If Gawker Is Nice, Is It Still Gawker?

“I’m not interested in ruining people’s lives,” says its top editor, Leah Finnegan, who once insulted a baby in a headline.

By Ben SmithSept. 5, 2021, 8:25 p.m. ET

When I started talking with Leah Finnegan, the editor of the newly restarted Gawker, I asked her whether there wouldn’t be a conflict of interest: She had been inexplicably mean to me on the internet sometime around 2013. I couldn’t recall the details but worried she’d expect a hit piece in revenge. She didn’t remember the details, either, but shared the general recollection. “I was absolutely a terrorist,” she said in a level tone, before inviting me to her walk-up apartment in Park Slope for an interview.

Ms. Finnegan, 35, is like one of those reformed extremists from TV terrorism dramas who you think just might return, at any moment, to their old ways. You could say the same about her website, which symbolizes, depending on whom you ask, either the absolute worst of journalism or the best of the open internet. But she, and Gawker, both seem to be reformed — and the question now is whether there’s space for a more forgiving website in this confrontational moment.

From 2003 to 2016, Gawker sometimes spoke truth to power, and other times exposed people’s private lives or sex tapes for no reason. It evolved with the internet, moving from a kind of gleeful nihilism to a brand of self-righteous left-wing politics, breaking some news and shaping online discourse along the way.

When Gawker returned in July, Ms. Finnegan posted a note to readers that, in a revisionist interpretation of what the site had been in its heyday, emphasized a side of it that tends to be forgotten: It was funny.

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...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/business/media/leah-finnegan-gawker.html?smid=tw-share