Where Your Favorite Gawker Writer Sits Now
Here is Gawker’s new seating chart, put forward this week, and then promptly and blatantly leaked to us in a very passive fit of nostalgia and reflexive defiance.
Don’t get too attached to it — the company is finally moving out of its oddball, stair-intensive Soho loft building this year.
Here’s a seating chart from 2010, for comparison. Lots of changes!
Back then, Gawker and Jezebel shared a table — behind them, so did Gizmodo and Deadspin.
This old chart also has Gawker’s Alex Pareene sitting next to John Cook. And look how far they’ve come! OH WAIT, no, now they’re sitting next to each other again, ol’ “AP” and “Cook,” just at a different table, one now in deep blue for “management.” How fast they grow up. [UPDATE: Angry sources inside Gawker Media claim that Alex Pareene has never sat in the seat marked AP which is clearly his seat. When will Alex Pareene sit down like an important white man? Guess he shouldn’t have dropped out of school.]
What else?
1. What’s most notable is that the real top honchos — Heather Dietrick and Nick Denton — have moved themselves downstairs, with the luxury class ad sales team and tech folks. That leaves Tommy Craggs as the top honcho on the floor. That’s a bit like leaving the zoo in the hands of the reptile house manager. I literally have no idea what that means!!! Honestly I bet it’s really relaxing having Nick off the editorial floor. Maybe people actually speak out loud in the office now.
2. There are sixteen Gawker seats. Isn’t that great? Wow, that’s huge. Can you name more than five Gawker writers? (JK, they have something called “editing” now, it’s crazy.)
2.5 Why do Caity and Hamilton have to sit in the seats by the bathroom where you always know when someone just took a huge unhealthy dump? (Glares at Deadspin.)
3. When we last checked in on Gawker’s seating chart, back in 2010, there was a whole desk of “video interns.” What was a “video intern”? That information is lost to history.
3.5 Ugh, the Jezebel table is so fun now.
4. Why does “management” (described by Nick Denton as “Tommy Cragg’s gerontocracy”) have to sit facing Jalopnik, of all terrible sights? (I SAID “SIGHTS.”) Can’t management move themselves into the lounge behind the bathrooms, or to some nice room on the third floor with the people who actually run the company?
4.5 Speaking of power… When Gawker employee Jason Parham wrote recently about the importance of diversity at Gawker, one of the only things I disagreed with was that he wrote diversity was important across the company but “especially in edit.” I get that he means “public-facing” and “giving voice” to people… but, honestly the day we see a single company have literally any kind of diversity in its ad sales department is the day things start to get better for real. That’s where the money, advancement, and power is too! Being a writer is just a trick to keep us all poor and powerless. We should all be rushing the business jobs.
5. Speaking of money, power and diversity… where does new Valleywag writer Dan Lyons sit when he comes to town? Is there someplace in some corner where everyone can throw trash at him for being so terrible?