G/O Media's Death Spiral Is Nearly Complete

With Gizmodo sold off, a once-iconic suite of very good websites nears its inevitable end.

It used to go like this: A friend sent you an article they thought you’d like from a website you’d never heard of. Or maybe you found it on your own while searching for movie reviews or some obscure fact you need to settle a longstanding bet with pals. It didn’t really matter how you got there (well, it did, but not for the purposes of this blog) so much as that you kept going back.

You’d check for updates as you figured out which writers you liked, and which ones you didn’t, and found other people who read the same stuff as you and slowly you got the sense that this wasn’t just a Web Site on the Internet, but a hub. A place that knew just what it was — or faked it well enough — and that pulled in the sort of people who could appreciate what that really meant.

It’s not like that anymore. Not really. Sure, those hubs still exist in their own way — if we’ve done our job right, you’re reading a small one at this very moment — but the notion of a website as a special destination for you and your friends seems very much an antiquated throwback to an internet era that’s long gone by now.

Which brings me to what happened to Gizmodo today.