![]() ![]() "One is permanent, and one is changeable based on people's views. "I'm more concerned about my character than my reputation, because my character is who I am and my reputation is what others think I am," he said previously. "Our track record and actual data on compensation, raises, promotions, diversity, as well as our ability to attract and retain employees who want to stay dedicated to the impactful journalism being done every day across GMG, more than speaks for itself," Narisetti said in a statement. Though he said he was "not minimizing" the effect many top women like Dietrick and Drummond had during the past several years, he pointed out that GMG's editorial leadership remained slightly more female than male, and he emphasized he was not "going to play defense on it." "There are women being promoted or hired into positions of power, and I'm sure there will be more, but even if the higher-ups do all the right things from now on, it's not like you can really fix it, because you've lost so many of the people who made the place what it was at its best." "Just since Katie left, we've lost our president, our top video journalist, and our best reporter, and that's after a big all-hands meeting where people were really clear about how alarming the pattern was. "People are really worried about this," one GMG employee said. ![]() "They had no interest in maintaining our editorial philosophy, having a functioning HR department, or retaining key talent."Īfter years of questions about its own relationship with female leaders at the company, the final iteration of Gawker Media was one with women in the most senior roles in the company, a source of pride and loyalty for many staffers.īut months later, with top leaders departing, some employees wonder whether the company is doing enough to persuade respected female leaders to remain, and if the company will suffer from the talent and leadership losses its already experienced. "Every day, morale got worse because it felt like Univision was determined to stamp out all the great things about working at Gawker Media," one former GMG staffer told Business Insider. But now the environment is, as one employee put it, "toxic," and as downcast as it was during some of the Hogan trial. Staffers say they felt initial relief after Univision beat out the media company Ziff Davis to buy GMG out of bankruptcy for $135 million. ![]() ![]() The Gawker ethos is fadingĬonversations with more than a dozen current and former staffers over the past several weeks detailed a difficult integration that has chipped away the spirit and ethos of Gawker Media, founded 14 years ago by Nick Denton as two blogs covering media and tech gossip, which eventually evolved into the fiercely independent, proudly standoffish, endlessly navel-gazing media company targeted by Thiel and Hogan. Since transitioning over to GMG's Kinja publishing platform in January, the African-American digital magazine The Root has 35% more uniques each month than it did in the same months last year.įor many GMG employees, "challenging" is an understated description of the past several months. Other Fusion Media Group sites that were integrated into the GMG portfolio have thrived. Traffic to the sites has remained steady at about 90 million monthly unique visitors since he took over in October, certainly an accomplishment considering Fusion's notoriously poor online traffic and the loss of the 15 million to 16 million monthly uniques that Gawker's flagship website generated. Narisetti said last week that even after he had hired 53 new full-time staffers across the websites, the company remained under budget and on target to experience a 30% increase in revenue across the sites in one year. The CEO, who joined GMG in October from News Corp., rattled off top-line statistics that showed a company growing after a tumultuous multiyear legal battle with Hogan that took the company from a $250 million valuation to bankruptcy. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
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