I became a blog addict because I was a kid who loved movies. In the early 2000s, the movie blogosphere was a very exciting place for developing nerds to find themselves. The first movie website that I got really into was the AV Club, back when Nathan Rabin, Keith Phipps, Tasha Robinson, Scott Tobias, and the rest of the original crew were there. I was already a devoted reader of the AV Club supplements from the old print Onion, so it was a natural transition to their website. Plus, one of my best buddies was a big fan of the site as well, so it provided frequent conversational fodder, that led to more reading on the site, and so on.

When I would run out of AV Club articles to read (and once I had finished poring over the IMDB trivia listings for every movie I could think of) I started looking around for other places to get my movie fix, and the big one that really stuck for me early on was CHUD (Cinematic Happenings Under Development). Founded by aspiring movie producer Nick Nunziata, CHUD had an irreverent editorial bent that gave it the “edge” my teenage self craved and employed a lot of great writers, including Jeremy Smith and massive asterisk Devin Faraci, who wrote a LOT for the site, from reviews to opinion pieces to an obsessively detailed series of pieces on each individual Star Trek episode called “Star Trekkin”. No other site at the time (at least not one that an immature Midwestern teenager like myself was aware of) featured the combination of breaking news and set visits with timely reviews of new releases and interesting pieces about older films that CHUD had.

There were plenty of other movie blogs doing brisk business at the time, and since they were all competing for scoops in the same news ecosystem, you couldn’t read CHUD without finding your way to plenty of others. I was soon spending time on Collider, JoBlo, Latino Review, and the 800 pound gorilla of the scene, Ain’t It Cool News.

Ain’t It Cool was, in the parlance of our times, a land of contrasts. The site was built on the success of its scoops and insider Hollywood information, gleaned from industry professionals and a cultivated “spy network” of production assistant-types and test screening-attenders, and on any given day along with the news you might find great and thoughtful pieces from pseudonymous writers like Quint (Eric Vespe), Massawyrm (C. Robert Cargill), Moriarty (Drew McWeeny) or Mr. Beaks (Jeremy Smith, also of CHUD) alongside Harry Knowles’ aggressively terrible movie reviews and a thoroughly insane comment section. But Harry owned the site, and it was his connections that kept it running, so he got to post as he pleased.

During the site’s prime, it really did do a great job of making the world of movies (and to a lesser extent, TV and comics) feel alive, exciting, and accessible. Looking back on it now, that particular corner of the internet blogosphere also reinforced a very dude-centric perspective on movie fandom and culture, which I didn’t even really notice at the time. Astute readers will notice that all of the writers on all the non-AV Club sites that I just mentioned were guys. Self-educated in the world of movies, in the mold of their idols like Quentin Tarantino, they wrote without much seeming awareness of their cultural blind spots – most of the movies that got the heaviest coverage were American, and targeted at an audience of young men. When the coverage broadened, it was often to include similar demographic fodder like Asian action movies and French extreme horror. There’s nothing wrong with any of those subjects, but when they make up such a large portion of your cinematic worldview they can lead to a kind of tunnel vision that leaves out a lot of other worthy art by many other worthy artists. It can also have an impact on your real world worldview, leading to a tendency to see men’s stories as the important ones by default and, if not necessarily discounting stories by and about women, perhaps not thinking about them much at all.

Devin Faraci left CHUD to kick off a movies and culture blog for the Alamo Drafthouse: Badass Digest, later renamed to the more marketing-friendly but punctuationally frustrating Birth.Movies.Death., which massively expanded his personal profile. Alamo had a lot of cachet as the “cool” movie theater chain, which landed Devin the kind of access to the world of Hollywood that he had only dreamed of before. It went to his head. He’d always been an opinionated snarker on blogs and message boards, but in his new position as a geek-film kingmaker he became downright abusive in the way he bullied his critics and “enemies” over social media. His notoriety also led to the exposure of a sexual assault that he’d committed years before, after which he was “fired” from his editorial job while remaining active behind the scenes at the Drafthouse organization writing copy. When this closed-doors employment arrangement was exposed, the reputational hit to the company led to the soon-after shuttering of Birth.Movies.Death. Though to be fair, the site was already floundering for a new identity after having built so much of its brand around Faraci’s personal voice.

Around the same time, the other one-time king of the movie nerd internet had to take responsibility for his own nasty history, when Harry Knowles was exposed as a serial sexual harrasser, having behaved abominably toward seemingly every woman who came anywhere close enough to him at a film festival or screening to be groped or subjected to lewd verbal assaults. Ain’t It Cool was already deep in decline at that point, having long since lost the talented writers who made the site worth visiting and ceded its cultural relevance to Badass/BMD and their ilk, but Harry’s downfall put the last nail in the coffin.

