I am possibly too invested in my disposable media.
I started reading Gawker in 2005, about a month after I started my internship at CosmoGIRL. It was mostly out of necessity: I was commuting out of Jersey with no prior internships, the other girls in my cubicle were in the NYU journalism program, and Gawker was a crash course -- no, an entire crash degree -- in the world of New York media. I was genuinely fond of the Gawker Stalker, though -- and, maybe not coincidentally, I finally stopped reading when they rolled out the Gawker Stalker Map, which promised concise, realtime updates of stars' whereabouts, as opposed to a lengthy, end-of-the-week compendium of snapshot nonfiction.
For all the complaints about the map, nobody mentioned the real problem, which was that it missed the fucking point: the pleasure of the Gawker Stalker was the meta double voyeurism -- watching people watching themselves watching people -- the prose and the thought, not the stargazing itself. Nobody reading Gawker (media folk in Midtown offices) was going to get up and go down to SoHo to try and catch a glimpse of Claire Danes eating a taco, especially since Gawker was all about how we didn't want to do that, anyway. How we were too good for fame, how we hated the people who thought it mattered, how we were hilariously ashamed of ourselves when we found ourselves staring at Uma Thurman in Whole Foods. And it ended up not being realtime anyway, or even particularly useful (thanks for showing me where 23rd and Broadway is, Gawker, because I totally forgot) and the whole thing was just the beginning of Gawker's downhill slide into being hostile and hypocritical and tail-eating above all else.
So maybe it was my kneejerk reaction to Gawker Media that made me hate Idolator. (Although I was still reading Defamer on and off -- probably because they still stalk celebrities in periodic digest format.) Maybe it wasn't as pompous and one-note as I thought. Or maybe it was terrible and I had good reason to stop reading. (I've also started re-reading Gawker, and they are just as awful as I thought back then, despite good coverage of the MTV permalancers scuffle and that Army Times piece.) Whichever it was, at some point while I was passionately hating them, they stopped sucking and started being pretty fantastic, and someone, I think it was ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
koganbot, shut me up and alerted me to this fact, and this morning when Jess made a post about blogging unbathed at 10:30am and watching ER reruns, I thought, "I want to work at Idolator." And when I came across this article about Nick Denton possibly wanting to sell it off, my heart gave a panicked flutter of "oh God, no!"
None of which stops me from mispronouncing their name.
