In Slight Defense of Nikki Finke
Last night I had a dream about Nikki Finke-just in passing. Like, she was at a party or something, and we had a conversation about toast. She looked great! But I awoke with a strange sympathy for her. In particular, I am thinking of some recent Gawker posts about her-some of which don't add up entirely.
Yesterday's rather funny screenshot of radical changes in one of her recent posts was fair game, for sure. (She published and then reversed opinion on the numbers for "This Is It.") When Gawker called her, she said: "You're full of shit. Gawker doesn't practice journalism and lives to impugn those who do." This is a pretty wonderful thing to say, just in terms of fun, though it has little to do with the issue at hand. (Though what question or statement prompted her to say "You're full of shit"? We aren't told; I suspect it was a statement about the purpose of the call, so it's actually not a non sequitur response, except it doesn't make sense to say someone's not practicing journalism when you are calling them to discuss what you are going to write.)
But there's something else in here. One thing is that: how many Gawker writers has Nikki seen come and gone while she's been plugging away. A dozen? Two dozen? Somewhere I have awesome emails from 2003 from her, making fun of me at Gawker. And all the while, while we've all come and gone, she's been at her desk. Except when she's not, as Gawker pointed out last month, when they rounded up all her sick-day and out-of-office posts, going back to 2006.
That takes a lot of nerve, coming from someone who started at Gawker just back in March. That's John Cook. Last September, he was already out on paternity leave from his job at Radar. While he was away, he was laid off (so were all of us here at The Awl!). He got both severance and unemployment. After six months of not working-though somewhere in there he wrote a book! Buy it here!-he started this job at Gawker, a job which has an average employee-sorry, permalancer!-shelf life of like, what, nine months? Or slightly longer, on average, if you are a man, at least.
Tad Friend's piece about her from the New Yorker a couple weeks back was intriguing enough to keep me awake from Raleigh to Chicago in a middle seat. I'm not that invested in Ms. Finke's methods or beat to have an opinion on its, or her, fair-mindedness, but the article read within gunshot of evenhandedness.
Longevity in this ephemeral game is measured in bytes, so kudos to her for having it, anyhow, and for commanding the respect/fear she seems to. As for Gawker editrii, well, um, you know what they say about money changing everything, and money for nothing.
Oh hey, I read that on a plane too and had the same reaction. I was all "Ugh, I'm never going to make it through this behemoth!" and then "Wow. So interesting." Tad wrote in there something about how, for Nikki, in the odern game speed was better than accuracy; I immediately thought of Denton's memo.
Also, How's that go about hating those most like you? Like the Palestine/Israel hate? Nikki and Gawker deserve each other.
I finished most of that article and put it down with every intention of finishing it sometime soonish, but I found it hard to pick back up. The behavior of the people in Nikki’s circle of bad guys and tattletales is so infantile and cruel, the article had a trainwreck appeal â€" but once I'd walked away I realized I hated them all so much I didn't really want to pay them anymore attention. Certainly made me glad that I'm not even tangentially involved in Hollywood.
"Permalancer." Perfect.
They're doing their best Choire, but at this point it's all a pale imitation of The Awl.
You know, I really do not mean to be horrible to the writers over at Gawker, because I have done some ethically questionable things in my career. (Including, OT, going on a junket for the movie Oliver Twist, wherein a group interviewed Sir Ben Kinsley, and the good sir was going on and on about how he would like to use the movie to help impoverished children, and he had been to the slums of Afghanistan, and the favelas in Brazil, and he knew real poverty, so he would definitely not forget the moral of Dickens' story and the movie would raise money and awareness for these poor people he had seen with his compassionate, worldly eyes, and then all of the sudden this journalist with, I swear to god, only two fingers on each of his his hands, raised hit arm to ask a question and says "Meester Kings-lee. Meester KIngs-lee. I am from Brazil, and I too know the tragedy of the slums… how children die there every day. What sort of aid will this movie bring to those people?" At which point Kingsley got red in the face and stammered that nothing had, um, really been planned yet, but it definitely would be".)
