by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
It’s times like these when I wish Gawker still existed. Gawker was felled, as you may recall, by its sheer hubris. It did not take very seriously a lawsuit funded by Peter Thiel. As the lawsuit progressed, Nick Denton, Gawker’s founder and publisher, couldn’t or wouldn’t realize struck at the very heart of his publication.
But the issue for me is that Gawker is sorely needed right now in this era of Trumplandia. I have romanticized Gawker’s golden age a great deal, but I still would like to think that if golden age Gawker would alive in this surreal age that we live in that the pee-pee tape would probably be on FOX News by this point.
The old Gawker really had a lot of spunk. You got the sense that you were hanging out with a really smart old friend who had seen all, done all and always had a smartass answer to the even the most jaded of events.
And, yet, over the years Gawker lost its way. It didn’t seem to have the spunk that it had when it first came out. It became less a really cool friend with something to say and more of an angry person drunk of success and arrogance.
The only thing is, Gawker was a one-stop-shop for the kind of content I was interesting reading. I can honestly say that since Gawker’s untimely demise, I don’t read any Websites except for Twitter and Facebook. What’s worse, it’s unlikely that any site will take Gawker’s place. The age of blogs is long dead and it’s highly unlikely you could start a new Gawker-like blog. The web universe is simply too large now and the money isn’t there anymore.
So, we’re just going to have to deal with the toxic waste of Twitter I guess. But for those of us who remember Gawker, we will have fond memories if nothing else.
