I really love zines. I’ve done a number of them over the years and I love the process of thinking them up and putting them out each month. And I know that under the right circumstances, I would probably have done well at the old Gawker.
Or, put another way — if there was some way for me to magically live in NYC, I probably would find myself making a name for myself one way or another because of what an extrovert I am. And, in all honesty, if I was in LA instead of NYC, then THAT would probably be a place where I would make a name for myself.
But now I’m old.
And I find myself thinking about what would actually happen if I became a success. I probably would be canceled for various things I’ve done and said while drunk. But whenever I think about that, I remember, “It is better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.”
So, I suppose I would rather suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling all day because I knew I am probably going to get canceled anyway.
It’s not one to one, but as a rule of thumb, the podcasting space is around the same level of development as blogging was around 2003. If I have my chronically correctly, I think Gawker Media was founded around 2002 – 2003.
Anyway, the point is — podcasting is still somewhat under developed. There is still room for a blow out podcast network to blow up out of nowhere. There are a few really powerful podcast networks floating around, but there remains a bit of excitement in the podcasting sphere.
There is a window of opportunity for something cool to happen. I doubt anyone will do anything about it, though.
This is all very moot for various reasons, but it is fun to idly daydream about this idea again. Listening to British duo “Wet Leg,” I can hear a deep music echo of the last time there was “good” music on the radio — that gauzy era known as “the 90s.”
Anyway, I keep thinking about the idea of a “vibe shift” and if it’s even possible for there to be one for various reasons. It’s a lot harder for a real vibe shift to happen than you might think. The reason is simple — for a vibe shift to happen, everyone has to be exposed to the same thing at the same time and make a collective decision as to what it all means.
So, yes, there may be the occasional general vibe shift, but I just don’t see there being a huge swings in vibes that happened up until the rise of social media. But, having said that, I was reading New York Magazine’s personality profile of the new Executive Editor of The New York Times, Joe Kahn, and it occurred to me we desperately need a new Spy-Gawker type publication to record this surreal post-Trumplandia world we live in.
I will note, as an aside, this passage from the piece, which definitely gives one some insight into who gets things published in New York Magazine.
Until last fall, I spent four years working at the Times, as a clerk for the columnist Maureen Dowd, whose only real input on this story was that she’d personally strangle me if I didn’t give Kahn a fair shake.
I mean, where’s snark?
The answer is, of course, snark is all over Twitter and no one cares about blogs anymore. Yet, it sure would be fun to have a blog that was obsessed with Julia Fox and mixed silly celebrity snark with biting media commentary. That’s just not going to happen. And if it does, I will be no where near it when it does happen.
But having said that, it continues to be extremely frustrating to me that I know that I could do something really interesting given the resources. We need a blog in the tradition of Late Night With David Letterman, Spy Magazine and Gawker. I just don’t see that ever happening again.
If it happens, it’s going to happen in, I don’t know, the metaverse or something. The era of print blogs is over. Long, long over. That will be the real vibe shift, when we’re so consumed by the metaverse that some snarky application of it will become popular.
What a curious state of affairs. Not only is rock dead, but it seems as though snark is, too. I occasionally look at Undead Gawker and am taken aback. That’s it? Undead Gawker is extremely boring. It doesn’t have any of the spunk (or punk) of the living Gawker.
Oh well.
It makes me wonder if This Is It. No matter how many vibe shifts we may have, because of modern sensibilities — and technology — we’re just never going to have what I thought we would always have — a snarky publication of some sort that comments on the day’s events.
It could be that if it happens, it will happen in the Metaverse. Now isn’t that going to be something. I have a feeling us Poors don’t appreciate how much Silicon Valley is sitting on its hands when it comes to investments as it waits for the kinks to get out of the Metaverse.
So, here we are.
No new Late Night With David Letterman. No new Spy magazine. And no new Gawker. We just have to wait until, maybe, until we’re all being snarking virtually with no legs.
It’s all very disheartening. Even more so when I know that I have the vision to pull off a new, real reboot of Gawker, but for, well, waves hand. Everything else in my life besides vision.
