The Press Box - Colin Kaepernick and Nike’s Commodification of Wokeness | Damage Control (Ep. 524)

Episode Date: September 13, 2018

The Ringer’s Kate Knibbs and Justin Charity try to parse the meaning of Nike’s recent ad campaign featuring free-agent NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick (01:24). Then, they discuss the reboot of Gawker and the potential impact new owner Brian Goldberg might have on the content of the site (22:36). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly. I want to tell you about our great football coverage on the Ringer podcast network. Every Monday, Bill Simmons and Cousin Salle recap the weekend and guest next week's NFL lines on the BS podcast. On Wednesday mornings, Ryan Rusillo hits the hardest angles in college and pro football on our new podcast, dual threat. And on Wednesday nights, Cousin Sall and the degenerate trifecta figure out the best gambling angles on against all odds. And five times per week, the Ringer NFL show reacts to the latest news with Kevin Clark, Robert Mays, Tate Frick, Brazier, Mike Lombardi and the Danesie football crew. Subscribe to the BS podcast, dual threat against all odds, and the Ring Your NFL show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Justin Charity.

I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. Gawker is coming back from the dead. Sort of. There are plans to bring back a controversial website, and these plans are. are questionable at best. But first, Colin Kaepernick's Nike ad

definitely caught our attention. We're going to talk about responses to the ad. We're going to talk about the ad itself. We're going to figure out what it all really need. Nike recently made the civil rights activist and NFL player, I should say inactive NFL player, Colin Kaepernick, the face of its Just Do It campaign.

You know, Just Do It is the iconic Nike tagline, iconic Nike campaign, and this year happens to be the 30th anniversary of the Just Do It Campaign. So the tagline for Kaepernick's believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. That's the tagline, an image ad and in the video ad, the TV commercial that Kaepernick stars in. And a lot of people are riled up. a lot of people who, I mean, first of I should say, the ad is encouraging to a lot of people who stand with Kaepernick and who stood with him throughout his police brutality protests, kneeling during the national anthem at NFL games. You know, it's encouraged a lot of people.

It's also irritated a lot of people who wish that Colin Kaepernick would just shut up and play football or not even play football at this point. And you basically have a lot of conservatives across the country setting their Nike apparel on fire. I saw a guy who set his shoes on fire while he was wearing them. It was not a good. Well, he didn't just, I should say, shout out to that one guy who set his shoes on fire while wearing them. And then did, in fact, share images of his feet at the hospital. His skin peeled off and charred. So that's where we're at right now

in terms of Nike and Colin Kaepernick and the protests. And it's sort of getting out of control now. There's a mayor in Louisiana who banned Nike. Kate, you want to elaborate on this story a little bit? I know that he banned local facilities from buying Nike equipment

because he was angry about the ad. Right. I do believe there was also a story. in Denver that sort of decided to sell all its Nike equipment at a discount because they were mad about the ad. There's been a lot of... Get on clearance sales. Yeah, there's been a lot of really weird protests of the ad. Right. And this is all because Kaepernick, you know, is the figurehead for these, the protests at NFL games during the national anthem of players kneeling as a statement about police brutality, right? It's this, this iconic...

post Black Lives Matter form of protests. So white people are lighting their shoes on fire. I don't really, functionally, I have trouble understanding with this. I should say sports fans have done this before. I've done it in more trivial contests. I remember they were burned with bronze jersey and I feel like people accidentally set themselves on fire during that. But that was like a less political, let's say.

I'm not going to lie to you. I distinctly remember during like the Bulls dynasty in the 90s, my mom got all these like Seattle Supersonics apparel and we stuff, we like built a supersonic's effigy and lit it on fire. That had nothing to do with politics. We just hated the Seattle Super So white people have definitely been burning athletic equipment for dubious reasons for a long time. Like I can personally attest to that.

