John Cook is an asshole. You are almost certainly a more pleasant and sensible person than John Cook, but you would not be here if it were not for what a colossal asshole he is.
There was a time, not that long ago but unimaginably distant, when it was OK to be an asshole. You could say you were one. You didn’t need to cuddle with your friend on live Twitter video and read tweets to one another about what friends you were. You did not need to give a shit what other people thought about you. All you needed to do was to tell the truth, with courage and integrity.
No one had more courage and integrity than John Cook. No one was more willing, as a reporter and editor, to be the asshole, to bring down the wrath of the gun nuts or the Fox News goons or the high-strung Quality Journalists on his own head. No one—literally, no one else—was there to run the newsroom in its darkest hour, into the darker hours still to come, fighting and losing and fighting and losing and fighting on anyway.
Tradition says that here is where I should roast him, where I should talk about his hilariously catastrophic hiring decisions, his homeownership in the very most non-embarrassing suburb for people who could definitely still live in Brooklyn if they wanted to, his dad-rock guitar-hero dreams, his dedication to quitting smoking that was almost as strong as his dedication to bumming cigarettes. John lived that tradition—endlessly roasting and endlessly roastable, fearless and funny and unashamed. He left the company twice and came back twice, drawn back to the fellowship of the weird and surly and otherwise unemployable, the culture of writers who couldn’t quite imagine being anywhere else, with anyone else.
Now we know what that culture got us: the contempt and condescension of other journalists as we battled for our existence, our inside jokes read aloud in court to inflame a jury of mistrustful Floridians, our honest or facetious confessions of weakness and failure compiled and passed along and signal-degraded by message-board cretins to form an endless smarmy indictment of who we are and what we did and why. It leaves us sitting and waiting to learn whether every word we ever published will be deleted, along with the ones already deleted, by whoever has the money to buy the wreckage of the years of work and care and bravery and idiocy that added up to Gawker.
Was it worth it? Day after day, an incoming message or phone call or news report would make him groan or gasp or swear, or grip his head in his hands. He would curse into his phone and listen and curse again, speed-walking away to find a quiet corner in which to handle the latest disaster, or he would slam shut his laptop and stomp off. And then he would come back to his desk. Sometimes he would still be there, in his chair, long after night had fallen.
He took the blame. He let himself be a target for the wrath and anxiety of an office under siege when no one even knew the reason why. He fired people he loved because there was not enough money to pay them, because a billionaire had maliciously bled off the company’s funds on pointless legal fees attacking a true story in revenge for other true stories. The man who flew to Toronto to try to buy a crack video counseled prudence, because without prudence there was no hope any of this would survive.
Here you are. There he goes.
Lacey Donohue, former night editor of Gawker, former editor of Defamer, former managing editor of Gawker, former executive managing editor of Gawker Media, former deputy executive editor of Gawker Media, current senior editor at Hulu:
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