It’s really hard to narrow it down to one. It is a place that lives up to its reputation and also requires a bit of demystifying and translating by people who are here. Is Florida as weird as its reputation says it is? I think there’s a strong voice, and that’s the thing we have in common.ĭo you run the amazing Florida man Twitter feed? I don’t think there’s a narrowness in perspective, generally. I’ve gone into colleagues’ posts and made comments. We have a platform now for people to dissent with each other within one post. That’s one of the wonderful things about our format, particularly as we’ve gone to this much-talked-about Kinja format. There’s a lot of disagreement within Gawker. It’s definitely got a voice, but it’s not always monolithic in tone. It really is a thinkers and writers place to be even when they’re doing things that might be characterized by other folks in the media as trolling. And you see those writers go on to bigger and better things. One thing that remained relatively constant is good writers sharing strong opinion succinctly stated. I think I did a lot of hate-reading of Gawker in its first couple of years. It’s evolved and we’ve evolved as readers. Obviously it’s not the same Gawker it was back then. You’ve said you’ve read Gawker from the beginning. They’re up front about making those sorts of value choices. One of the things Gawker has been refreshingly honest about is that we all have a perspective. I also have a responsibility to articulate it well and be honest about whether that comes up short in reporting a story. I certainly have a perspective, and I am not going to pretend that I don’t in my writing. Would you call what you do activist journalism? You certainly have a voice and often an opinion. You don’t come across those choices often in this profession. I took those to heart and felt that that was a good conversation to have. There were people who were validly questioning whether it was my decision to make. I was a little surprised by some of the people who offered valid criticism of my choosing to present the photo and how it was presented and whether it took some agency away from Trayvon’s family. To be honest, after having covered the Trayvon Martin case specifically since the beginning and second-amendment issues more generally for a long time, I was prepared for what turned out to be an ugly bunch of hate mail. There was a tremendous amount of blowback over that. You’re probably best known for being the guy who posted the photo of Trayvon Martin’s body on Gawker. I also maintained relationships with reporters in Florida who break that sort of news and was able to be a conduit to follow that stuff and make sense of it for a national audience. I managed to do a very small amount of original reporting on my end. We started pioneering a very formatted explainer and that ended up being a great format to tell the Trayvon Martin story. Around that time we had gone into a new direction of explanatory journalism. That was the year Trayvon Martin had been shot. Then I was lucky enough to spend a year reporting from Florida before bouncing up to their DC bureau. You’ve written a lot about your home state, perhaps most notably about politics, gun control and Trayvon Martin.įor the three years before I came to Gawker, I had been at Mother Jones. I don’t want to get into any details about what my story will be about, but I will point out that a certain region in Florida is considered by many to be the nudist capital of the country - and there will be some primary reporting done from there. In some ways, it’s a bellwether and, in some ways, a freakishly conservative dystopia.Īnything particularly exciting coming up? There are critical congressional races and ground broken legislatively here where the NRA and gun issues as well as others are concerned. As we hurdle into the 2014 election cycle there’s some really bellwether elections going on here: the referendum on the conservative governor, Rick Scott, and whether we’re going back to Charlie Crist. My main charge is politics on a national scale. Pete - and he’s lobbied for a greater Gawker Media presence here. That honor goes to Tim Burke, most famous as the GIF guy at Deadspin. I should say I’m not the first person to work out of Florida for Gawker media. I came on full time in the middle of November, and I’d done some blogging for them before that.
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