Well, burning it to oppose a protest movement against police brutality is certainly a height of burning athletic apparel culture. I think those people are just going to have to replace their Nike. Yes. But it, you know, coincidentally, Nike's online sales, at least sales

in their web store are up like 31% since they unveiled the ad with Kaepernick and we'll unveil the whole campaign with Kaepernick. But meanwhile, Kaepernick is seemingly blacklisted by the NFL. That's sort of what makes this

complicated to me, right, is Kaepernick is out of work, basically. And so Nike has come along and said, well, you know, we got to just do it campaign. We got to run. You can be the star of that. And we're obviously going to pay millions of dollars to be the starring role in this advertisement campaign.

And so, in a way, it's like, Cap has, I think the tricky question of Kaepernick is that he really, he sacrificed a career. And Nike has stepped in, as this sort of corporate benefactor. Yeah, it's uncomfortable.

I definitely don't blame him for taking money from Nike because he is effectively blacklisted from his chosen profession. I see it from his perspective as this is an opportunity to have a really powerful backer help spread his message. I definitely wish that the Nike commercial had like touched on police brutality against black people. Like it didn't really. It just sort of... Yeah, the advertisement is very, you know, I should say, Kaepernick, he narrates the main commercial. Yeah, but it's all like, it's very like, if people say you can't do something, you should do it. You know, it's like that's

like all of these vignettes about, um, if people say you're bad at basketball, just play basketball some more and then you'll be the Bronj Jane. You know what I mean? It's that kind of, the commercial is that kind of sentiment. And so it's like, you take believe in the, something, even if it means sacrificing everything as a tagline. And you look at Kaepernick and you understand what the stakes of that are in his specific instance. But then the Just Do It campaign universalizes that sentiment to be about athletic commitment. You know, it's very targeted at kids in a way too.

It's like you should you should try your hardest and do your best so that you can excel. And that's a, again, it's like an appropriate message, but it also feels like a, a reductive, again, it's like a childification of what Kappernick's specific usage of that sort of messaging would be. Yeah, it's definitely turning very pointed activism into advertorial for shoes. Right. Why do you think Nike bought into this? Because I think Nike knew that this would result in. in a sales bump.

Or, I mean, they couldn't know for certain. Obviously, it was a gamble in terms of, like, how this campaign would be received. But, like, Nike is Nike. Michael Bowman, who's like our very smart sports writer colleague, wrote about this. And one thing that he wrote that really stuck with me was he said, you can't build a multi-billion dollar company from scratch in 54 years if social justice is anything approaching a primary concern. companies like Nike are by nature aggressively amoral.

And I think he's spot on. And I think that Nike assessed the situation and determined that more people would buy Nike shit because of this ad. Right. And that was the bottom line. If they assessed the situation and thought that more people would buy Nike shit, if their ad was like... Stand for the assum. Yeah. We stand for the way.

Then they would. Like, I don't think that someone at Nike is. is like actually invested in this cause. Or maybe they are, but they're not invested in this cause above selling Nike shop. Actually is an interesting word in that case because, I mean, they are actually invested in so much as investment is paying Pollackabinet. That is an actual investment. But it's more like are they spiritually or are they politically invested? And if anything, I think there are two ways to look at it, right?

It's like at best you can say they're maybe not politically invested in the same way or in the same spirit that Kaepernick is, but they're sort of like passively financially invested in it. And at worst, you can look at Nike and say, in the long term, does this actually undermine the messaging? Does this undermine Capp's outlook on his protests as a way to get more people talking about police brutality? if the Nike advertisements are going to come along and recontextualize his words as being about like encouraging kids to play tennis or whatever. I don't think it will actually water down his message. I think this was pretty smart on Capp's part too. I think that in a different like cultural moment, it would. Like in the 90s when people or pre 90s, I don't know, when selling out was more of a thing and people weren't so used to like the commodification.

of ideas. It would be potentially, like, detrimental to the cause. And I think he's definitely, I mean, I'm sure there's, like, some people who are purists who are like, this is bullshit. And they're not wrong, but they're also, like, from his perspective of trying to get his message out there and also just, like, live in the world. Like, he doesn't have a job. Taking on this sponsorship, I think, was, I don't think it's going to hurt his cause.

Yeah. What do you, what do you think? I, it's weird because I feel very, and I know we come here with stark opinions about the issues of the day. But I actually do feel, I don't know how this ends. You know, I know what I think about it in terms of it stressing me out, that corporations can sort of buy financial stakes and activist movements that theoretically should exist as like critiques of a system.

