gridskipper – Jean Snow [.net]

This weekend I managed to finish going through the posts of 2005 (all 1063 of them). As I was going through these posts, I could see that it was a really important year for me. My first professional writing work started in 2004 as I became editor of MoCo Tokyo (a spinoff site to MoCo Loco, where I was also a contributor), and then at the very end of that year I started my monthly anime and design columns for Tokyo Q, but it was in 2005 that I started my monthly “On Design” column for The Japan Times, wrote for Gawker’s Gizmodo and Gridskipper, and also wrote some other freelance pieces. I’d definitely point to that year as the start of my writing career.

It was also the year I started writing almost weekly round-ups of Japanese magazines — which years later led to me starting the now-defunct The Magaziner website. It was also the year of me and Jesper’s first big collaboration together, in the form of our “Mamma Gun” exhibition/event at Cafe Pause, part of Swedish Style/Tokyo Design Week.

I’m pretty thankful that I can go through archives of my life like this, and see exactly how things happened and evolved.

The news of the sale of Gawker Media and the closure of Gawker.com was a sad one for me. I consider myself very thankful and lucky that early in my writing career I had the opportunity to write for three Gawker sites (Kotaku, Gizmodo, and Gridskipper). These things happened after I had the chance to spend some time with Nick Denton (as well as Joel Johnson) on one of his visits to Tokyo — having lunch and then drinks in various spots around the city. What he was doing with his new media company was incredibly exciting for me — a budding writer — and I felt privileged to be asked to contribute to what he was building.

Considering my love of games, writing for Kotaku was certainly a highlight — and it’s how I met and later became friends with Brian Ashcraft, with whom I was lucky enough to contribute on a book we did together, called Arcade Mania, about Japan’s game centers. The site I contributed to the most though was Gridskipper, a now-defunct urban travel site that saw me contribute Tokyo-related posts (which made sense, as it was similar to the type of content I was covering on my personal blog).

A lot of crazy things have happened to Gawker.com and Gawker Media over the years, and I just want to thank Nick for keeping us entertained all these years, and for the support I got at that point in my life. Can’t wait to see what he’s planning next.