It’s really annoying to me that it’s pretty obvious there is a media niche that’s not being filled at the moment — a successor to Spy Magazine or Gawker. Now, some context.
Twitter has pretty much so absorbed the snark of Gawker that, lulz, it’s kind of pointless to try to start something that would be a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. As I keep saying, blogs are dead. Apps are dead. I get all my news passively from my Twitter feed. If I wan’t snark, I got to Twitter.
So, lulz, this is all moot.
And, yet, come to think of it, it would be nice as an Old to have a blog that was completely obsessed with Tik-Tok pop culture. It would be something of a companion piece to it. With that in mind, here’s what I would with Julia Fox.
Julia Fox is “the moment” as they say, and it would be fun to run around New York City with her. Have her wear a GoPro or something. Something, anything to be weird and different and NOT BORING. And, in that context, do a really up close and personal personality profile of Ms. Fox.
Anyway, absolutely no one listens to me. No one cares. It’s just irritating that I can see there’s a need for a new media outlet and yet I am, in real terms, powerless to do anything about it.
The Tik-Tok generation doesn’t really have a blog of its own. I’m old enough to see the progression from Late Night With David Letterman to Spy Magazine to Gawker to….uh…..nothing? And I use Tik-Tok a lot even though I’m an Old and it seem pretty obvious that Tik-Tok is Ground Zero for modern pop culture.
Julia Fox — Tik-Tok icon.
If you believe we’re in the midst of a “vibe shift” then it makes a lot of sense that the new vibe would have its own publication. It’s kind of sad that Gawker is now an undead husk of itself — even though the original version was fucking hateful and nasty before its demise.
Anyway, here’s what I would do. I would start a site that was ostensibly obsessed with Tik-Tok and the pop culture it flings off at an astonishing rate each day. But, I would also produce a lot of really interesting, serious commentary about other topics — politics, what have you. You get The Youngs hooked on this new blog by taking Tik-Tok deadly seriously, then prepare them for the Adult World by presenting them with hot takes on what’s going on in the broader world.
And, if I was involved, I would occasionally throw curve balls involving doing something silly with Julia Fox around New York City or whatever. Or maybe the occasional sexxy snap of this or that celebrity simply to be ornery. The issue is — do anything not to be meh. Not to be boring. The whole reason the blog would exist would be to provoke a response of some sort.
As best I can tell, Generation Tik-Tok doesn’t have its own Gawker at the moment. Of course, there is a risk that, lulz, by definition Generation Tik-Tok doesn’t want it’s own Gawker-like blog and fuck you.
Now, I’m not saying that I would be involved in this in any way, but just doing a back-of-the-envelope study of what I see in my Webstats and here’s my suggestion for how to start a successful new blog.
The first thing you would have to do is realize to manage your expectations. Blogs are dead. Apps are dead. We’re all in a holding pattern while we wait for the kinks to get worked out of the Metaverse.
And, yet, I think if you flipped the script some on your traditional blog that maybe, maybe you could pull it off. But you would need a wealthy patron to help you with the backend and marketing. Here goes, though.
My magazine in Seoul.
If you were actually going to try to start a new Gawker-like blog now, you would really have to focus on celebrity news. But here’s the catch — you would need two or three people on staff who would simply use Tik-Tok all day and then turn around and write stories about what trends they saw. Tik-Tok would set the blog’s editorial agenda.
As such, right now, such a blog would be doing profiles of Julia Fox — or, hell, even turn her into the blog’s de facto mascot like Julia Allison was with the original Gawker way back when.
The point is — the reason why the undead Gawker is so meh right now is it has no spunk, no snark and it’s not laser focused on what Generation Tik-Tok is interested in. That’s the thing I’ve noticed about the new, undead Gawker. It just seems kind of indifferent to what’s really going on with pop culture.
If you want to be a pop culture media outlet, you have to be on the cutting edge of what people are talking about, and by definition, that means you have to be obsessed with Tik-Tok.