Yeah. But it, I do look, he sort of, if you view Kaepernick, through the lens of formal politics, then he's very much doing the like operating within the system. You know, he's that type of person. And yeah, you're right.

It is easy to, I think from a more radical perspective, look at that and say, that's insufficient or that's ineffectual in the long term. And I totally get it. It's hard for me to know how this ends. It's hard for me to know whether Nike linking with Kaepernick add some or restore some popular legitimacy.

to his form of protest. You know what I mean? It's like Nike is big, but the NFL is also big. And Donald Trump's Twitter feed is also big. And to me, I look at it as like, Nike, again, on a personal level, is giving money to a civil rights activist.

But I just think in Kaepernick's overall context, it still seems like the both popular consensus and the moneyed consensus is that Kaepernick is wrong. and should be out of sight and out of mind. I don't know if it is the popular consensus, though. I'm sorry, I don't mean like that. I just mean that, like, you're right, popular consensus.

Because people are buying, like, people like this campaign. So at least as far as Kaepernick getting people to buy Nike shoes, he's doing something right? Like, I think it's very divided. What I'm saying is I don't think you, I have a hard time imagining, like, remember the Titan style, right? I have a hard time imagining 50 years from now being at an NFL game and people looking back on this particular moment in time when like Mike Pence and everyone else thinks that these protests are just the worst and how dare you do this? I have a hard time imagining this particular sports culture growing to a point that the culture ultimately concedes that it in 2018 was on the wrong side of history. you know like that's what sort of stresses me out about all this like I just can't really imagine the cultural shift of the NFL as an institution and a lot of its audience coming to understand

what cap is even talking about in the first place do you think that the Nike campaign is at least maybe helping with that that's the thing I don't know like I don't know that not even on a level of Nike is a big corporation I'm skeptical I just mean even in terms of the framing even in terms of if you watch the advertisement, if you set aside your fundamental concerns with Nike, and you just say, okay, well,

how are they executing the campaign? I don't know that the execution of the campaign seems like it is helping, right? Like, again, the main thing it's helping is it is helping their sales a bit and, like, their web sales,

but I don't know that that's the same as it's helping mainstream caperick's political priorities with regard to the concerns, of its target or of the sports demographic. I don't know if this makes sense, but I think it's like helping with Kaepernick's, like, the idea of a football player as an activist, I think it's helping mainstream that. I do think that his actual point is getting lost. Like, I don't think it's helping people think about the fact that police brutality

like is happening. Right. And that's, but that's sort of the insidious thing, right? It's sort of the Muhammad Aliization of Colin Kaepernick, where it's like the thing I worry that Nike will do is instead of, it'll pay Kaepernick is an activist and an advocate. They'll pay him personally, but they'll pay him in the process of, again, transforming his political messaging and his priorities

into something bland and palatable, such that like, I don't know, like what I can't imagine is instead of 50 years from now, you know, white people and stands at NFL games looking back and being like, yeah, that was a dark period in, you know, the history of the NFL that, you know, people didn't, people weren't receptive to what he was trying to underscore about police brutality and racial injustice. What I can't imagine is people looking back and sort of retconning Kaepernick is this just like bland. Like Martin Luther King. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Muhammad Ali, which is sort of like, yeah, you know, he was rebellious and he was just like generically rebellious. Yeah.

Wasn't that cool? Because Muhammad Ali is like the whole image of him. It was a draft dodger who hated white people. I know. The whole image of him has been so intensely softened over the years. Yeah, I mean, I could see that happening. I don't know. Yeah, I go back and forth like the, the like radical leftist part of me.

like my politics say that the campaign is really gross because I just think that aligning with Nike is not the right thing to do like if I'm being a purist. But then I'm I mean I'm not actually a purest and I look at it and I'm like well this might end up being a good thing like for the world. I don't know. It's a good thing for Nike which is gross. But if it's a good thing for CAP,

if it's a good thing for the message he's trying to spread, then I guess I don't care if Nike makes more money. Also, I'm saying this while wearing Nike shoes. Like, I'm a hypocrite. They're cool. They're cool. But like, I guess I'm waiting to see how it all shakes out. It does, it is like kind of telling that Nike is already, like,

experiencing this huge boost and Kaepernick still is not playing football. Can you think, I'm trying to think his. historically of when does a corporate brand serve to do anything other than sort of leverage political movements or political ideas toward like totally um castrating them and like again turning them into instant oatmeal? I mean, I think that a lot of like like Apple really, it wasn't a political movement, but it really tapped into this sort of like idea of counterculture. Yeah.

