![]() ![]() ![]() Steve Jobs's uniform of jeans and a black turtleneck has heretofore seemed less like a…īut before he was a cultural icon parodied on Saturday Night Live, imitated in TV commercials, and celebrated in a national theatrical production, Jobs was regarded as a corporate oddball, even within his own company. Sales of Jobs style turtlenecks spiked in the days following his death last week. Acclaimed designer Ralph Rucci has called 501 jeans and black turtlenecks like Jobs's two of the three most "wholly original" pieces of clothing in modern fashion. Today, Jobs' fashion choices look downright visionary. Before he died, Jobs himself explained his sartorial signature to biographer Walter Isaacson, in an interview published for the first time below. But the Apple co-founder wouldn't have worn them if his employees had accepted the nylon jacket he proposed as a corporate uniform instead. Here is how BuzzFeed's staff will remember Gawker.Steve Jobs's black turtlenecks helped make him the world's most recognizable CEO. It's ironic, but also somehow fitting, that it was brought down by one of the very people who most needed to be kept in check. Still, the DNA of the original site (and its early editors) was never really lost Gawker always saw its mission as being not afraid to speak truth to the most powerful. So it wasn't that surprising that when we asked BuzzFeed staffers for their favorite Gawker posts, many of them - Caity Weaver on TGI Friday's, Adrian Chen on the most notorious Reddit troll, Kiese Laymon on racism in America - were from the last few years, a time when Gawker had moved far beyond its original ambitions. Even so, traffic eventually plateaued - it turns out that there is a limit to the number of people who care about media gossip and mocking socialites - and sometime not long after I left, the site's mandate grew much broader. ![]() But Gawker was (arguably?) the most widely read. I only lasted 10 months before taking a job at the Observer, where the snark was a little more subtle.Ĭertainly Gawker was not the first publication ever to do this there was Spy, and there was, and there was Might Magazine, and there was the New York Observer, which (believe it or not) used to actually tweak the rich and powerful. We were never explicitly told to be "snarky" or negative, but it was understood that that was the default posture, and it turns out that doing it day in and day out is exhausting. Because at the time, Gawker was explicitly a New York and media-centric blog anything outside of that world was considered off-limits. What's funny about this email, nearly 10 years later, is that there was no question at the time that the post had news merit - it was that it did not have the right news merit. Unless there's NYC/media-gossip hook I'm missing." The post was titled "Barbara Bush, Committed Drinker," and it published some photos with commentary of the former first daughter throwing a few back at Yale. the Barbara Bush post/photos, while amusing, are off-topic. I was two weeks into the job when I got an email from my boss, Chris Mohney, about a post I had written: "The one commenter has a point. When I was offered a job there as a writer in the fall of 2006, it seemed like I had unlocked some kind of door into a secret club. For those of us who came of age in the early to mid-2000s with vague aspirations to work in media, Gawker pulled the curtain back on a world that seemed at once alluring and opaque. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |