Gakwer corpse finally collapsing: good riddance I say
It seems like it’s finally the end of the road for the rotting corpse of the Gakwer media empire. The company’s new owners, G/O Media, are laying down the law, and it’s not going over well with the “journalists” working there. Many are now threatening to walk out or quit their jobs entirely if they’re forced to abide by the draconian rules being mandated from up top.
What are these rules? Stick to your beat.
Ever since Hulk Hogan leg dropped Gawker into submission, the site’s fractured former properties and have been run like a hose without a fireman. This has given their writers free license to write articles about anything they please. Hence why Deadspin is filled with political editorials and anti-Orange Man propaganda, instead of, you know, sports. The thing people are visiting the site for in the first place. Meanwhile, Kotaku seems to cover move social justice nonsense than they do actual video games these days.
Now G/O Media is telling employees that they can’t do this anymore. They already have a site for politics and social justice. Those stories don’t need to be on every other platform. If you write for Deadspin, you have to stick to sports, and if you write for Kotaku, you have to stick to video games.
Now, I’ve worked in the media business for quite a while now. This is a pretty normal practice across the board for “old media” publications. If you’re hired to write about a specific topic, you write about that specific topic. When I was writing for an online commuter magazine, I covered things like cars, public transit, and travel. I didn’t write about flower arranging or the finer points of dual-GPU systems, because that’s not what my audience was going there to read.
It’s a perfectly reasonable request from G/O Media, but the “journalists” working under them seem to think this is editorial interference. No, editorial interference is “don’t publish that story because it would make us or a shareholder look bad”. “Do your job you were hired for” is not editorial interference. That’s how every single job in every single industry works.
Journalists are also complaining about the company putting auto-play video ads on the sites. Which again, that’s not editorial interference. That’s a media company doing what it normally does. Selling ad space to whomever will pay for it. Yes, the ads are annoying, but that’s really for readers to decide, not the writers. Your job as a writer at a for-profit company is to write compelling articles that sell ad space. If you don’t like it, go work for NPR, PBS, or some college magazine that ends up in my recycle bin every month.
To be honest though, I do take great delight into seeing these sites collapse. The people working for them are activists masking as journalists, who spend their days pushing the most toxic and vile substances on the internet. Endless streams of click bait and rage bait, endless attacks on people who enjoy the hobbies they cover. “Woke” media sites across the United States are losing money, big time, as the fad dries up and people become increasingly annoyed at their antics. Good riddance I say.
