Writing Today: As Gawker to the 2010s, so The Ringer to the 2020s

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This is the latest in an occasional series called Writing Today, where I write about writing and media and publishing and the writing life in the 2020s. I was recently on the Changed My Mind podcast talking big think education stuff. Check it out.

There’s a certain image of the 2010s that I can’t shake, though like most of my images these days what I’m picturing is bleary and indistinct. I’m walking around in New York back when I first moved there in the middle of last decade, kicking around, and I come across something like an American Apparel billboard in lower Manhattan, maybe Chelsea, and the billboard is all muted tones and cruel cheekbones, barely hiding its contempt for all of us down on the street. It’s raining and I’m overdressed and I’m walking past a glowing Apple Store window where someone inside is buying a laptop that costs twice my rent, and perhaps there’s a pack of young model-looking women walking by, and they laugh to each other, and my brain insists that they are laughing at me. I am in a place the does not want me, that rejects my presence with its own tacit being. There is a mood that might best be described as the romanticized aesthetic of meanness, the performative superiority of downtown cool, and it makes me think of Gawker. Gawker was aestheticized meanness. It was often cruel, this meanness, needlessly cruel, sometimes destructively so, but it was a kind of spitefulness that nevertheless insisted on itself, that meant something. It meant something even as Gawker was immolated by a capricious billionaire, even as it immolated itself.

And then I open up my web browser and spend some time at the Ringer. The Ringer is not mean; the Ringer is a podcast. I’m not saying that the Ringer has a podcast network and is a podcast network, though it does and is. The Ringer is a podcast, itself, in a metaphysical sense: approachable, welcoming, unfocused, good-natured, self-deprecating, amiable, slightly sweaty, long-winded. The Ringer is slightly embarrassed about its ad reads but goes through with them with professional dedication. If Gawker was a suspiciously fashionable guy performatively glaring at your lame tote bag, the Ringer is your friend’s boyfriend explaining NBA trade rules at a holiday cookout for forty-five minutes without stopping to breathe. Gawker was an inedibly bitter cocktail drunk by people who don’t actually like it; the Ringer is a Bud Light Lime drunk by someone who apologizes for his bad taste but does. The vibe has shifted. We live in the tides of time and they swell and recede at paces uncontrollable by us.

These two sites, Gawker as the avatar of the 2010s, the Ringer for the 2020s, are not perfect parallels and they are not perfect foils. But they are, in their own ways, quintessential media brands of their decades, and comparing them tells us a lot about the culture industries that shaped them. Gawker and the Ringer are both particular kinds of media dreams, cold foreboding New York skyscraper canyons vs sun-blasted traffic-snarled LA boulevards, one built on defiance and contempt, the other on access and enthusiasm. One smoked clove cigarettes while texting “kill yourself” to your favorite columnist; the other brings you a top-five ranking of NBA duos and their analogs in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each posture offers its own kind of seduction. Each tells a story about what media is supposed to do, and what it’s actually allowed to do, in its era. And I wonder if there will be such a thing as a publication that might define its era in the 2030s.

I don’t know. People are always underestimating what the audience wants, how much we’re willing to pay for something bespoke and human; there are print magazines flourishing right now, if you know where to look. Americans buy a billion books a year and despite the relentless insistence that no one is reading them, people are reading them. Good things can survive. Somewhere there’s a place for us. But masscult and midcult appear to be giving way to nocult, and Silicon Valley’s relentless war on media does appear close to achieving a future where there’s the New York Times and then the world of reaction videos and Twitch streams and get-ready-with-mes, one self-impressed ark of elite American tastemaking hovering above us like the spaceships from Independence Day and the rest of culture a howling blobbish mass of semipros making shortform video to blot out their own lives from the horizon of their minds. But I grow decadent here.

Gawker's defining attribute was cruelty, more precisely stylish cruelty. It hated you, but it hated you in a way that flattered you. You had to be worth hating if you were hated and you had to be in on the joke to be one of the haters. It was insiderish to a fault, invested deeply in a taxonomy of New York relevance that was incomprehensible outside of a few zip codes and cocktail parties. That was the initial appeal, anyway, but as I and many others have said years before the Hogan trial Gawker’s particular character had been stamped out by the dictates of clicks-based revenue models. Still, Gawker was a thing, and Gawker was mean because it could be. It was the mean girl with the best outfit and the worst sense of proportion. There’s a kind of integrity to that, an underrated kind. I don’t want to get carried away - I don’t, in fact, think calling people ugly on the internet constitutes resistance, and ex-Gawker Media people’s habit of retconning the place into a social justice factory is laughable - but Gawker’s hostility served an ideological function: it said that media should not be friendly. It should not help people sell things. It should not talk to advertisers. It should not pretend that Lena Dunham’s latest project is a cultural event just because HBO says it is. It insisted that media could still be oppositional, perhaps in the pettiest and most ineffective way imaginable but still in a way true to the reason media exists.