That's a funny thing to say in 2018, Apple and counterculture. It did, though. Yeah, it did. Yeah, it did. Yeah. And I don't think that Apple has done anything to advance any sort of counterculture. In fact, Apple's like whole MO is getting people to just exist in an Apple ecosystem. Right.

I mean, Apple became the megaculture in a way, or at least in a lot of circles. Isn't it worth a trillion dollars now? Yeah. Yeah. So that's like the first example that springs to mind. I'm sure that there are others, though. Right. It just seems like that's the general rule is that corporate, again, it's, you can see the appeal.

At step one, the appeal is apparent of corporate brands with youthful demographics in mind, appealing to protest movement and protest style, like, you know, protest aesthetics to use, you know what I was thinking of too? Do you remember probably in like, I think it started in 2015 and then really ramped up in 2016, but a lot of like fashion brands sort of like commodifying feminism, like the future is female. And then there was also this whole thing where Balenciago was like making Bernie Sanders apparel. I don't remember that.

It was like Bernie Sanders. Oh, no, I got to go on eBay. No, there was like this weird, there was this weird thing where like it became very. Is Balenciaga doing that ironically? I don't know. I mean, that's like totally over my head. But there was this whole movement like recently of trying to tap into like female feminist rage and just what happened with the election. And there was all this merchandise you could buy that was like feminist themed but really did nothing but like enrich the sellers of the merchandise.

The money that was made was not being. needed to like causes. It was literally just people being like, people will buy these shirts that say I'm a feminist. Right. And then... And then in contrast with that, like, Nike's not even going that way. It's not like Nike... Does Nike have any feminist gear? Well, what I just mean that like, they... Okay, so they tap Kappernick.

But it's not like Nike now is selling fuck the police t-shirts. You know what I mean? Like, that's not... I just want to be clear, like, the people burning their shirts or whatever. They're burning like white socks with a black Nike check on them. So that's why... That's part of what makes the potential here, the sort of the rebellious... potential of this campaign seem limited outside of just, again, rehabilitating, commercially

rehabilitating Colin Capric. And maybe, you know what, maybe that's worth it. But I just, I do think that in the long term, yeah, you look at what I think popular culture does to civil rights figures over time. And I think in most cases, they dedicate media that includes advertisement, it includes television and film. It almost always, I think, strips those figures of their contacts and strips them of their radicalism in an effort to turn them into these like bland. Markitable. Yeah, like bobbleheads, basically. So do you think that this is sort of like an acceleration of that impulse?

Like Kaepernick five years from now is just going to be like a feel good figurehead? Ten years. Oh, God. Give it 10 years. Oh, man. Well, one thing that made me like, I'm going to try to end the segment on a slightly positive note. Like while I was reading about this, again, Bowman sort of acknowledged the fact that there might be a slight silver lining of this whole thing. And he wrote, immoral, though it may be, Nike apparently believes that people who believe in racial equality are more numerous and more passionate than those.

who oppose it. So basically he was saying that whatever, for whatever, whatever else happens in this whole thing, it's like slightly comforting to know that Nike assumed that there are people who like Kaepernick and his message and that they outnumber those who are like lighting their feet on fire. Yeah, if only because, you know, the movement of people are setting their feet on fire. I feel like natural selection maybe doesn't fit for them in the long run. Yeah, if your feet are all burnt off, you don't need sneakers. Instigating a race for, meanwhile, it's like you can't even get drafted because your feet were burnt off. Like, oh, man.

