Hasta La Creative!

Gawker has always had the most delightfully codependent relationship with its readers. I do mean that in the psychological/clinical — i.e., unhealthy — sense. (And yes, I count myself among the unhealthily codependent.)

In its early days, a decade ago, the site focused on deconstructing a certain Manhattan-centric mind-set. It mercilessly poked fun at the absurdities rife in the media world, and in doing so served the needs of a media-industry readership that was always up for a little self-loathing. (Everybody loves bashing the media, but members of the media love doing it more than anyone.) It was very S&M.

That phase worked brilliantly — the media-chattering class became obsessed with reading Gawker. But as Gawker founder/owner Nick Denton's national and international ambitions grew, and he cycled through new editors and writers, his site's penetrating gaze drifted away from the usual suspects (because outside of the Manhattan media-world bubble, who really cares about, say, Tina Brown or Barry Diller?). Instead of just attacking pompous media mandarins, Gawker rather arbitrarily started ridiculing what would become known as “Gawker-famous” strivers — like Julia Allison, then a self-promoting 20-something editor-at-large at Star magazine with a tangled personal life (boyfriend problems!) that Gawker took great pleasure in exposing and exploiting. Allison got Gawker-famous enough that she ended up on the August 2008 cover of Wired magazine next to the headline “GET INTERNET FAMOUS! (EVEN IF YOU'RE NOBODY).”

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