5 years ago today, @keanesian made me her lawfully wedded husband. I'd love to say it was the best day of my life, but the fact of the matter is that it was simply the beginning of a five year run filled with an uninterrupted string of the best days of my life. Thanks for saying yes that night at Puppies all those years ago, and thanks for being you. I loved you then, love you even more now, and will always continue to love you with everything I've got. (at The Coveleigh Club)
After nearly fourteen years of operation, Gawker.com will be shutting down next week. The decision to close Gawker comes days after Univision successfully bid $135 million for Gawker Media’s six other websites, and four months after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal campaign against the company.
Did you know that I was hired to run Gawker.com in late 2007? True story! Then Nick changed his mind and decided to run it himself. That dizzying sequence of events should have signaled to me that working alongside (and, in a lot of ways, directly competing with) Nick at Gawker Media wasn't going to be a great fit for me, personally or professionally, but I still spent the next 11 months and change of my life giving all I had to (the now defunct) Defamer. That ended badly —as most things at Gawker tend to— but even that life-souring experience doesn't change the fact remains that Gawker was the epicenter of my world for much of the Aughts.
Gawker was the spherical object that all of us who were trying out this "blogging" thing in those days orbited around. People like Lizzie Spiers and Choire Sicha were my personal objects of aspiration, and it was through this blogger solar system (God I really wish I had chosen a different metaphor) that I developed many of my closet relationships. Most of these started out as "internet" friendships, a lot of which blossomed into IRL friendships (not to mention a few IRL frenemies). Without the momentous impact that Gawker.com had on the media landscape, I can safely say that I have no idea where I would be or what I would be doing today. Nick's successes inspired and enabled me, along with hundreds (thousands?) of others I know, to breach the gates of the biggest media companies in the world. Mostly, I think, this was a good thing. (It certainly was for me.)
So, basically, what I'm trying to say here is thanks. Thanks to Nick and Choire and Jessica and Jesse and Alex and Emily for all that they accomplished during those first five formative years of Gawker.com, and to Lock, too, for his shadowy work behind the curtains. I only wish that Lock's couch (RIP) still existed so we could all get together to see the sun come up one last time. In lieu of that, see you all at the Magician, I guess?
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