So for any listeners who did not have the internet before 2016, I'm just going to do a little spiel about what Gawker was. It was a media-centric website that existed from the early 2000s, until 2016. It was a good website. Yeah. It made some mistakes, but it also pursued some really interesting journalism. I'm also just going to say right now that I'm pretty biased because I worked for Gawker Media for two years. Yeah.

So, like, just to be clear, I have an opinion about Gawker and that it's that it was largely good. But it was bankrupted in 2016. Hulk Hogan sued the company for publishing an article that included a very short clip of his sex tape and a description of it. And Hulk was actually bankrolled by Peter Thiel, a libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire who didn't like Gawker's coverage of technology and in the valley. and long story short, the company ended up getting sold to Univision, but the gawker.com website went dormant. No one would really touch it. They thought it might be too toxic. People were sad, myself included.

And now it seems like Gawker is coming back, which you think people would be happy about, but they're not. I'm not. I'm worried. I think it's going to be kind of a nightmare because a man named Brian Goldberg, who's like an entrepreneur who owned Bustle, which is like a large female-centric media company, he bought the site and is relaunching it. And it's going to apparently go live in 2019. That news just broke this week.

So I wanted to talk about it because I really like don't see any way that it's not going to be a disaster, but I'm hoping you can talk me out. Are you optimistic about this at all? Okay. Am I after? Well, okay. What's the, I think there is a common sentiment among web journalists. It'll be in a really bad political newsweek, like a really bad Trump news week.

And I'll see someone say it. And they'll say it like a prayer to the stars. They'll be like, I miss Gawker. Or like, it would be really great to have Gawker now. So what is the, what is the case for resurrecting Gawker? Because I think people feel like it's one of those, we need Gawker now more than ever. ever type situation. Well, I think like the reason why people miss Gawker and the case for relaunching it are different.

Like, I think that the people, reason people miss it is that the website did a lot of really good political journalism. It exposed Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's crack addiction. Yeah. There was a lot of really smart writing just like about the political climate in general and how it interacted with media. Um, Ashley Feinberg, uh, my genius weirdo friend, uh, uncovered James Comey's Twitter account and sort of solve the mystery of Donald Trump's hair. Um, one of the big benefits of Gawker was that they, it wasn't really beholden to anyone. So it could go after powerful figures without worrying about offending them at all. Like that was not an access. I think it's how we should be. It had its knives out. Yeah. And. And. And people want that kind of journalism now.

Right. So that's why people miss it. Also, it was like one of the only funny websites besides the ringer.com, obviously. But like there's not a lot of places that are regularly publishing funny stuff. I think Crystal is funny. In a way. Yeah. But in a very different way that Gawker was funny.

So that's like the argument for bringing why people miss it. Yeah. I don't know what the real argument for bringing it back is because it's obviously not going to be the same. And I believe that, I mean, I'm assuming that the argument for bringing it back from like Brian Goldberg's perspective is that it could potentially be a profitable media business. Right. Let's talk about Brian Goldberg. Yes. Who is this man?

Well. Gawker has covered this man. Yeah. It's kind of interesting because like Brian Goldberg ended up being a character in some Gawker narratives because he was sort of famously. pompous. He was a lot of the things that Gawker disliked. He was very good at marketing himself, but not as good at delivering the goods. I don't know. So he founded Bustle. He also owned Elite Daily, which I actually wrote very negatively about Elite Daily when I worked for Gizmodo because they stole my identity. Like they stole a picture of me. What?

Elaborate on this. Yeah. It was so weird. Well, elaborate on this. Wait a minute. One day people were like, someone came up to me and was like, why are you writing for Elite Daily? And if you don't know what Elite Daily is, it's sort of like a clickbait factory for millennials. And I was like, I don't write for Elite Daily.

And they were like, well, here's an article that you wrote. And it was some bullshit. And it had my name and like my actual biography. And so I tried to like get all this content removed and it was a whole thing. It wasn't like, it was this this dude who had this whole scheme where he would take writers' identities and then like get paid by impersonating them. But like elite daily didn't exactly do a great job of vetting that it was really me. And so I was I was mad at them. So anyways, Brian Goldberg used to own only daily.

