Foster Kamer Departs Gawker, Invites Friends Over to Trash the Place
Gawker weekend editor Foster Kamer left his tenure at the site yesterday to start work at The Village Voice. (His departure, incidentally, had nothing to do with the near simultaneous canning of editor Gabriel Snyder.)
For his last day, Kamer invited along a bunch of his friends—including Andrew Krucoff, whom Gawker sort of accidentally got fired a few years ago—to write content for the site ranging from a smart reaction to a "Times blog rant about how servers are really just asking for too much in tips these day" to a bunch of weird insidery charticles.
While it was nice that Kamer gave some writers who might not regularly (or ever) appear on Gawker a chance to have a byline on the site, it was a little weird (unprofessional? but awesome?) to go out like that.
Doree Shafrir, former-turned-current Gawker employee, commented on her blog that she "must have missed a memo somewhere," tagging the post "Gawker is not your Tumblr."
And, of course, she's right. But it was the weekend, it was Kamer's last day, and while it was probably "too insidery" for most casual readers, for a little while it felt almost (especially with the inclusion of Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers) a little bit like that mythical "old" Gawker.
I'll leave you with Kamer's last words on the site (following a massive TL;DR post thanking nearly everyone he's ever worked with):
Honesty is the great equalizer, compassion is what makes you a tolerable person, a sense of humor is what makes you an enjoyable one. For fuck's sake, have one.This was never not fun.
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