Gawker Is Back, Again, Kind Of ⇥ gawker.com

Leah Finnegan, Editor in Chief of the new Gawker:

Why did Bustle Digital Group want me to edit Gawker in the first place? Well, I was Gawker’s features editor from 2014 to 2015, before I was asked to leave because I live-tweeted a meeting during which Gawker founder Nick Denton hit his head on a lamp. From there I went on to be executive editor of The Outline, which was acquired by Bustle in 2019. Bustle immediately shut down The Outline when the pandemic started, for which I hold no ill will, because The Outline, while a very special site, made no money. I suppose my selling points as a potential editor-in-chief of Gawker were that I had previously worked at Gawker and Bustle and was unemployed. I was also willing to do it, which not many people can say. And I am a genius.

I am impressed that all of the old links appear to be working. There is a lot of history contained in URLs that begin with “gawker.com”. But this iteration of the website, as a product of Bustle Digital Group, uses the same deconstructed design language as Input and the Outline and Nylon and basically everything else BDG does. I think it spoils the bloggish appeal in the same way that the Onion became a bit less funny when it was migrated to the Kinja stack.