Hulk Hogan's Real Legacy

I don't mind speaking ill of the dead when they've done horrible things that will outlive them.

I wrote about Hulk Hogan's legacy for The New York Times this week. That's a gift link, so you can read the whole thing even if you don't have a subscription, but here's a bit of it:

WHAT HULK HOGAN LEFT BEHIND

Terry Gene Bollea, better known by his stage name, Hulk Hogan, died Thursday at the age of 71. For wrestling fans, he will be remembered as the man who, along with Vince McMahon, was responsible for turning professional wrestling into a popular mainstream sport and a franchise worth billions. But for many journalists, Mr. Hogan’s legacy is altogether less impressive.

He was fired from World Wrestling Entertainment for using the N-word repeatedly on tape and he used slurs to describe gay people. He prevented his colleagues from unionizing. His ex-wife and daughter have described him as physically and emotionally abusive. Most relevant to me, he sued Gawker, a news and entertainment site that I co-founded in 2002, because its editor published a clip from a tape that featured him having sex with his friend’s wife.

The lawsuit, to be clear, was not important because Gawker was important. Gawker was largely an entertainment site that, on its best days, reported presciently about powerful people behaving badly. The site published stories about the alleged sexual misconduct of many celebrities long before the #MeToo movement, and published Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book way back in 2015. It could also be frivolous, crass, and even mean, which often rankled the powerful people it covered. But journalists’ frivolity, vulgarity and snark all happen to be protected by the First Amendment, as long as what they write is truthful. Only there is an exception to that: When someone sues for invasion of privacy, the truth is no longer a defense. And that is what Mr. Hogan and his allies cynically exploited. (READ MORE HERE.)

SOME CONTEXT

It's not a good moment for media organizations. Aside from the fact that Donald Trump is using the playbook I described in the column to extort news outlets (and ABC and CBS have already caved to this pressure), this year has not been kind to digital outlets economically, especially if they were reliant on big traffic numbers driven by search and social. Longer term, I think this might be a good thing because it forces media companies to develop real audiences, and audience and traffic are not synonymous. I'm always resistant to building growth around paid media because when you turn that firehose off, there may not be anything left.

That means a lot of good journalists have been laid off and independent media is struggling and progressive media doesn't have the gargantuan levels of investment that right wing media does. We're out trying to raise money for The Barbed Wire right now in a tough environment, but unlike many media orgs, we've built audience organically, spending around $1000 a month on paid media, and only because our audience director thinks we get algorithmically suppressed if we spend nothing. (And who knows. Meta in particular is a black box.)

So if you or anyone you know is looking to support independent media, we're raising both investment money (The Barbed Wire is a B Corp) and we also have a nonprofit option. The raise is to build out the Texas site, and to launch some new properties that focus on regional culture in the Deep South, southwest and midwest. Please get in touch if you're interested in helping or have ideas re: people we should be speaking to.

OTHER STUFF I'M WORKING ON

For me personally: I usually have two or three gigs running at any time so I'm a little more protected from layoffs. But I just ended a big consulting gig, and the program I have been teaching in at NYU is on hiatus and my wonderful boss Jay Rosen is retiring after 39 years.

For the last few years, I've taught a class on innovation in media in the graduate school of journalism, and my students were required to conceptualize and prototype new media products from start to finish, as well as developing business models and marketing plans for them. They came up with some incredible stuff and I will miss teaching there.

So I'm looking for new opportunities and incubating a little creative project I'll tell you about in a few weeks. Feel free to get in touch if you think you could use my help. Click here to see what I do as a consultant, and if you're interested in learning how to write op-eds for national outlets, my online workshop starts up again in the fall.

Thanks for reading!

ES