"Too butch" for Gawker

As I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, my stint at Gawker came to an end in late August and, after getting over some initial anger and having time to process my thoughts, I really didn't have any intention of discussing the whole thing publicly. In the weeks that have followed I've received a number of emails inquiring about my departure, wanting to know when and if I'm coming back to Gawker, why I wasn't there any longer, etc. Amazingly, I'm still getting a few of those each day, along with some wanting to know whether or not I, Cajun Boy, am actually Andrew Belonsky (I am most certainly not!), the guy who took my place as the night editor. And then today Gawker announced, in a rare post in which the comments were curiously disabled, that they were looking to hire two new night editors. This announcement inspired a handful of potential job-seekers to write to me to ask for my thoughts on the job. So, taking all of this in and feeling a bit frustrated by it all, I decided that perhaps it was time for me to say something about my stint at Gawker. That way, whenever anyone asks about it, I can just reply with a link and say, "Here, go read that." So I decided to take the lazy way out in doing this, naturally, by simply copying and pasting an exchange I had over a series of emails with an acquaintance of mine a couple of weeks after leaving Gawker. In its totality, it reads as a pretty thorough Q & A, I think. So anyway, if you're interested in such dreadfully boring horseshit, here ya go...

Why haven't you been writing Gawker at night for the last two weeks? Are you on vacation or something?

Well, um, no. There's really no other way to put this I guess...I was FIRED!

Whoa, what?????????? You've got to be kidding me.

Nope.

You're fucking with me. Why would they fire you? You have a distinctive voice and a following. Commenters seemed to like you a bunch. Me and the two girls in my office would always check Gawker first thing in the morning to read your posts. Your pageviews were through the roof! It seemed like every night you had at least one post that had tens of thousands of views. It doesn't make sense. Please tell me you're messing around.

Yeah, my traffic was great. If my memory serves me correct, I led all the other Gawker writers in pageviews in June and July, my first two full months, and was leading in August when I left. Those three months I think were also the most trafficked months in the site's history. But unfortunately, this isn't a fuckaround on my part. The reason for my being let go that I was given at my firing session, which was on the vaunted Gawker rooftop, was that my "tone" wasn't right for the direction Gabriel was taking the site. I was told that it was "too butch."

"Too butch"? What does that even mean? Fucking Denton!

No, actually, as far as I know, Denton had nothing to do with it. I rarely had any interaction with Nick but when I did he was always pleasant. As far as I know, this was all done by Gabriel Snyder, Gawker's managing editor. My calling Patrica Heaton a "staggering ass" in a headline was what he cited when he fired me as the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back in regards to my "tone" issues.

Gabriel blew a gasket because you called Heaton an ass? Was that in the post you wrote about when she went on jeopardy? She did make a "staggering ass" of herself!

It was actually Millionaire, but yeah, that's the post. The day after I was let go, I went back through my Gmail and found every editorial note I ever received from Gabriel. There were a total of four regarding "tone." The first was on May 27th...he told me to "tone down the fratty language" and cited a couple of things in the previous night's posts...I said that Kelly Bensimon was "annoying the shit out of people" in the Gossip Roundup and I sarcastically used the terms "big vagina liberals" and "little gay press packets" in another post. Then on June 1st I called Jesse Watters "Bill O'Reilly's buttboy" and received the following note in the morning...

"NO MORE PROFANITY OR VULGARITY. you're on probation. Jesse Watters is many things but "O'Reilly's buttboy" is not one of them."

So at that point I was put on "cursing probation" for using "buttboy" in a post, which was fine, I can write without cursing, but it was enormously frustrating to read the posts by other Gawker writers and see the word "fuck" or "fucking" and "asshole" etc. all over the damn place, even in headlines, while I was forbidden from doing the same! But still, I followed orders and was on my best behavior, but then on June 8th I slipped up and used the word "ballsiest"...yes, "ballsiest"... in a lede and got scolded for that. Apparently ballsiest is a curse word.

I didn't get another note on tone from Gabriel until June 17th, when we had one of the two face to face meetings I had with him during the time I worked there. It was at this meeting that he mentioned my "tone" being "too butch" for the first time. From there I didn't get another note on tone until July 27th when he emailed me my pageview targets for the new bonus system. Here's what he said...

"I think you've still got some big tone issues to work on editorially, but your traffic has been great and these numbers are well under what you've been generating."

Two days later I referred to a group of Hamptonites as "twatwaffles," and that really set him off. He fired off an email saying...

"Your voice is simply not working for Gawker. The conclusion I've close to making is that you're simply unable to make the change to a voice that fits the editorial style of the rest of the site."

