Photo: Rachel Sklar, Nikola Tamindzic
Holy poop you guys, did you get that IM from the intern down the hall? Something totally crazy is going on at Gawker!! Writer Emily Gould and managing editor Choire Sicha, are QUITTING. Sicha is that hot gay who helped shape the site as its second solo editor from 2003 to 2005. He left to work at the Observer and then came back early this year. Gould has been working on the site since November of last year. Neither have jobs lined up, we hear. SO BRAVE. This certainly marks the end of an era for the site, which (as Vanessa Grigoriadis pointed out in her recent story in New York) has been making a shift toward an emphasis on comments and page views over edited content in recent months. It also comes on the heels of the departure of another Gawker mainstay, Alex Balk, who left for Radar magazine’s Website recently. Perhaps more interesting, Gould and Sicha’s departure puts today’s Who’s Quitting Gawker Media tally at four: Valleywag correspondent Megan McCarthy has also announced that she’s leaving the Silicon Valley blog for the warm corporate arms of Wired, while Jalopnik founding editor Mike Spinelli has removed himself from the blog’s daily operations and is instead acting as editor-at-large, which he himself acknowledges is an “inflated” title. Obviously the timing of these departures is coincidental, but still.
What does this all mean? And more important, were you the first one of your friends to find out? And, wait, you commented, right? Wow, anyway, we have no idea what happens next. Who will they hire?
That sound you hear is the thumping of a thousand editorial assistants running to their apartment roofs to take a picture of themselves in a bathing suit.
A Long Dark Early Evening of the Soul With Keith Gessen [Gawker]
Related: Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass [NYM]
