The Observer has just learned that Gawker blogger Seth Abramovitch was dismissed after a post that invoked a racial slur many considered to be in generally poor taste. Gawker.com editor A.J. Daulerio has confirmed: “Yes, he was fired.”
Seth Abramovitch—who previously worked for Gawker Media at Defamer, before the Hollywood vertical was folded into the main site, later returning to the company under Gawker.com’s recently-ousted editor Remy Stern—wrote a post last night about Kanye West going on a rant over Twitter.
Written at 1:28 AM, the post was titled “The Top 10 Kanye West Tweets About DONDA, His New Everything Venture.”
The offending passage read:
You think Tom Ford is full of himself? Kanye West shits Tom Fords for breakfast. Then he irons out the shits into cutting-edge fabrics, and frantically cuts, sews, and laces that fabric through the night and into the morning, until he has produced the most unbelievable clothes — nay, FASHION + ART = FARTSHION! — in the universe. And he calls these clothes DONDA. But he calls all that other stuff DONDA, too! DONDA will be your everything. Just you wait and see. And what is DONDA? It’s an acronym for Dis Original N***a Dresses Aight.*
Originally, the slur was not censored, nor was it given a strikethrough, as it has now. A correction below the passage was later added to read:
*DONDA is actually the name of Kanye’s deceased mother, not the acronym above, which was meant to be the kind of thing Kanye would make up in a late-night creative writing fit, but has offended many people. So sorry, to everyone who was offended, and for the confusion. Sorries all around!
Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio responded to The Observer‘s request to confirm that Mr. Abromovich was let go, but did not elaborate on whether or not it was explicitly because of the post in question, his last and most recent on the site. Mr. Abramovitch did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Related (tangentially) is Mr. Daulerio’s first post on the site since his tenure started, in which he noted Monday afternoon:
The only sites that will be left intact amid the smoldering embers of the brief Longreads revival will be a few of your lonely cousin’s FB-shared Buzzfeed links of newborn otters singing ukulele songs with Zooey Deschanel. That’s a damn shame, because I had hoped that during my brief stint as Gawker EIC I’d finally manage to get Denton to write that “Why I Like Black Guys” essay I’ve begged him to do for two years.
Mr. Denton acknowledged the line over Twitter:
Today, one supposes, would be as good a day as any to give it a shot.
With additional reporting by Kat Stoeffel.
fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek
