This couldn’t last forever, of course-not everyone in New York was so nice and smart. Spiers tried to dish some dirt: “Everbody hates Wired’s Chris Anderson except for James Truman and Si Newhouse.” But that, it turned out, was a joke: “Most people who know Anderson think he’s a smart and charming guy.” Really, Spiers admitted, “I have to gush”: “New York media people are witty, and that isn’t a word I’ve used in a while.” The only problem was that Spiers’s escort, in town from San Francisco, was exhausted by the end of it. In one of her first pieces of media commentary, Spiers attended her first “New York media party,” for Slate and new editor Jacob Weisberg. Sometimes she forgot the kicker and just told readers what a good time she was having. ” This is the Spiers signature: the outburst of enthusiasm, followed by the well-timed, half-apologetic reversal. The darker Manhattan-centric themes-class warfare as a recreational sport pathological status obsession and the complete, total, and wholly unapologetic embrace of decadence-are much more fascinating to us. “The absurdities, in particular, are much more apparent. “I think it’s actually easier to write about Manhattan if you’re an outsider,” Spiers explained on the site in March 2002. To a reader who first met Gawker a few years later, it can be surprising to read these posts, which combine the excitement and the put-on knowingness of a genuine novice. Spiers, who was from a small town and probably knew from Tupperware, couldn’t seem to stand the idea that, in the city, you might not get to throw everything away. “Please tell me this Tupperware thing is intentionally ironic so I can stop banging my head against the wall and screaming,” she wrote. In her first few months as Gawker, she showed a disarming interest in maps of Manhattan (one, for instance, identified all the Wi-Fi users) she linked to New Yorker pieces she liked and she strenuously objected to an alleged Tupperware party trend, as reported in the Times Style section. She was not bored by any piece of information about New York. Spiers, who grew up in Alabama, attended Duke, and then started her career in San Francisco, made her notebooks public.

Lists like this usually only exist in the notebooks of young people who come to the city intent on figuring it out. is “cultural stimuli in New York” New York is a “fluffy, bitchy city magazine” and the New York Observer is “the print inspiration for Gawker, a pink-paged broadsheet designed for the Upper East Side elite.” But in her very first posts (from March 2002), Spiers writes blurbs to herself about what she’s read or should be reading. It’s hard to believe that at first Gawker, which we now know for “knowing everything” about local media and celebrity culture, didn’t even know what to read.

Elizabeth Spiers, the 25-year-old writer he hired, was a recent New York arrival who had kept a blog about her life in finance. Founder Nick Denton, a former Financial Times reporter, had helped start the early social networking site First Tuesday, which arranged for web and media entrepreneurs to go for drinks together. New York gossip website Gawker was launched in 2002 by an internet entrepreneur and a naïf new to the city-Professor Henry Higgins and his Eliza Doolittle.

Gawker blog