As I read Gawker’s purpose statement, I found myself thinking, “NOW I get it.” Ideally, a mission should be clear to the reader through the content, but to be fair, I am not a regular Gawker reader. They could very well be doing their jobs in putting forth that mission but I’m too much of a flyby reader to pick it up. The primary intent of a statement like this is to guide the writers to make the right choices in their stories, so that they understand what the site is about and their posts can be the living examples of that mission.
I also think Nick Denton did a nice job of leading with a story to explain why they do what they do (mission statements, purpose statements — they all work better when there’s a creation story to help ground them in a real problem or to just show where the publication started so they can better understand what it has become). Here’s Denton’s story:
Gawker Media begins with a story. I was a newspaper reporter for the Financial Times. It offered unrivalled access to newsmakers in politics and business and some of the smartest colleagues one could find in media. And yet the most compelling anecdotes and opinions that were shared privately — over a drink after deadline — so rarely made it to the page the next morning.
From the foundation ten years ago, Gawker and its sibling titles were intended to give readers a direct connection to writers — and through them a deeper understanding of events and the way the world works. That question asked over a drink by one reporter to another — so what really happened? — is the impetus for all the work we do.