Given the freakishly warm temperatures and steady Twitter mentions, it feels like the Summer of Gawker never ended.
Last night, Dayna Evans, a writer at NY Mag’s The Cut and a former Gawker staffer, published a lengthy reported piece exploring Gawker Media’s “Problem With Women.” The story was scheduled to run on Gawker but, after executive editor John Cook overruled recently-named editor in chief Alex Pareene and killed the story, it was posted on the Medium publication Matter.
Coincidentally, Gawker media announced a slew of staffing changes this morning. Katie Drummond is leaving Bloomberg Business, where she is currently deputy editor, to become editor in chief of Gawker Media site Gizmodo.
“Katie is a sharp and deeply experienced editorial talent, and she’s ideally suited to lead Gizmodo where it needs to go right now,” said a Gawker memo announcing the hire that went out this morning. “She has all the qualities that Gizmodo needs in a leader: Experience, curiousity [sic], enthusiasm, savvy about technololgy [sic] and its discontents, and a facility with telling stories and decoding the world through video, imagery, text, and any other medium available to her. She’s got an acutely wry sense of humor, doesn’t suffer fools, and is Canadian.”
(For whatever reason, no nationality is invoked as often in media hiring announcements as Canadian).
Gizmodo’s current editor in chief Annaleen Newitz is leaving the site for Ars Technica, where she will be tech culture editor.
“The story behind this particular story is that over the summer, Annalee quietly expressed a desire to get back to writing and hand over management responsibility for Gizmodo to someone new,” the memo explained. “We planned to (covertly) recruit a new editor-in-chief and transition Annalee to a role as the site’s face and marquee writer. Annalee gamely ran the search for her replacement, and waited until we had Katie in place to tell me that she had, after all, decided to take a job as a writer at Ars Technica.”
The news of Ms. Newitz’s departure was supposed to be coordinated, according to the memo’s petulant post-script, but things don’t always go according to plan:
A post-script: This announcement was planned, in conjunction with Katie and Annalee and Ars Technica, fornoon today. For some reason, Ars Technica didn’t honor its end of the agreement and issued a statement to Adweek this morning. I was really looking forward to news about an editorial transition here being communicated in an orderly fashion, without staffers reading about it first on the internet. I tried.
The hiring announcement included a news of a couple other staffing changes at Gawker Media. Gizmodo’s Michael Hession is going to The Wirecutter.
this is my last week at @gizmodo. i'm gonna go try to make shit look cool at this other site. you'll see!
— Michael Hession (@michaelhesh) November 16, 2015
Jezebel managing editor Erin Gloria Ryan is leaving the site to become deputy editor of Vocativ, where she will join former Jezebel editor in chief Jessica Coen, who recently became editorial director.
https://twitter.com/morninggloria/status/666277078757679104
These departures come shortly after two top Gawker executives, Erin Pettigrew and Andrew Gorrenstein, left the company.
This may be the Fall of Gawker, but it’s hard to tell given the unseasonably warm weather.
