Welcome to Gawkerland

Old media is generally infatuated with new media, but the obsession the New York media world had until 2007 with all things Gawker was something else again. After all, the blog was all about them, starting with the tagline “Manhattan Media News and Gossip,” and the reputation its writers had for viciousness, exceeded only by that of its commenters, made it as much fun to despise as it was to read.

But if the Establishment’s reaction to Gawker had always veered between horror and delight, by the beginning of this year it had congealed into disgusted indifference. In an article about editorial shakeups, the Times distilled the new conventional wisdom: founder Nick Denton’s efforts to broaden the site’s appeal beyond New York had driven it toward tabloid sensationalism; it had gotten meaner without getting funnier; it was no longer “useful” to the media insiders who had served as its audience. In short, Gawker had, as the Times headline put it, “jumped the snark.”

Or had it? Traffic certainly didn’t suffer: In fact, from July 2007 to July 2008 it almost doubled, and Gawker now gets ten million visits each month. But the deeper, slower change that has transformed Gawker can’t be measured in page views: It’s not just Gawker’s audience that’s grown, but its community as well. A site that seemed on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own misanthropy has become a place that brings people together, metaphorically — even physically: Its first two meetups were held this summer. The New York-media fishbowl could never have predicted this development, and it’s unclear whether they care or even notice. They’ve (mostly) gotten over Gawker, and Gawker’s (mostly) gotten over them.

In retrospect, the love affair was doomed from the beginning — before “Gawker commenters” even existed, let alone went to bars together — because it was premised on a misunderstanding of what Gawker actually was. The site’s basic formula for content was clear enough: Take the cast of characters from Page Six or the New York Observer, subject it to a zoom-lens scrutiny previously reserved for supermarket tabloids, and pickle the whole thing in the sarcastic irreverence of snark.

But this was the product as it was created, not consumed, and the only account of the latter came not from consumers but from the editors as well: The intended audience was New York’s “creative underclass” (think Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada), who read the site in commiseration as they toiled under the people the site mocked. Gawker succeeded, in other words, because it reflected and responded to the real Manhattan in which its audience lived and worked.

Attributing the site’s bilious schadenfreude to the frustrations of the “underclass” did make a lot of sense — especially after 2006, when comments were allowed on the site and the real underclass, finally given an outlet, began to out-snark those blogging on their behalf. But in the eyes of Gawker’s “victims” the nastiness was a secondary offense. The more heinous sin was the one that went unexplained: the “invasion of privacy” posed by features like Gawker Stalker, a map of Manhattan that marked locations and descriptions of recent celebrity sightings.

Perhaps this is because, despite its web 2.0 wizardry, the Gawker Stalker map is essentially a (high-tech) tabloid feature. Tabloids, after all, were the first to capitalize on the appeal of celebrity culture and the constant scrutiny that resulted: What was important was not the truth a photo exposed about its subjects’ private, “everyday” lives, but the illusion that by looking at that photo a reader could feel that much closer to those subjects physically (thanks to the zoom lens) and emotionally as their personal dramas played out over the pages.

Gawker Stalker takes this illusion an extra step: Not only does it turn celebrities into characters, but it places those characters upon a common stage — a stage that closely resembles the Manhattan in which much of its audience lives and works. It’s not actually Manhattan, of course, but an idealized version populated entirely with celebrities (and of course, by extension, the viewer). Then-editor Emily Gould had it right in 2007, when she defended Gawker Stalker by saying that “the Internet has created a new reality, and we’re all living in it together.” She was right: It was a new place — part internet fantasy, part office peon's nightmare; you might call it Gawkerland.

Gawkerland was never exactly the same place as Manhattan — it was closer to the “Big Apple” of urban fairytales like Sex and the City or Breakfast at Tiffany’s — and it was the difference — the fantasy — that made it interesting.

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