The Ringer, by contrast, is friendly to a fault. If Gawker was the mean girls in season one of The White Lotus, the Ringer is the resort staff in any of the seasons, professionally welcoming, approachable in a pro-corporate way. The Ringer’s tone is that of a group chat that’s been accidentally made public, which is something like the platonic ideal of media for a large swath of the audience these days. There’s no pretension to superiority, no interest in status as a weapon; status is awarded only by middlebrow arbiters like the Oscars or the reviews of Roger Ebert and his spiritual descendants. The Ringer is pointedly anti-snob. This is often refreshing, and I say that as a rabid partisan for the value of snobbery in cultural commentary. You don’t get the sense that the Ringer hates you, or even dislikes you, or even evaluates you much; if Gawker offered the feeling of elitist insiderism by pulling you into a private joke, the Ringer exemplifies the cheerful indifference of a party where truly everyone is invited. The site’s contributors, many of whom are very talented, have been trained to project maximum affability. And to be absolutely clear that affability is not faked, but cultivated. I am not accusing the Ringer of faking friendliness. The Ringer just is friendly. This is the ethos of podcast media: warm, forgiving, a little overfamiliar. The Ringer doesn’t want to alienate you. It wants you to subscribe.

That is the posture of the 2020s. You see it not just in the Ringer, but in the broader online discourse-industrial complex: the Reddit voice, the YouTube guy energy, the let’s-hang-out streamers, the makeup tutorials in lieu of real friends, the low-level fandom of all things. The internet used to be cool; now it wants to be your buddy or your parasocial companion. Or, more apt here, your gambling enabler, the guy who tells you with a smiling sunny face that single-game parlays are a great idea, and it’s seamless and easy to hook your credit card up to your DraftKings account. Which, to be clear, is not a reality under the control of the ordinary foot soldiers who make the #content. It’s just that they work for a corporation. The Ringer is owned by an increasingly-predatory Swedish company that wants to own all of music and to use that power to gradually replace every human musician you ever loved with AI analogs that do not ask for royalties, but the people who work at the Ringer want only to occupy some of the last remaining seats in the macabre game of musical chairs that is digital media. I don’t blame them. I fear that if the site closes I’ll plunge into a terrible depression.

There was something strange about Gawker’s brand of insubordination: it was deeply invested in a kind of counterculture that it also sort of knew was dead. It sniped from the sidelines, but it still believed in the idea of cultural opposition. It cared about literature. It had an adversarial relationship with power. It was sarcastic about everything, but in the way that a disappointed idealist is sarcastic. It hated things because it believed things could be better. And then at some point something curdled in the publication as its younger writers increasingly tried to ape their own pinched vision of what Gawker style was, and the accusation that Gawker was simply directionlessly mean became more and more true; like seemingly all of us do, it became indistinguishable from the caricatures that had been made of it. It was easy, in the last few years, to ask what exactly all of the ample interpersonal cruelty was for.

But if Gawker had a somewhat inconsistent attachment to the relationship between harshness and truth, the Ringer is not interested in that framework at all. If Gawker was a child of punk rock, the Ringer is the offspring of Comic-Con. It’s obsessed with pop culture and, more to the point, with loving pop culture, with the idea of being the kind of person who is in love with pop culture, with being the kind of person who writes defenses of collecting Funko-Pop. Its writers often try to give even the dumbest streaming show the benefit of the doubt, as though criticism was a form of disloyalty. And this isn’t always a bad thing. The Ringer has real cultural literacy - read Justin Charity or Brian Phillips or Katie Baker - and real taste. The perspective you get there is much more nuanced than the bland pro-everything boosterism it gets accused of. But it does not believe in counterculture. It believes in content.

That’s why so much of the site’s writing is organized around celebration rather than analysis. It’s also why so much of it is genuinely fun, like actual fun, and also why the site itself feels ideologically empty even as it produces thought-provoking essays at a pace that seems entirely unacknowledged by the industry. (There have been a ton of great essays out of the Ringer over the years, and yet this fact seems not to affect their reputation; unfortunately, my praise will only work against them and I’m sure most people who work there would rather I not voice it.) Still, the Ringer is in love with IP, and sometimes it’s in love with the love of IP, which is worse. The whole project surrounding Hollywood and the culture industry is animated by the same force that animates its interest in sports gambling: a desire to be inside the system, to predict its movements, to master its codes. There is no interest in overturning anything. The Ringer knows that media is corporate. It just wants to make the best corporate media possible. And I do confess that at this point that probably amounts to an adult type of wisdom.

