Gawking at Gawker

Elizabeth Spiers was just another Wall Street type. Now she's the must-read chronicler of trucker hats, Soho House, and Anna Wintour.

Howard Stern says he checks it every day. Gossip columns in the New York Post, the Daily News, and Salon.com have all picked up items from it. Time recently rated it one of the internet's "50 best sites," New York called it the "white-hot blog du jour," and, yeah, we know you've been furtively checking it in your cubicle whenever your boss steps away for a moment.

"Everyone who is anyone in chic Manhattan is reading Gawker.com—or should be," wrote Michael Gross in the Daily News.

Gawker, which is a Manhattan-centric weblog, has enjoyed a truly meteoric rise to notoriety, particularly in media circles. The site is a mixture of media gossip, voyeuristic takes on life in New York, and biting commentary on pop culture. It's sort of The New York Observer in blog form, though, frankly, it generally out-Observers even the Observer.

It's so media-obsessed—even, specifically, Conde Nast-obsessed—that it spent a good chunk of a recent week discussing and analyzing the ban on garlic in the mag company's famous cafeteria and whether said ban might mean Si Newhouse is a vampire. It runs a regular feature called "Gawker Stalker," in which readers contribute blind-item sightings of celebrities around the city, and the scruffier the celeb the better. For a while, it used its network of tipsters to catalogue where in the city celebrities—and especially media celebrities—live.

Though Gawker has only been around for seven months, it regularly gets upward of 30,000 page views per day, and it peaked at a stunning 120,000 when a photograph of a pregnant Catherine Zeta-Jones sunning herself and smoking a cigarette was posted several months ago. It's a phenomenon that could only have been born in the internet age, where tastes can be formed and reformed in a nanosecond; but it's for real, and it's taken the city—or at least he boldfaced, mediacentric parts of it—by storm. As Tina Brown, one of the site's frequent targets, might remark, Gawker is "v. hot."

* * *

It's a warm spring day outside Coffee Shop, on Union Square. Wafer-thin fashionistas and their disaffected beaus pick at salads at the outdoor tables, and the manic rush of lunch hour sweeps by on the sidewalk.

It's humid and I've already sweated through my shirt, but when Elizabeth Spiers arrives for a lunch interview, she's nonetheless wearing a long vintage-style coat with a faux-fur collar, the picture of urbanity. Spiers is the woman behind Gawker, the witty and cynical cyberscribe whose personality suffuses the site. She's shorter than I'd expected, but she walks with quick, confident steps as we're led to a table in the back room.

Spiers's reputation precedes her. Though less than a year ago she was analyzing small-cap tech stocks for a hedge fund, the 26-year-old has burst onto the media radar over the past seven months as the voice behind Gawker, and she has created a career for herself in the center of the media maelstrom more or less out of thin air.

I've read Gawker for the past few months, and I'm surprised at how much about Spiers's personality I'd assumed from the voice of her writing. In print she is the queen of snark, consistently acerbic, intelligent, and supremely hip in her daily criticism of the uniquely Manhattan-centric universe of media, gossip, social climbing and conspicuous decadence. She once called the New York Post gay, she's lengthily dissected Anna Wintour's behavior in the Conde Nast elevator, she debated the relative merits of hipsters' trucker hats, and she has dressed down a wide swath of prominent media folk. But in person Spiers is soft spoken, friendly and accessible, and with a slight Southern accent that betrays her rural Alabama roots. Her easy smile is hard to reconcile with her online acid tongue.

"I use a bit of an alter-ego on Gawker," she says, "I'm actually kind of quiet and shy. I was always the kid in high school sitting in the back of the room saying nothing. I was always thinking of smart-ass comments, but I'd never actually say them."

Now, however, she does—electronically, anyway. And those smart-ass comments have developed a major following. The whole shtick of the site, indeed, is that kid-in-the-back-row mystique, the clever outsider watching—gawking—at the cool stuff within. And, in a way, that's what makes Gawker so interesting: While Spiers's writing persona often casts her as an outsider, voyeuristically looking in at the absurd and decadent lifestyles led by others around her, her newfound fame has transformed her into a media insider. She attends hip Manhattan soirées, knows many of the people she writes about, and even occasionally writes freelance for The New York Times and "Page Six." Maer Roshan even hired her to oversee some back-of-the-book sections of his Radar, the most insiderly hip magazine around.

But Spiers maintains that her editorial style on Gawker isn't affected by the site's popularity. "It's pretty difficult to be a media critic if you're an independent journalist," says Spiers, "You don't want to offend anyone that you're going to be begging for work later. But most people kind of get the gist of Gawker; it's snarky, and there's usually some grain of truth to whatever I write, but it's not personal. Most of the editors I write for know that going into it, and even as I work for the publications I cover, that won't exempt them from criticism. And the kind of person who would be offended by something on Gawker is probably not going to be somebody I'm asking for a job anyway." Still, as she continues to see more and more success as a writer, one wonders how long this outsiderness can last.

* * *

Spiers grew up in Wetumpka, Alabama, about 20 miles northwest of Montgomery and with a population around 5,700. Her parents have never visited her in New York, and when she goes home during the holidays, she says, it's a different world.

"My parents still think of New York as the New York of the '70s," she says. "Like it's this really dangerous place. They're always telling me to be careful."

Spiers did a lot writing growing up, but she never considered it as an occupation because, as she says, she was "averse to starvation." And so when she graduated from Duke in 1999 with a major in public policy studies, she didn't try to write professionally. Instead, she first took a job at the tail end of the tech boom with a startup internet company and then moved to a position as an independent equities analyst. She was still analyzing stocks for a hedge fund last June when it dawned on her that she needed to make a change.

