I don't understand the world, just a little bit of my view from where I stand and one of the places I've stood is in the world of journalism. There, i've met some very bright people and some people who would have put the children in the coal mines.
I'm not sure what it is about being a publisher, but it can really bring out the worse in some people. For example, a million years ago, i worked for someone who intentionally cultivated an image of cruelty. This person once told me, appropos of nothing in particular, he would never intentionally hire a handicapped person. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the office one day and found a lovely lady in a wheelchair setting type. Deciding to tease the publisher, i strolled into his office and reminded him what he told me. His reply is forever etched into my memory because I never, to this day, decided if he was kidding me or not. He said, "Yeah. I reconsidered. I thought about it and figured out if I ever needed to get any overtime out of her I could always grabber her wheels and put her up on blocks." And I will never know.
The New Yorker has profiled Nick Denton and this is what his colleagues have to say about him:
“He’s not, like, a sociopath, but you kind of have to watch what you’re doing around him,” Ricky Van Veen, the C.E.O. of the Web site College Humor, told me.
“The villain public persona is not a hundred-per-cent true,” A. J. Daulerio, the editor-in-chief of Deadspin, Gawker Media’s sports blog, said. “It’s probably eighty-per-cent true.”
“I can’t lie to make him worse than he is, but he’s pretty bad,” Ian Spiegelman, a former Gawker writer, said.
“Other people’s emotions are alien to him,” Choire Sicha, another Gawker alumnus, said.
“He’s got a strong carapace of not really thinking other people’s opinions are that important,” John Gapper, a columnist at the Financial Times, said.
“He’s right,” Matt Welch, the editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, said. “He’s never right about me, of course. But people are lazy and not very good.”
“He almost sees people as Legos moving around,” Sheila McClear said.
“He’s not a fully human person,” Spiegelman said.
“I mean, maybe he thinks he’s the one truly advanced human,” Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel, a.k.a. Girlie Gawker, said.
“Does he have parents?” Daulerio asked.
“I always imagine that he came fully formed out of British finishing school,” Holmes said.
“What can you do with a person like that?” Spiegelman said. “He’s a character out of Dr. Seuss, frankly.”
“Nick is a bit of a sphinx on purpose,” Joel Johnson, the longest-serving Gizmodo writer, said. “He has some of the attributes of the dork who wraps his Asperger’s around him like a cloak.”
“There’s no point in writing about Nick if you can’t get to the fundamental problem of his nihilism,” Moe Tkacik, who has worked at both Gawker and Jezebel, said.
[more]
If you want to find out how the mind of a publisher works, there's precious few opportunities better than this.