Part of that, I’m afraid, is its worst element, which is the site’s absolutely inveterate starfucking and name-dropping. HOLY SHIT, these people will not stop letting you know that they know famous people. Yes, I understand, we get it! LA, Hollywood, I’m on a first-name basis with Kevin Feige, woohoo! I’m very impressed that Damon Lindelof is here to talk about his new show, Upper-Middlebrow Masterpiece Theater. It’s genuinely shameless. And yet there is a touch of something endearing there, a very human and admirably egalitarian admission that the people there like famous people and would like someday to be famous for themselves. The trouble is that this admirably forthright relationship to the American obsession with celebrity is often indistinguishable from compliance with corporate interests. Gawker, for all its smugness and destructiveness, did not want that. It didn’t want to succeed within the system. It wanted to make you uncomfortable. It wanted to publish your emails. It wanted to burn down the village to save it. It failed, often and badly, by refusing to learn the difference between being provocative and merely being provoking. But Gawker failed trying to do something that wasn’t reducible to brand management.

There is also the matter of form. Gawker was the last great professional blog. It cared about the voice on the page, about cadence and rhythm and punchlines. They would make fun of anyone else if they used the word “craft,” to be clear, and this was part of their endlessly tiresome two-step about their own position in the creative culture - it was a site that mocked literary ambition in everyone else, written by a cohort of people who clearly had such ambitions themselves. And yet there was at least an undeniable sense of giving a shit about the product. The site didn’t always do longform particularly well, though some of its writers would go on to do it extremely well elsewhere, but the team there cultivated a culture of short, sharp, cutting essays that were unmistakably personal. The ethos was bitchy, yes, but bitchy in a highly stylized way. Gawker was a collection of writers who wrote things and editors who edited them, and once that was enough.

The Ringer is the home of the podcast, and more broadly of the podcast vibe. To repeat myself, its essays are consistently of a an excellent caliber, but written words are not its primary product. The site is an accessory to its audio empire, which is where the real money is. They make podcasts, and podcasts flatten things. They create intimacy at the cost of insight. They’re long, but hangout long, not filled-with-information long, while Gawker was short, sometimes short in the service of being reductive but also short in the service of being sharp. The Ringer is affable where Gawker was precise, permissive where Gawker was punitive. The Ringer has built a whole ecosystem around the podcast as a medium of cultural digestion; it’s media that melts in your mouth. And the inevitable cost of a podcast culture over an essay culture, aside from everything else, is that a great essay can be fractious and unlikable while still being riveting, but people only like podcasts that put out their lips to be kissed. The scripted podcast industry has collapsed while “a few guys farting into a mic for three hours” podcasting has flourished, after all. Essay culture rewards the outlier, the distinctive voice, and has room for work that slaps the reader in the face. Podcast culture rewards coherence, companionship, and the slow drip of consensus. You can still have insight in the latter medium, but it tends to be diluted by the endless need to fill time. Gawker built voices; the Ringer builds teams.

Would I rather spend hours listening to podcasts with the genuinely sweet sweeties of the Ringer podcast network than read some desperately angry 24 year old at Gawker ritualistically disembowel a minor media figure who only half deserved it? Definitely. But that’s the point: the only path left is the path of least resistance. Media is supposed to have higher aspirations than hanging out.

Founders Nick Denton and Bill Simmons are, in many ways, perfect avatars of their respective media empires. Denton was the consummate 2010s media antagonist: slippery, cosmopolitan, prone to contradiction, and deeply invested in provocation as a moral good. He was often cagey about his own opinions, but delighted in airing everyone else’s, weaponizing transparency as a form of power while maintaining a fierce protectiveness over aspects of his own privacy. Gawker’s guiding ethos - publish what they don’t want you to publish - was Denton’s in miniature: it wasn’t just that information should be free, it was that the media should go around freeing information for its own sake, even when the public interest was minimal and the human costs were considerable. His presence hung over the site like a challenge. His vision of journalism was adversarial, invasive, a little bit dirty, and matched a moment when media still clung to some notion of being outside the system. Denton wasn’t trying to make friends. He was trying to make friction. And, more than anything, to make money.