"I decided about that time that I really hated equities analysis," says Spiers. "I really wanted to write, but people kept telling me 'It's really tough. Don't do it. You'll be lucky if you have a byline in, like, three years.'" So instead of getting an editorial assistant job and working her way up the coffee-getting, Xerox-making masthead of a magazine, Spiers entered into the media world through the back door. "I was coming out of a totally different industry," she says, "and if you just want to start cold and you don't know anyone, you have to come up with your own way in."

Spiers had been blogging for about a year while working as a stock analyst, and she'd grown familiar with Nick Denton, another blogger who was also a journalist and internet entrepreneur. He was looking to create a sort of insider's-guide site for New York, with gossip and news about the city, that he could use to promote his other projects (which include the gadget-site Gizmodo), and which might eventually generate advertising revenue. The two bloggers become friendly by reading one another's work, and Denton eventually approached Spiers about editing his new site. Gawker was born.

("Eventually there will be a similar site in Los Angeles," says Denton, "as well as a similarly produced pornography blog called Fleshbox. Ultimately, I hope to have a dozen or so niche web magazines like Gawker, all with part-time editors, not to mention possible spin-offs of one kind of another.")

Denton had been reading Spiers's writing for many months, so he knew what kind of editorial sensibility he was going to be getting. And he says the site has turned out pretty much as he originally envisioned it. But Spiers says he has lately begun to realize how much Gawker is dependent on the personality in her writing, and, as a result, has tried to steer her towards more service-y sorts of content, as he'd originally envisioned. "Nick often has to push me to post to-do lists and restaurant recommendations and stuff like that," Spiers says. "For me, I'm much more into media and people. He especially hates the literary gossip, which is more my thing."

But isn't Spiers's voice the whole point? After all, the site hasn't particularly pushed the envelope as far as content goes. The format is more or less the same as that on zillions of other blogs on the web, and most of Spiers's content consists simply of a link and a brief blurb. So why has it had such success?

"It basically just comes down to talent," muses Simon Dumenco, a media critic for New York and Folio:. "Elizabeth is just a really smart, funny writer and an exceptionally nimble cultural critic. Yeah, she's doing something that plenty of other people were doing—or trying to do—already, but she's way sharper and more constructively caustic in her approach. She does shallow with surprising depth."

* * *

Gawker is created on a rickety laptop, which is most often operated while Spiers sits on the sofa in her small East Village apartment. While the site is supposed to be a part-time, freelance assignment, she says she regularly spends six to eight hours per day creating content. As well, an unspoken but large part of the job involves keeping up with dozens of new publications that come out each day.

"I have to read all the New York media and kind of have to absorb everything," she says. "I read the Times, the Observer, New York magazine, et cetera. A lot of the stuff I just find on the web, but I also get maybe 150 emails a day with stuff people think should be included."

She says that she has yet to get an email from Anna Wintour or Graydon Carter, and she imagines the highest echelons of editorial mastheads aren't even aware of the site's existence. But she notes that in a recent column Tina Brown quoted a fellow blogger who was a friend of hers, making it clear that the former Talk editor at least was aware of the medium.

Definitely some editors are paying attention. Radar wunderkind Roshan, who Spiers took some swipes at early in the year, says he eventually brought her on board at his magazine because he "loved her tone," and because her experience with the web added an element of what he was hoping to bring to his magazine.

"I was friends with Nick a little and followed the site when it started," he says. "They actually started taking a few pot-shots at me, but it was OK, because they were really well-done pot-shots. Also, I admired how much material they were able to get every day, and I'd often say to my staff, 'Look at how much they can do with just one person.'" He thought Spiers had "a funny sort of Dorothy Parker thing going," he says. "When I met her in person finally and said, 'Hey, you're the one who's always making fun of me,' it occurred to me she was a natural fit for the magazine."

Roshan isn't the only Gawker target who has ended up befriending Spiers. She is also now friendly with New York Press editor Jeff Koyen, whose columns were criticized on Gawker several times since he took over at the paper earlier this year.

"She gave me some slams," said Koyen, "but it was fine. She's just a really good writer, and that comes across, and we've gone for drinks since then."

* * *

Spiers says she meets a lot of people through Gawker and gets invited to lunch a lot by people who come across the site. Many seem to be taken aback, as I was, by the difference between her on-screen and in-person personalities. (Roshan said he found this made her even more interesting.) But she says she thinks most people understand that Gawker is this alter-ego, and that her persona is more caricature than reality. In that way, one can see a parallel to her view of the people she skewers on her site. "I tend to separate the people from the publication," she says, "with the exception of some of the editors who have these larger-than-life personalities, like Anna Wintour and Tina Brown." Those kinds of personalities are fair game because they've taken on a life of their own, she argues, and are thus kind of depersonalized.

Ultimately, Spiers says, her ideal scenario would be to have a staff job at a magazine and a book deal on the side. And aside from her current larger-than-life persona, she says she doesn't really have ambitions to become like the people she writes about.

But Spiers's prominence just keeps growing. When Richard Johnson went on vacation a few weeks ago, for example, Spiers filled in as a legman on "Page Six." And doesn't a stint there—at the gossip column that is in many ways the ultimate insider read—detract from one's outsider cred anyway?

"I work in the industry and know several media people," she mused by email afterwards. "But I don't know if that makes me a de facto insider. If it does then I was an insider long before "Page Six." But even if that's the case, I don't think it matters unless it affects the editorial voice—which I don't see happening because I get a lot of personal enjoyment out of the irreverence of it. It wouldn't be fun without that."

David S. Hirschman is a freelance writer and editor and mediabistro.com's news editor.