When Leah Finnegan worked as features editor at the notorious media blog Gawker in 2015, she and the other staff would often play a game: what news story would get the most traffic in the world? Traffic was an obsession – writers were ranked by how much they brought in. “There was always pressure to produce as much traffic as possible,” she told me, “and you never knew when they were just going to fire everyone or hire a new editor, which happened basically once a year.” Now when she played the game, she suggested the answer was “maybe an Obama sex tape”.
From 2003 to 2016, Gawker was the epitome of the very best or the very worst of the internet, depending on your perspective. A blog with a gossip-y, insider-y tone, it reported on both the personal lives of popular media figures and global politics. Often, it was home to some of the smartest cultural writing on the internet. Some felt its acerbic sense of humour punched up; for others, it was sneering and toxic. Its popularity among a certain, very online demographic is hard to overstate (Finnegan said, when she worked there, the homepage had 24,000 people on it every morning). It was eventually bankrupted by professional wrestler Hulk Hogan – secretly backed by the billionaire Peter Thiel – after Gawker published a sex tape featuring Hogan.
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