything you write will be forgotten within a matter of days. That and a box of old notepads are all you can walk away with. If nothing else, it was a well-timed invitation for introspection on a decade in journalism. In October, Splinter, the politics-focused successor to Gawker where I was working, was folded. The company was sold off to a big media company, which handled it ineptly, and after a couple of years sold off again to a private equity firm, often the last stop before the media ownership train goes fully off the tracks. Layoffs became common, and employees started to flee – one’s entire social life could have been built around going-away parties. A lawsuit secretly funded by a vindictive Republican billionaire outraged about our reporting on him bankrupted the company. More importantly, we were financially sustainable and doing what we wanted. We were proud of the quality of our enemies. We were loved, hated, and feared in equal measure. One day Brian Williams, the news anchor, came by the office for a chummy lunch with us, motivated, no doubt, by the fact that his daughter was about to star in Girls, an HBO show we were sure to mock mercilessly. The mid-decade years were the high point one liquor-soaked holiday bash featured a tower of crab legs and a bowl of macarons the size of a car trunk famous media people routinely showed up at our parties, eager to slum with the mouthy kids who made fun of them, and to try to be friendly enough to inoculate themselves from criticism in the future. I was a media reporter, and watched wide-eyed as titans of the industry were ravaged by a combination of the global economic crisis and the rise of new media, like us.Īs the years went by, what had begun as a little blog by a handful of people working at home moved to a big office in Soho, with parties on a private roof deck, and then to a fancier office in Union Square, with wide open spaces that were the architectural equivalent of bragging. In 2009, I was working at, a news and gossip site that rested in the sweet spot between the media establishment and the seething hordes – enough of an outsider to do whatever we pleased, but well known enough that the insiders still read us, often out of hate.
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