Simmons, by contrast, is the ultimate 2020s media bro: personable, prolific, and never far from a sponsored segment. His voice (literally and metaphorically) is everywhere on the Ringer, inflecting even the most highbrow content with the slightly nasal cadence of a guy explaining why “Rocky III” is underrated. If Denton stood for the idea that media should challenge power, Simmons stands for the idea that media should be accessible, self-referential, and above all, likable. His whole project has been about collapsing the space between critic and fan, between professional and audience. And that approach makes perfect sense in an era where the line between content and marketing is barely legible. Simmons isn’t cynical about this blending; he’s fluent in it. He’s corporate media’s best-case scenario: someone who genuinely loves the product. Simmons is a guy who certainly isn’t afraid to take credit for things, so it can feel silly arguing that he doesn’t get enough credit, but his ESPN columns were truly massively influential in writing for the web; he understood that, freed from column inches in dead tree publications, a column could serve as something you took in slowly in chunks over the course of three or four hours of your workday. That style went on to be much replicated. And while there’s something sad and cynical about his abandonment of writing for podcasting, that too was prophetic for the industry. He has been remarkably adept at navigating the changing media landscape, and the upshot is a lot of talented people get to have jobs in the creative industry.

I am, as you know, an inveterate snob, someone constantly accused of being personally mean, and a great champion of things that are hard because the world is hard. I am not a fan of affected chumminess and I think the world needs to become meaner for integrity to have any chance of survival. But this isn’t a eulogy for Gawker or a hit piece on the Ringer. Both have flaws. Gawker was cruel, often pointlessly so. Its commitment to snark often came at the expense of truth, or empathy, or even basic coherence. Its politics were fuzzy and inconsistent but no less self-aggrandizing for it. The company’s eventual collapse was a great scandal that represented a massive encroachment on free speech as a fickle billionaire destroyed the site for daring to report on the open secret of his homosexuality; the failure of many in media to sound the alarm bells was a profound mistake. Yet I confess that the company’s collapse felt, in some ways, like an inevitable if not just outcome for a site that had often prioritized vendettas over values.

The Ringer, for its part, can feel bloodless to the point that I imagine someone at Spotify making a list of KPIs for the site on a whiteboard and writing “First, do no harm” on it. Its embrace of the mainstream has made it immensely accessible but ideologically lightweight. It’s everything you want in a media company except disruptive. It’s smart, funny, likable, and totally friendly to capital. It makes room for a lot of great writing, but its dominant tone is cheerful concession. It feels safe. And the readymade defense of being safe, in media in 2025, is that no one can afford not to be. Simmons is famously antipathetic towards labor organizing at the Ringer, while Gawker eventually had a union. And you can see a future where every worker in media who asks for a little bit more is told that the industry can’t afford more.

I think you can tell a lot about these different approaches by their victims. You might look at AJ Daulerio, who during the Hogan saga was cast aside by Denton with almost comical indifference; his inability to help himself on the witness stand always struck me as being an expression of the risks of being in the truth telling business, of not knowing when you should just tell the pleasant lie. The whole affair left Daulerio penniless, and Denton surely knew he was suffering under a brutal addiction, and still Denton left him to rot. It was nasty work, and if you are among those who have little personal sympathy for Daulerio you might at least think that Denton owed him better. But it’s also true that Denton’s betrayal of Daulerio, something like Gawker’s last act, was also very true to Gawker’s spirit. However much you might want to reward the site for its commitment to relentlessly saying the quiet part out loud, it is a bare fact that the company chewed up and spit out workers who probably thought that the financial compensation, at least, would be a little bit better. A mean publication with little regard for human costs acted that way even in its own destruction.

How could the Ringer have victims, you say! The Ringer’s tone is so relentlessly cheerful, so full of inside jokes, fantasy drafts, and easy camaraderie, that it’s easy to forget what it’s actually helping to sell. But at the core of its business model now is sports gambling, and that will have victims. This is obviously much bigger than the Ringer; I cannot comprehend the tidal wave of human misery that the “a casino in your pocket” era of sports gambling is unleashing, will unleash. There’s just something about the sweet-guy-you-met-at-a-sports-bar ethos of the Ringer taking part in this that makes it all seem a little more cruel. People will lose money they can’t afford to lose because they trusted a voice that felt like a friend, because the hosts joked about parlays and player props like it was just another segment in the show. That’s the genius of the Ringer’s affect: it makes everything feel safe. The site doesn’t look like a predatory operation. It looks like a podcast you’ve listened to for years - chummy, familiar. But the smiley, self-deprecating tone, so central to the Ringer’s appeal, is precisely what allows a deeply cynical and damaging partnership with the gambling industry to flourish. That’s the darkness underneath the friendliness: no one warns you when the content you love becomes a vehicle for your financial ruin.

