If Gawker Is Nice, Is It Still Gawker?

She also listed, in a document intended for freelancers, the sorts of things Gawker was no longer interested in, including articles that are “sanctimonious,” or “cruel,” as well as any piece that uses the word “neoliberal.” That is to say — quite a bit of what Gawker used to be.

I’d asked to meet Ms. Finnegan at her office, but she works from home and so I found myself at the small dining table in her second floor walk-up.

“I’m not interested in ruining people’s lives,” she said in a flat tone.

That marks a notable change from her time as the features editor of Gawker, in 2015, when her indiscriminate brutality included describing an infant as “hipster scum.” That one prompted a rebuke at the time even from Gawker’s rather coldblooded founder, Nick Denton, who wrote in the site’s comments section that the headline was “just nasty” and that she would regret it. Ms. Finnegan responded that she was speaking “my truth.” (Asked about the new version of the site he founded, Mr. Denton told me in a text: “Finnegan’s take on Gawker not my thing, back in 2015. No opinion on the 2021 revival.”)

Ms. Finnegan has come to this role after a career of starts and, mostly, stops. After running The Daily Texan, the student paper at the University of Texas at Austin, she landed — and then lost — jobs at Huffington Post and The New York Times. She was pushed out at Gawker after she confronted Mr. Denton over his decision to take down a story outing an obscure media executive as gay, and live-tweeted their dispute. It was a difficult run, all “self-inflicted,” Ms. Finnegan said.

And it turned out that Mr. Denton was right. She regretted what she had done. In a thoughtful mea culpa in 2019, she wrote that therapy and a snaggletoothed dog helped her find an alternative to a quest for authenticity that had turned her into an “antisocial, or mean” public person. She had been, she wrote, following the online mania for self-expression at all costs, the blogger credo to “be yourself.” Finally, in 2016, her therapist told her to “be less yourself.” She had been, she realized, “going through a righteous phase that unfortunately coincided with having a national platform.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/business/media/leah-finnegan-gawker.html