Anyways, my point is, and I think I have made it here by in situ rant, is I don't really find anything on Gawker adds up anymore. I wish they had some thing where you could just filter certain writers out or something.
/end long winded, irrelevant rant. I guess the point is my brief click over there drove me to (further) babbling idiocy.
I called her "Vulture buddy Nikki Finke" all the time at Vulture, and that was only sort of tongue-in-cheek. After all, pretty much the only correspondence I ever had with her were similar emails making fun of me, and she was the first writer to a) notice and b) mock Vulture in our otherwise-ignored first month of existence. But to me she's akin to Michael Riedel in that she's somewhat toxic on a sourcing level but essentially almost always right. (She would ALWAYS be right if she, like Riedel, wrote a twice-a-week column and wasn't worried about TOLDJAing everyone to death.)
But anyways, she knows more than I or basically anyone ever will, and the one time I wrote a big Hollywoody industry feature, she instantly honed in on — and dismantled — the one part of the story I secretly felt was kind of weak. While I sure hated it when she did it to me, I am glad that someone out there is dong it to everyone else.
This is why I would not mind becoming like Nikki Finke, if I had to be in that business.
Then again, I will not be willingly led into this business.
Leaving aside the personality cesspool, Nikki possesses a disingenuity that would get her frozen out as a beat reporter covering any other industry. The petty shitfits with Cathy Seipp, Sharon Waxman, Kim Griffin are utterly unattractive; the attagirl commenters are brainless twits. And yet, where else does one go for the first (and second!) draft of industry doings? Not the trades; she's right about that.
All of which is to say: Every time I read Nikki Finke, I lament the passing Tom King all the more.
Honestly, since Richard left, I haven't been back to Gawker. I will read Deadspin because Drew and AJ are the balls. Also, Valleywag occasionally has something of tangential relationship to my job. But Gawker itself? meh.
Also, I think this may be like when you have a sex dream about someone gross and then for a couple hours after you wake up you still want to have sex with them. I am looking at *you*, Tyra Banks.
A reunion of former Gawker Media editors would required renting out the Intrepid. A meeting of current editors that can write a single paragraph without a grammatical error can be held in a Starbuck's janitors closet.
Gawker's like that part in The Thing (the second one, where Kurt Russell staggers around with an icicle beard) where they open up the storeroom and that unidentifiable bodyparts body has turned into a gory gooppuddle with a plastic dog's head slurping and snarling out of the mess.
And the moral of the story is: we have to live with the Thing, unless we're willing to lock ourselves in an isolated wasteland and just die. Except if we don't, it'll eat us, so we become The Thing.
Anyway, fuck that. I like watching Wilford Brimley with tentacles eating people, so count me in.
snake was clearly talking about gawker when he says:
"This thing doesn't want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it's won."
They blocked Gawker at work so now it's kind of like don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got til it's gone. Miss u, Brian Moylan.
:(
Anyone else follow Nikki Finke via RSS and occasionally get the commenters showing up as standalone posts? Those days always cause me a few minutes of complete confusion.
OMG I can barely read Gawker any more. The posts are boring and pedestrian.
Some Gawker writer (can't discern them anymore) made the obvious point that posts about the decline of the print industry didn't gather nearly as many views as tv recaps or celebs. Uhh, maybe that's because your site is no longer the place to go read about media news and gossip?
Meanwhile the Awl's most-read item is pretty telling about the audience swap going on here. Sadly, we readers apparently don't pay in the long term. Sorry Balk and Choire!
It's also because Gawker is simply no fun any more. Without the hilarious, insightful old skool commenters, you have the ilk of Perez Hilton commenters.
(okay, maybe not that bad, but it does suck.)
I really don't get what is behind Gawker's thing for Nikki Finke lately. Is Nick a good friend of Silverman and/or Zucker?
I am Gawker-free and loving it.
Once I got banned by that twit Owen Thomas I stopped reading.