So that's like one strike against him. That is interesting. That sounds less than that. than ideal. That sounds a little shady to me. I'll say, so you have Brian Goldberg's attempt to revive in some form

Gawker. But it's like meanwhile, the, the journalists that, it's like you said, I think people associate Gawker with a specific sort of journalism and specific feats of journalism, and the former Gawker journalist, who I will refer to as the Gawker diaspora, they are spread throughout

media now. It's not like, so Gawker, died. Gawker was killed as a website. The journalists of Gawker still largely, not all of them, but they work in media and they work in prominent web publications. So I think it's additionally strange

that Brian Goldberg is going to sort of corpse revive this website. When meanwhile, the people who actually define that website and its voice and its accomplishments work elsewhere. And I think that creates this weird tension between the people who are actually there for Gawker and know

what the DNA of Gawker is versus whatever that Brian Goldberg Yeah, because the thing about Brian Goldberg is that sensibility-wise, he could not be more far off. I mean, maybe he'll hire all the right people. Maybe he'll bring back some people.

Maybe he'll just find new voices. It's very rare that I'm like rooting against a new media company. You're a big hearted person. Well, I want more good stuff to read online. Like, that's the bottom line. I just want more things that I like to come into my eyeballs when I'm looking at a screen. Right.

But I just don't see how this is going to work because Brian Goldberg's, like, whole MO has been pursuing this sort of toothless, you might be a millennial if new journalism. Right. It's just so antithetical to like the original mission or even the. I mean, Gawker evolved a lot over the years, but it's not, it doesn't line up with any iteration of it that I could ever imagine. So I am dubious. Although I got to say, like, a lot of media companies are helmed by jerks. And jerks that unlikely figures, right?

It's weird, right? It is weird to just hold, I guess it's all we have for now, because we don't know who the writers for such a hyper, or editors for a hypothetical site would be. So we only have this guy. but that is also weird if you applied it to other media companies it wouldn't totally hold up

as like a website is necessarily represented by the person who owns it or whatever like you know what I mean that's not necessarily how it always works like I think there are people at Gawker who have like complicated feelings about Nick Denton the founder of Gawker

you know and yeah so it's not like I don't want to completely write it off because I don't know who he's going to hire and they might be great. But it just seems like a really poorly conceived idea because you're always going to have to live up to this thing that has sort of become a legend. Like when you were saying that people are always invoking Gawker as like, oh, I miss this entity.

Right. And especially in this political moment, in this chaotic post-drunk political moment, it's like designed for Gawker in some ways. Yeah, I kind of think that like that's more powerful then it's more powerful dead than it would be turned into a zombie. So you were talking a second ago about just as a reader wanting more good content. And that's why you root for web companies in general.

I think of it differently. I think of Gawker. I think of the current media landscape is not being very conducive to producing, like forget bringing back people who are from the old Gawker or whatever to make the site feel. like it's old self again. To me, the important thing about Gawker is that it was like a training core for a certain kind of blogger

and a certain kind of journalist. And I think post Gawker, it's easy to look around at the media landscape and to the dominant web properties within it and say, yeah, there isn't a place that exists to train the writer. Like forget the audience engagement and forget, like, I'm not saying forget, forget,

but I mean it's like you have, the fact that web publications aren't serving audiences in the way that Gawker did, but it's also like there isn't a place that's really serving writers in the exact same way that Gawker did. There isn't a place that is producing, I think, hyper-sceptical, snarky, I think, writers with their knives out. I think that's what the outline was trying to be. Yeah, that's true. But then it ended up not really working out from a business perspective, apparently. So it's like.

But that's the elusive thing. goal. It's like you, I think we both want that. We want a place that can train a new, like, again, forget who from the old gawker they might hire back. It's like, I want a place that trains a new generation of

web writers to embody those ideals in their own way. And I think that's the thing that makes Brian Goldberg stressful is that you can't, I just can't imagine him seeking that kind of writer and trying to cultivate that kind of journalist. Yeah.

that would shock me. That would definitely shock me. I guess I'm holding out a little smidgen of hope that it will be interesting, but I'm mainly like dreading this revival. I find the idea of relaunching a website to be also kind of quaint in 2018 because people don't go to websites as much as they used to. So having that is your own. only thing seems very risky to me. Like, for instance, the ringer is is a new media property.

