Gawker’s first editor, Elizabeth Spiers, was paid $2,000 per month for twelve posts a day, seven days a week. Her job was to mock the club of New York elites she had never been invited to join. Her job was to, with a kind of humorous contempt that’s come to be called snark, dismiss people and institutions as laughably unimportant, even as, in writing about them, she was in fact admitting how important they actually were (and that perhaps, deep down, she’d like to join them someday). Denton had a knack for recruiting talent like her, and for cultivating their voices as he did with Spiers and,
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