After that, I didn't get another note about "tone" until he cited the Patricia Heaton "staggering ass" thing when he fired me.

I'm in shock. This doesn't make any sense. I read Gawker every day and I can honestly say that your tone was in no way that dramatically different than Nolan's or Pareene's, that's for sure. I can't make sense of this.

Imagine how I feel! I'm the guy in the middle of it trying to make sense of what happened. Honestly, I think there's more to it all. Let me start from the beginning...

When Ryan Tate left the night editor position to become the Valleywag guy, Gabriel and I talked about me taking the gig. He asked me to do a one week tryout kind of thing, so I did, and honestly kind of knocked it out of the park. So we met up the following Saturday and he asked me if I'd be willing to take the job on a week to week basis. I told him fuck no! "Shit or get off the pot" were my exact words I think. Who the hell wants to work under those conditions...not knowing if you'll have a job from week to week...especially when it's a night job where you kind of have to turn your life upside down in order to do it. So anyway, he then asked if I could do another tryout week. I was annoyed as hell, but agreed to it. The next Friday I go to the office to meet with him and he offers me the job. We shake on it and he tells me that he'd have a contract drawn up and that he'd get back to me the following week to set up a time for me to go in and sign my contract and all.

So weeks go by and I email him a couple of times to ask about the contract and also about getting assigned an @gawker.com email address and having my name put on the masthead. He never responded to any of those inquiries. So time passes and people start asking questions like, "Hey why aren't you on the masthead?" and I always responded by saying "I'm just seeing how long I can work there before they acknowledge me," and honestly it really wasn't that big of a deal to me. It became kind of a big joke honestly...everyone else seemed to care about my being on the masthead way more than I did. At one point one of the salespeople at Gawk asked if I'd like them to set me up with a Gawker email address and put my name on the masthead. I declined, repeating the old "I'm waiting to see..." line. Again, all I really cared about was doing my job and getting paid each month. Outside of that, I really didn't care about much else.

But then at some point in early June or late July, I can't recall when exactly, I woke up to an email from someone who works in the Gawker office who wrote to warn me that my time there was short and that Gabriel had no intention of keeping me, basically insinuating that there was someone else he wanted for the job and that I was just being used as a temp without being told that I was a temp.

Holy hell that's shady. SO SHADY! So do you think you were fired to make room for this Belonsky guy?

Well, I sort of did initially, because I just couldn't make sense of the whole not being on the masthead or getting a Gawker email thing, but after having some time to reflect on it I don't think that's the case. However, I don't think I was ever Gabriel's guy, the person he really wanted so to speak. I think he needed somebody and I came highly recommended by a bunch of people on the inside and I was available to do it, but I wasn't his guy, and that led to conflict. When he fired me, I asked him to explain why he never put my name on the masthead or gave me an email addy and his response was this: "That's because I had my doubts about you from the beginning." WELL WHY THE FUCK DID YOU HIRE ME, ASSHOLE?!?!?!

This guy sounds like the doucheiest douchebag in world history. Reading all of this frustrates the hell of me, so I can only imagine what it's like for you.

Gabriel's actually not a bad guy in person and outside of work. However, he's not a good manager of people. AT ALL. We had nothing resembling a nurturing editor/writer relationship. It was almost entirely adversarial. In the whole time I was there, I never received a single piece of positive feedback from him. NOT ONE. Not once did I get a note saying "good find" or "good take on that story" or "good headline"...NOTHING! Every editorial note I ever received from Gabriel was one pointing out something he thought I did wrong, and usually in an extremely harsh tone. I mean, REALLY prickish. I wasn't using em dashes properly, or he didn't like my point of view on something, or a headline I wrote was flat. Worse, he was often quite vague in what he wanted me to do to correct whatever it was he was pissed about. It was like he had no trouble expressing what he didn't like, but was incapable of expressing what he did like. Does that make sense? In person though, he's quite pleasant, even on the rare occasion when we met to talk shop and he'd just sit there pounding me, pointing out everything I did that he didn't like. But over email or IM he's a total asshole. He's one of those guys who grows huge balls when he's communicating electronically and says things in a way that he'd never say them if you were standing in front of him looking him in the eye. And look, I'm not one of those writers who needs his ego constantly stroked...quite the contrary...I take criticism pretty well and value it greatly when it's valid, but in order to grow as a writer, or in any profession really, you need to know what you're doing right just as much as you need to know what you're doing wrong, and Gabriel just never did that, even after I pointed it out to him that he was negative ALL THE TIME and virtually begged for some occasional semblance of positive feedback. It just never came.

Did he not even have anything positive to say after you broke that Mancow story? That's one of the biggest stories Gawker broke all year?