And our website is a is a core component of what the ringer is. But it's also more than that like video and podcasts, obviously. And in documentaries. And there's a lot of different moving parts because it seems like that's what a media company has to be in 2018. To buy a URL and then try to fill it with more content and hopefully that... Bringing the blog back, right. Yeah. It's like... It's like there's something old school about the idea that like...

And like, I want blogs to come back. So the general concept I like, but it's just, it seems quaint and like, I'm very curious how they plan to make people start going to their Google box and typing in www.gawker.com again because that's just not how a lot of people access the internet anymore. counterpoint you're saying this like Gawker does not have a video of Jordan Sargent eating a banana for the first time in his life

I don't know how much traffic I don't know I gave it a lot of traffic I watched this video is a lot Shots on Jordan replaying replaying I don't maybe there maybe Brian Goldbergson do a video series I don't know

but it just seems like the idea of doing just a website is bold yeah I think that it's weird because I think that Gizmoto media group, I think the remaining sites in that network, they realize that, like they produce video,

they have podcasts, they have good podcast. You know what I mean? And so it's like, that's the other thing that makes the seem point though. It's like the other, yeah, you have Jezebel and you have Deadspinning, you have Gizmodo and they're grappling with these questions. And meanwhile, it's like, so you

take those living sites that are grappling with what it means to be a new media company in this current year. And you contrast that with, again, And this sort of discordant guy being like, I'm going to reactivate this blog. Yeah. You know what I mean? So even in comparison to other media properties in its own orbit, it seems strange.

As just prospectively, it seems strange. It's really strange. Maybe it will be my new favorite website. I mean, well, here's the thing, though. The counterpoint to all this is that as it stands, you know, the top post chronologically on gawker.com is by Nick Denton. And you can't let that stand. You got, Nick Dent has the last word. He has the last blog.

Uh, true. It should have been like, who should have had the last blog post on Gawker? I think it's appropriate that he did. It's a very good post. It's a very good post, but it's also like. I liked him actually, though. I thought Nick was a good boss. Actually, it's going to be weird for him not to.

Yeah. Like, it's really going to sort of push him out of the Gawker narrative. Right. In a weird way. Unless he gets hired by Brian Goldberg, that would. would be strange. I don't even know if that, like, now I'm so accustomed to everything being bizarre that

I'm like, who knows, maybe he will. Yeah, and in fairness, Gawker was always a deeply strange website. So, stranger things have happened. If you could bring one media company back from the dead, do you have any favorites or like magazines?

Like, people are always talking about rebooting spy magazine. Here's the thing. I never read it. I literally was never in the magazine culture. I love magazines. I was really, most of the magazines I was really into still exist in some form. Like I went through a phase of being like really into EW. In like the 90s, I like demanded an entertainment weekly subscription.

I did really love like the glossies. Like I loved print magazines. But there aren't any that I've been like, the world must have this come back. I'm generally of the opinion that like reboots are bad. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard because it's like, again, it's rebooting a, like, trying to think of what magazine brands are reboot. I don't know. It just, it's like you said, we live in a media landscape now that feels so fundamentally new, that even if you, if you were to take like a brand and relaunch it, the thing that it would have to be to sort of suit the demands of the current media landscape would just be so fundamentally different from what it was. like relaunching spy on the internet in like the post podcasting internet. Like what is that even, you know, constitutionally? Like it's just a totally different thing no matter what you're taking and trying to

reanimate. And it is weird to see Gawker become a test case for it. I know. I think we're going to end on a paradox because the main thing I wonder about New Gawker is The main thing I want, I need Gawker coverage of the new Gawker. That's the problem. I need, like, that's the thing. It's like Gockers where you go for that good media criticism.

Yeah, and like meta, niche media drama. And so what is, what is Gawker 2.0 without either Gawker 1.0 or Gawker 2.0's metaccommentary of its own owners in this rewatch. I do think that if not on Gawker itself, all of the former Gawker employees will be tweeting about New Gawker with conventions. All right, I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs. That's this week's damage control, and you will hear from us again in two weeks.