Denton used Daulerio up and threw him away, and he’s had to work through shit for years to get back on his feet. That’s cruelty with a cruel face. The Ringer will just keep telling people what parlays and teasers to hammer until they’re dead broke, and after it happens they’ll remind you that they ran a disclaimer at the end of every episode that absolves them of responsibility and guilt. That’s cruelty with the face of a guy who loves sports and buffalo wings and Point Break just like you, and I don’t need to tell you that that’s much worse. I do acknowledge that most of the people at the Ringer have no control over the gambling content. They must make their own ethical decisions about their entanglement.

What I’m really talking about, or trying to, is a transformation in what media is for. Gawker said media should make you uncomfortable. The Ringer says media should keep you company. One was too hostile to survive. The other is too friendly to resist. Gawker afflicted the powerful until it got sued into oblivion; along the way it lost any sense whatsoever of who exactly the powerful are and when exactly it does and does not make sense to throw somebody to the wolves. The Ringer makes Spotify money by helping people bet on NFL props. I’m not sure which is more depressing. Clearly, though, the former could no longer survive financially, not in a world where Buzzfeed couldn’t survive, where Vice couldn’t keep floating along on a cloud of cocaine and semi-ironic fashions. Maybe the Ringer still can. And every writer and editor who remains professionally employed in the 2020s, everyone who trades words for health insurance now, feels like a win to me.

Whatever the truth, I do think something has been lost. I don’t mourn Gawker Media, which increasingly had become a general interest site with none of its initial purview or mission and thus none of its energy, like how you turn on MTV and Comedy Central and E! and they’re all running the same Law & Order reruns. But I certainly miss the aesthetic of meanness, even if I don’t always miss the meanness itself. I miss the idea that media should have enemies. I miss New York cool, not because it was good - it was often self-parodic and ridiculous and always self-mythologizing - but because it was aspirational. Gawker wasn’t “better” than the Ringer. But it believed in a different kind of literary culture, one built on sharpness, skepticism, and some residual belief in the value of being disliked.

I read back that term, literary culture, and I feel kind of absurd for having produced it without really intending to. Can literary culture survive this? Not survive the Ringer, which is really not the enemy here, but survive the larger shift it represents. Can writing matter in a world that’s structured to maximize friendliness and minimize friction? Can sentences compete with vibes? I don’t know. Like I said, people still pay to eat at restaurants staffed with real chefs and waiters when they could eat food made on a literal assembly line. But the answer is still almost certainly no, literary culture can’t survive, the kids don’t want it, the adults have all collapsed into a state of permanent and total self-exoneration, and we are all amusing ourselves to death in exactly the way predicted by Neil Postman. People are lazy and selfish and they don’t want to work for anything and the core of both literature and integrity is the notion that some things that are good are hard. Why bother, when you can drug yourself every night with so much YouTube that you forget your own name?

The Ringer has produced some brilliant essays, work as good as anything in the old Gawker stable. I like several of the podcasts; they give young men what they want in a chummy bro-down podcast without all the reactionary baggage that is so common to the medium. The site has range. It has curiosity. It rewards intelligence. It deserves credit for all that. But it also exists within an ecosystem where criticism is mostly a branding tool, and where real oppositional writing is increasingly impossible to monetize. The Ringer is not the problem. The system, as ridiculous as I find the term in using it, is the problem. And it’s worth asking whether the shift from Gawker’s antagonism to the Ringer’s affability represents a symptom of that system, a system in which being interesting is no longer enough, because being liked is so much more profitable, where the only media that can compete with a billion talentless amateurs staring into their front facing cameras is that which relentlessly embraces parasocial friendliness. So no, neither is better or worse, really. But Gawker felt dangerous, even if it was sometimes just mean. The Ringer feels like a product, even if it’s often a good one and sometimes a very good one. And I wonder what that says about us.

I can imagine, just barely, a synthesis of the two. A media project with Gawker’s moral nerve and the Ringer’s generous spirit, a place where the prose is sharp but not cruel, where the jokes land but don’t seek out vulnerability for its own sake, where pop culture is treated seriously without being worshipped, and where writers are allowed to be both critics and fans without being reduced to brand ambassadors. A site that still believes in making enemies when necessary, but doesn’t mistake bitterness for integrity. A site that knows how to say something true and still be fun. It’s not impossible to create. It’s just impossible to fund.

Because I understand the finances of media far too well to believe such a thing could live. The incentives are wrong in every direction. Cruelty doesn’t monetize, but neither does rigor. Skepticism doesn’t scale. Podcasts pay. Listicles pay. Branded content pays. Being liked pays. There’s no real room anymore for a media project that wants to be both brilliant and unbought. So we choose between the relics of a dead counterculture and the friendly face of total concession. I don’t think either model is enough. I also don’t think anyone’s going to pay for something better.