Anyway, the point is — you use the pop culture element of the blog to hang all the rest of the blog’s content on it. Come for the Tik-Tok meme talk, stay for a snarky feminist polemic or maybe a sexxxy snap of Julia Fox doing whatever it is that Julia Fox is doing at any particular moment.
This is just me mentally masturbating on a Sunday morning. I have no money and, hell, I don’t have any friends. I guess I occasionally get frustrated because I know, given the opportunity — and resources — I could probably bring back the spirit of the old Gawker with a new blog.
I’m kind of drunk, but cognizant enough to give you my hot take on undead Gawker. The issue with undead Gawker is it’s trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist — I don’t know about you, but I get 99% of my content passively on Twitter these days. And, what’s more, the very thing that made the original Gawker both great and problematic — snark — has so become a part of Twitter culture that, lulz, undead Gawker is moot.
The Best of The Old Gawker
And, really, I don’t even know if my go-to solution to this moot problem — turning undead Gawker into a really cool Twitter clone with a paid staff — would even fix the problem. That ship has sailed. That window of opportunity is no more.
In fact, I would go so far as to say the entire content production universe is kind of in a holding pattern until the kinks are figure out with the Metaverse. Blogs are dead, if you will. Apps are dead, if you will. There’s just nothing going on right now.
It is simply impossible for undead Gawker to bring back the glory of the hateful old Gawker because that moment in media history has past. For Gawker to exist at all is a self-indulgent nostalgia circle jerk. Now, because I have a huge ego, I believe if they would like me write for them that I would at least make things interesting in my little corner of its online presence.
I may be a kook, but I’m at least a thought provoking kook. I’d be a really cheap hire and would love to do crazy, nutty things simply to get attention. Though, of course, either I would have to work remotely or they would have to pay for me to crash on someone’s couch in Brooklyn.
This reminds me — if I ever somehow magically found myself living in New York City, I would start up a zine again. It would be so much fun to see if I could create a successor to the Village Voice. The process of starting a new print zine is so much fun, especially the handing it out ot strangers part. I would stake out the New York Times building and hand the zine out, hoping one of their writers might like it so much that they wrote about it.
Bring back zines! And someone help me move to NYC! Wink.
Jesus Christ can I be a delusional dreamer at times. But one man’s delusion is another man’s dream, I guess.
Anyway, the point is, in a sense, undead Gawker is like undead Newsweek. It’s coasting off the fumes of its namebrand without much point. The old Gawker live in moment in time when blogs mattered. That moment in time is over. Bring on the Metaverse!
Absolutely no one listens to me. And I don’t have any money. But I do have vision and passion. I keep wanting to start a blog (or podcast?) and absolutely nothing ever comes of it. And, so, this is just another failed attempt at the moment. Until it isn’t.
There is a very specific beat, the “doom shit” beat, that I think needs to be covered extensively by a blog (or podcast.) If I could get New York Magazine or undead Gawker to either give me a job writing about this particular troubling situation or if they could just do it so I could read it, either one would be fine.
But, I’m a nobody. An absolute nobody.
I miss the old Gawker.
And, yet, my gut tells me that if you founded a blog (or podcast?) hyper focused on things like Steve Bannon’s podcast, or any number of other horrible trends floating around, I feel it would be a success.
I think I’m going to try to contact places like undead Gawker and New York Magazine to see if I can at least get them to hire someone, anyone to cover this beat so I can read their stuff.
So, I saw on Twitter where Gawker is accepting fiction of up to 5,000 words. I would be a such a thrill to get the validation associated with getting a short story published on Gawker.
And, yet.
It’s something of a cliché within my own mind is haters who say, “Why don’t you just write a short story” when they grow frustrated with how long I’ve been talking about writing a novel (or, now, novels) without anything to show for it.
First — those people can fuck off.
Second, however, it would be fun to have a diversion that required a tight in and out of storytelling. I have a number of ideas in my mind that could be turned into a screenplay that I could instead convert into a short story.
On one hand, the validation of getting anything published would be great but it would be far overshadowed by the thing on the other hand: my almost inevitable rejection.
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