What Gawker Taught the World Of Media

Gawker.com is no more.

This past week, the founder of Gawker, Nick Denton, announced that he would be selling the long-running site to Univision. Denton exits stage left to pursue other opportunities not by his own accord and Univision gets a still hot media property to add to its portfolio as it continues to mount world domination with younger, bi-lingual speaking and mobile audiences.

It's hard to tell what may happen with the digital world of media right now. It seems to be trying to find its place like a 14-year-old trying to figure out what his or her place in this world is among his or her peers.

Also for everyone who thinks Gawker began with the intention to be all snark, all the time, you don't understand the environment in which Gawker was born. The case with the majority of business analysis (especially around media and tech) is people rarely look at the history or path in which a business navigated. They simply look at the "instant" data available and try to configure the entire history of an organization on that one moment. It's a very biased way to view the world, but one we usually take in this narrow lack of attention and detail we face because we don't have the discipline to truly analyze how a business evolved over time or the contextual circumstances it endured.

So let's back track. Gawker was born in New York City in 2002, not Silicon Valley in 2016. There wasn't much money in online news sites powered by a blog then as much as there is in doing one now. The reasons were different. In 2002 the world was entrenched in the desktop era. This was pre-iPhone, pre-Android, pre-mobile, pre-Broadband, pre-WiFi as we know it today.

It was also a pre-cloud computing era. If you ran a site you had to figure out how to get a server, how to hire an IT consultant and how to monetize content. It was a big hassle, there was no video pre-roll advertising, YouTube was barely a blip on the radar and it was very expensive as your website traffic grew and very different from the producerist "I am a digital writer, videographer, podcaster, blogger that stores my data on a very affordable domain" world that is commonplace today.

Today's reasons for why journalism has a hard time living in our digital world has more to do with ad blocking, bot takeovers, staff reductions and changes in media consumption more than the issues Gawker dealt with at the time. Denton was navigating a world still not on the digital transformation voyage. That ship is still departing for many industries right now and didn't really take off in the journalism world until 2007/2008 when Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube helped redefine traffic to news sites and banner ads still weren't anathema and good sources of revenue.

What fascinates me about the fact Gawker got started in 2002 is because that's the same year I started my own consulting business in my Brooklyn apartment. I had left the music industry a disgruntled digital employee who felt the executives didn't understand the power of MP3 technology. And of course it took the world of tech to shape that narrative for them. My business was powered by a Compaq desktop and a website domain with server costs powered by a remote team. I tried to provide consulting services in the emerging world of reputation economics that now exists as a norm in the social web. My business tried to do "influencer marketing," such a tired term now, yet a term no one even understood back then (much like the term "blogging") and that I had printed on my business card so it read "Lifestyle and Influencer Marketing" (people understood "lifestyle marketing" more). But it went nowhere. I barely could eat and if it weren't for my now spouse Allison, I probably would be homeless. Now, 14 years later, the influencer relations industry is growing in momentum. Much of that is due to the changes in behavior as a result of advertising. Ads don't matter anymore. Instead, influence has taken a primary role in how people make purchasing decisions.

Meanwhile, the world of Denton, well, it's shrinking in momentum. Much of it the polar opposite of why influencer relations is growing. Ad revenue is drying up and it's hard to live on clickbait journalism beyond it being lucrative for a few sole proprietors.

But what can we learn from how Denton (who also started his business in his Manhattan apartment that same year as me) approached a world entrenched in big media and reshaped it into something radically different from over a decade ago?

Many say Gawker is responsible for "click-bait journalism" and "shaming" journalism that has scorched the web. This is a tactic in how to get the most traffic to a story on your site usually by using appropriate or more likely inappropriate headlines with trivial stories to create demand. It's commonplace now on every site far and wide from The New York Times to Breitbart. What's worse, it's used by every content marketer in the business and even posts on LinkedIn (gasp!). But Gawker didn't just do this to create a fuss. They didn't plan to run their outlet in this manner and be some big influential media titan. No one ever starts a business like that.

You have to remember the circumstances in which Gawker was founded. This was New York City in 2002. The era of the post dot com bubble. An era of a recession where 9/11 one year earlier had taken its toll on the city and creative industries like music, fashion and publishing were feeling the pinch. To Denton and crew, the snark that led to its demise came really from this "We're not traveling above 14th Street to your party" and "New York City is the center of the universe" personality that you only would understand if you've lived in New York. It was like being at CBGB in 1977 or seeing Grand Wizzard Theodore in the Bronx at that same time. The rest of the world had no clue what this upstart was about to do to rumble and disrupt the rest of the media world forever.

Ultimately Gawker grew with much controversy surrounding it. How it grew was interesting. Word of mouth and on the back of search and social we take for granted today. It ran crazy stories no other outlets would ever touch. Some of them were flagrant, others led the way in investigations that should have been broken by larger publishers. If you were at a party in those post dot-com days people asked if you had heard about it. If you were living in Brooklyn prior to the Brooklyn, Inc. era the borough is in now you always heard at least once at a gathering, "I have to send you this link to this story on Gawker." Gawker was as New York as the Knicks, the Brooklyn Bridge, Hip-Hop, Punk Rock, Bagels, The Ramones and The Beastie Boys.

This personality, mixed with Google searches, shares of URLs via email and ultimately shares on the social web helped fuel its growth no different than how tech platforms grow now. When people say Buzzfeed and Upworthy grew on the back of Facebook and Twitter, they ultimately owe that to Gawker blazing that trail for them. And as it grew it expanded and diversified its content properties: Jezebel, Lifehacker, Deadspin, Gizmodo to name a few. No different than how Business Insider and Mashable have diverse outlets for different types of their journalism.

I guess it is true that good artists copy, but great artists steal.

Now it's all over. Buried and done. Rolled into a corporate media parent after over a decade of operating independently. But if there's one lesson Nick Denton inspired me to think about in my Brooklyn apartment back in 2002 while he was toiling away in his SoHo apartment to change journalism forever, it's that what you needed in the 20th Century to be influential is not what you need at all to be influential now. A printing press and trucks to cart your newspaper around town? Fuhgetaboutit.

Denton showed instead of industrial-sized big media power, all that is required in the 21st Century world of journalism for better or worse is an idea, some good prose by starving writers, a twisted sense of humor, some inside scoops, a web domain and a powerful server.

Oh, and some crazy headlines.

The rest, as they like to say, is history.

Geoffrey Colon watched the rise of the early tech titans in New York's Silicon Alley while living in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan; Astoria, Queens; and Park Slope, Brooklyn. He now resides in Seattle, WA and is author of Disruptive Marketing: What Growth Hackers, Data Punks, and Other Hybrid Thinkers Can Teach Us About Navigating the New Normal. He is a communications designer at Microsoft where he works on search advertising products for Bing Ads.