“People are too worried about how they will be perceived, and they’ve ceased to be playful, so anything that starts to be like that again is welcome,” Brown adds. “Editorials are uptight, and comedy is seen as in a field outlet of its own.” “It seems now that social media is so flooded with humor and irreverence that people no longer see it as having a place in the mainstream media,” he told the Guardian. Purchased by Bustle media and led by a new editor, Leah Finnegan, Gawker’s reboot has added (or returned) a welcome blast of satire to a US media landscape that often lacks it.Īccording to James Brown, founder and editor of Loaded, a British magazine that started the lad-mag revolution of the 90s and whose account of that era “Animal House” has just been published, the mainstream US press has all-but abandoned satire. The rotation of subjects, relatively ideologically unrestrained, marks a return for an organization that had been dead. Over the past week, the site has run stories that much of the media would sooner swerve: alleged anti-British, anti-Royal sentiments at the New York Times whether it was wrong for Meghan and Harry to hold hands at the Queen’s funeral (“Even for a family filled with perverts, this is beyond”) and if the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills are “too mean, too callous, too focused on tedious drama” to merit a show. Since a quiet relaunch a year ago, under entirely new owners, Gawker is once again starting to attract interest and readers – still purveying snark, still relying on attitude against elites – but without the edge of nastiness that got its original iteration in such trouble.

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