Gawker Media’s Nolita office, where the blog conglomerate was located until the summer of 2015, was always dank and weird: a brick, loft-style room in a former tenement on Elizabeth Street, with lighting so low it was probably reportable to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. I began working there in 2014, as culture editor for the women’s site Jezebel, and while I adapted to the speed of blogging culture, I could never quite get over the fact of the office. It was so dark that our computer monitors emitted more light than the overheads, which were strung across the ceiling with the aplomb of an early 20th century publichouse, and had the useless brown glow of tiny Edison bulbs. Those of us without the wherewithal to get desk lamps, which was most, clacked away in the dark at the long rows of tables where the staffs of its six sites, about a hundred of us, sat side by side. We communicated almost exclusively through internet chat — even coworkers who sat a foot apart — though often the room erupted in gales of laughter at quips known only to those in their particular Slack channel. Everyone got used to that, but otherwise the office was so silent, like a wacky library, that it was almost startling if someone spoke to you aloud.
Except for Feb. 26, 2015, when a viral outfit known as “The Dress” upended the office silence and, probably, the trajectory of the media itself.