Ha! You know, that's a funny story! No, he never complimented me on it in any way, in fact, HE WANTED ME TO KILL IT! Here's how the whole thing happened...On the night of Weds. May 27th, I got my hands on a bunch of emails between Mancow's publicist and various other people his flack had contacted looking for some military guy to help Mancow fake a waterboarding for publicity. I was also tipped to the fact that Olbermann and his producers at MSNBC were privy to the fact that it was all a hoax and still rolled with the story and had Mancow on the show to talk about how horrible waterboarding is anyway because it fit Olbermann's political agenda. I contacted the publicist, who confirmed that the email chain I was forwarded was in fact completely authentic. So, in the middle of the night, I pieced this monster post together and then when I was done I thought, "This is kinda big...perhaps I should run this by Gabriel before posting it?" This was the only time I'd ever do that, mind you, but anyway...so I emailed him at about 7am saying "Hey I've got something kind of big, can you call me?" He emailed back asking me to forward him everything I have so he can look it over, and then he finally calls me at about 7:30 saying, "I don't understand what the story is here? So a radio shock jock faked a waterboarding a week ago, big deal!" Absolutely incredulous, I tell him..."But Gabriel, I think the bigger story here is that Olbermann and his producers knew about it all up front and they still had him on Countdown while pretending that everything was on the up and up." I then asked Gabe if he had any contacts at MSNBC I could email for a comment, as my emails overnight to email addys I'd found on the MSNBC website had produced nothing. You know what he said? "Nobody at MSNBC is going to return your emails...so just forget about it." So I go to bed but am just seething after waking up and processing everything and by the time my shift rolls around on Thursday night I'm just livid and pissed off and a million other things and finally I just said fuck it and posted the damn thing anyway at a little after 9 that night. By the next morning, the story is EVERYWHERE and then John Cook came in behind me and filled in some blanks and added some things to the story and the next thing you know Olbermann is on his show with Mancow, not even 24 hours after my post went up, devoting an entire segment to desperately trying to save his reputation by discrediting everyone at Gawker as being a bunch of full of shit assholes hell-bent on destroying him. The subject of my Mancow post was never spoken of even again. Gabriel never acknowledged it to me in any way. NOTHING!

Holy shitballs Batman! Worst boss you've ever had?

No, second worst boss I've ever had. But definitely the worst editor I've ever had. Ironically, the guy who takes first place in the worst boss category is the guy who nicknamed me "Cajun Boy." It was the first job I had in New York, a survival job if you will, working for this real estate guy who was the embodiment of every bad stereotype of Jewish people known to man, just a total arrogant little prick who thought he was the shit and tried to fuck everyone out of money. He refused to call me by my first name as a way of belittling me and/or putting me in my place, so he went around calling me "Cajun Boy." So when I decided to start a blog in 2007 and was faced with the "Do I want to use my real name or an internet handle?" decision, I went with "Cajun Boy," mainly because Katrina and Rita had just happened and I was homesick and really wanted to be identified with Louisiana. Plus I thought it was kinda funny. But no, Gabriel's wasn't as bad of a boss as THAT GUY, the one who wouldn't address me by my name, but he does get the silver medal.

Well man I'm sorry all this happened to you. You were really fucked hard. I'm sure something better will come of it, though it's going to suck not having you on Gawker to read in the mornings. What's the deal with the TV thing you had in development?

Oh don't feel bad for me...not at all. My life is already so much better now that I don't work there. Don't get me wrong, I was REALLY pissed for the first 24 hours or so, but then it became quite obvious that my life was going to improve by not working at Gawker. I mean, I had wheels in motion for news gigs within an hour of walking out of the Gawker office from being canned, and here it is two weeks later and I'm much happier. I was fucking miserable there! Looking back on it, I wanted to quit so bad after hearing that I might be being used as merely a temp and wasn't really being acknowledged as an employee, I thought about it every day, but didn't have the balls to do it. I was stressed out all the time, I wasn't sleeping properly, I'd wake up having nightmares about Gawker...it was just fucking awful. I was completely lacking motivation the last few weeks I was there. I just did what I needed to do and got the fuck out, sort of punching the clock I guess. I'm not saying I phoned it in, as my stupid pride would never allow me to that, and I still worked hard to pump out ten posts or so each night, but I was definitely lacking motivation. So Gabriel actually did me a favor by letting me go in a way. And the TV thing is dead btw. I've got other film/TV ideas that I need to get off my ass and work on eventually, but for now I'm blogging at Animal and am going to be writing a news/politics blog for Yahoo! that's launching later in the year. I have a voice in the national conversation, I'm happy, and that's all that really matters. But follow my Twitter because I usually update it with links to stuff I do and whatnot.