Gawker Media Group’s web properties practice honest, conversational journalism about stories—whimsical or serious, joyous or grotesque—that matter, or should matter, to our readers. Some stories rely on our own reporting and ideas, and some respond to news generated elsewhere. The same rules apply.
After the announcement that I was being named permanent executive editor of Gawker Media, and after Buzzfeed’s publication of its diversity statistics last month, we received renewed calls internally from editorial staff members for an accounting of the racial and gender diversity of our teams. We have gathered the data, and are publishing them here.
Our union drive has expressed at every stage of the process that one of our core goals is to protect the editorial independence of Gawker Media sites from the influence of business-side concerns. Today’s unprecedented breach of the firewall, in which business executives deleted an editorial post over the objections of the entire executive editorial staff, demonstrated exactly why we seek greater protection. Our opinions on the post are not unanimous but we are united in objecting to editorial decisions being made by a majority of non-editorial managers. Disagreements about editorial judgment are matters to be resolved by editorial employees. We condemn the takedown in the strongest possible terms.
Please don’t take me down.
In 2013, when Gawker Media sites moved to the new Kinja platform, a set of reader forums—including Groupthink on Jezebel, Observation Deck on io9, and Opposite Lock on Jalopnik—moved with them. Other reader sites sprang up on the same model. The result was a group of reader-run sites on Gawker Media website domains, operating outside our editorial supervision.
Gawker Media Special Projects Editor Alex Pareene and Executive Features Editor Tom Scocca have never watched the much-discussed AMC program Mad Men. Nevertheless, in honor of the show’s much-anticipated finale, we scheduled a roundtable discussion on Twitter.
On Saturday, Jezebel Editor-in-Chief Emma Carmichael will be speaking at the Columbia Women’s Leadership Conference. The afternoon will include a panel discussion of the significance of and accessibility to quality education and a keynote speech by Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues. Emma’s cooler than her, though.
We are the Gawker Politburo, the executive editors who supervise all Gawker Media sites. In lieu of an ombudsman, this is our clearinghouse for questions. Ask us anything about Gawker Media, except why you're in the gray. We'll keep this chat open indefinitely.
Fran Lebowitz's sartorial opinions are fun but the part of this interview to which everyone truly needs to attend is the part where she refuses to talk unless it's on a landline or in person. Mobile phones are worthless for interviews, or for anything beyond brief yelling, and it is past time to stop pretending.
Just a quick update on the performance of the related widget: It works very well!
Much of the mundane, day-to-day media coverage of the president's activities is conducted under an arrangement that Matthew Yglesias has called a "mutually agreed upon plagiarism pact"—the pool report. Convention dictates that a reporter bear witness to essentially everything the president does outside the White House, but it would be logistically unworkable and economically inefficient for each member of the White House press corps to follow the president around in a crowd at all hours. So the news outlets that cover him agree to set up a pool—a rotating cast of reporters from each organization is scheduled to be on call, and that reporter writes up a dispatch of the president's comings and goings that each publication can use in their own coverage, as they see fit, without attribution.
Today, Gawker Media filed a Freedom of Information Act complaint in U.S. District Court against the Department of State, seeking email correspondence between former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philippe Reines and members of the news media.
This is a regularly updated list of Gawker Media editorial employees who have taken steps to send and receive encrypted communications, with links to their public PGP keys and fingerprints. They are all reachable via email, or via Google Talk chat using the email addresses listed below. Their OTR fingerprints—for the OTR chat encryption protocol—are listed to aid verification if you engage them via instant message. For good instructions on how to install and use PGP and OTR encryption, go here and here.
If you've been wondering what sort of things you can expect of and request from Editorial Labs, let's walk through a sampling of the fruits of this department's first month.