One site that Faraci hated was Gawker, which should have been an early red flag about his personality. I started reading Gawker in the late aughts, and before long my Google Reader feed was filled with Gawker and its suite of sister blogs (Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Jezebel, Kotaku, er… Fleshbot…). You started following Gawker blogs because they were consistently entertaining, often salacious, and always a delight to read, and over time they grew on you as you grew with them. They expanded your worldview and introduced you to new things you might never have tried – I got hooked on Deadspin because of the quality of the writing, and over time grew to understand what their subject matter (sports, primarily) meant to the writers as people, and gained an appreciation of sports and sports culture that I never would have had otherwise.

Gawker was also an incredible talent incubator. Site alums founded or contributed heavily to some of the Internet’s most beloved blogs – The Awl, The Hairpin, The Toast, and Popula to name a few, and have become bestselling authors (Danny Lavery, Jia Tolentino and Jason Schrier, among others) and even a New York Times Styles section editor in Choire Sicha.

The Gawker sites covered a huge variety of subject matter in many very different ways, but the driving ethos behind all of the sites was simple: tell the truth. You had Gizmodo reporting on the reality of what was going on behind the shiny PR of tech companies, Lifehacker helping readers improve their daily lives by gaining a deeper understanding of the tools and habits they rely on, Jezebel pointing out the ways that our mainstream media landscape degrades its subjects and shames its consumers, Deadspin piercing the veil of access journalism that held a tight grip on our understanding of the world of sports, and Gawker itself, a gossip blog, eschewing tabloid fabulism in favor of truly uncomfortable truths about the worlds of media and celebrity and coming up with a product orders of magnitude more compelling than its predecessors. Gawker’s defining post tag was “How Things Work”: at their best, posts on the network tried to understand a subject from the inside out, and to explain what the writer knew and learned about it in a truthful way, including acknowledging the truth of the writer’s own subjectivity.

This extended to Gawker Media’s proud tradition of reporting on themselves. The “Journalismism” tag, another popular one on the sites and their successors, covered reporting on mainstream and fringe media, and it was also used by writers on the sites to air their own dirty laundry. The most famous example of this is probably Megan Greenwell’s The Adults in the Room, her piece about what it was like trying to edit Deadspin while being micromanaged by their private equity ownership, and this article represents well the spirit that Gawker Media bloggers carried forward. It also led to the end of her tenure at the site, and not long after to Deadspin’s de facto shuttering when all of the rest of the writers walked out in protest of those same owners.

After the downfall of the main Gawker site, prompted by a lawsuit from Hulk Hogan over their publishing of a sex tape of his (and funded by Peter Thiel in revenge for their coverage of his personal life), the company was sold off to Univision, which added a politics site (Splinter), then sold the whole package again to a dunderheaded private equity concern that was convinced by their “success” in transforming Forbes magazine into a hollow but lucrative content mill that they could turn Deadspin into the next ESPN and Kotaku into the next IGN. The new owners had no idea what readers valued about the site (they were there, and not on ESPN or IGN, for a reason), and seemed hostile to the idea of anything other than profit having any “value” at all, and made such a mess of their new properties that they wound up either losing all of the writers people went to the sites to read – Deadspin writers, for example, formed Defector together after leaving their previous job en masse, and Kotaku’s writers moved on to a new collective as well – or parting them out and selling them off to companies that were at least marginally interested in running actual media concerns, like their sale of Jezebel, Splinter, and the AV Club, which they had also acquired via their Univision purchase, to Paste Magazine. Gawker itself was briefly relaunched by Bustle founder Bryan Goldberg, who proved to be more game than expected to the Gawker spirit. But ultimately his investment in the site was financial rather than spiritual, and after a couple of years of delightfully mischievous posting it was shut back down.

Many of the writers whose work populated the best of those blogs have struck out on their own. Most of the old AV Club staff left to create the amazing and sorely missed site The Dissolve for Pitchfork, and after Dissolve dissolved moved on to critic-in-residence positions at legacy magazines and Patreon/Substack sites like The Next Picture Show and The Reveal. Max Read of Gawker maintains the subscription site Read Max and Gawker/Splinter/Deadspin all-star Hamilton Nolan writes reported pieces and opinion blogs at on his own platform, appropriately titled How Things Work.