Almost all the players who we're discussing... were major blogosphere figures in the early to mid-2000s. Pretty much all the big Substack people. Sullivan, Greenwald, Yglesias, were big deal people in the Bush-era blogosphere. And then Gawker, even though it generated a large number of people who belonged to the opposite, guild-mentality, journalistic clique: very New York-centric crowd... Gawker was another product of that free-wheeling blogosphere era, with Elizabeth Spears, and all the Gawker people were absorbed into legacy media in one form or another, either the legacy or nascent Vox-type, venture-funded digital media outlets. Then you have this polarization, or this clique of people I'd associate with Gawker who become the guild representatives of this new media, digital media journalist cadre, who are not journalists of the old-school Don McNeil type... but they make a big deal of their journalist status, they'll attack you... for [your] non-journalist status... A lot of them found this foothold in this extremely precarious world of venture-funded digital media outlets, which is where Freddie's whole "this is all high school" thing comes from... a foothold in an industry with a patina of prestige, they feel themselves to be the cool kids, and then you have these outsider-ish figures they're at war with.
