Gawker's Hamilton Nolan Is Watching Boxing or a Kitten Show: MEDIA DIET

Hamilton Nolan has been at Gawker since 2008, so he’s seen a lot of changes at the company — including its recent unionization and upheaval over the controversial posting (and consequential removal) of an article outing the CFO of Condé Nast. Still, he keeps grounded, as he keeps surveying the news for Gawker’s trademark takes: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Advertising Age, USA Today, Insider Higher Ed and Bloomberg. “I look at those every morning,” he tells me from the Gawker offices in New York, rattling off the old-school sources. Then, he pauses, and it’s 2015 again when he tells me how long it takes him to click through all of those sites. “That’s like 30 minutes.”

Nolan also points to Abnormal Returns as a financial news source, along with Brooklyn real estate blog, Brownstoner, and the neighborhood-centric DNA Info. He also routinely checks out BoxingScene.com (more on that later). I ask whether he gets story ideas from Twitter. He verbally shrugs. “Honestly, I’m really bad on Twitter: I just follow people I know. I follow idiots that I work with,” Nolan says. Still he says he’s down with @dril and, hilariously, Tom Hanks’s pseudo-rapper son, Chet Haze — er, Chester M. Hanks. “But he hasn’t been on Twitter lately, so my day is not quite as bright anymore,” Nolan says. “Chet Haze is the only Instagram I look at, also.” Haze/Hanks has three posts.

At home, Nolan pages through The New Yorker, Harper’s, and National Geographic but still makes time for some books. He just read Joseph Stiglitz’s Price of Inequality and has been reading Charles Portis’ novels, like Masters of Atlantis. “He’s really funny,” Nolan reports from the year 1970.

On the tube, Nolan keeps things varied. “I just watched Deadwood again, for the third time,” he says. He also has started Narcos on Netflix, but his heart beats for pugilism. “Mostly what I watch is boxing. I would cut my cable if I could watch boxing somehow. So I have HBO, Showtime, the whole cable package: just so I can watch boxing,” Nolan says. He still boxes and writes about the sport.

“I’m doing my part to keep boxing alive by paying for a bunch of cable. Now, they’re putting more fights on network TV — for the first time in, like, 30 years. Hopefully that will put it back in the mainstream.” He’s most looking forward to the Golovkin-Lemieux bout, October 17 at Madison Square Garden. He plans on attending, but admits his fascination with the sport can go too far. “I even bought Floyd Mayweather’s fight a couple of weeks ago,” that recent farce against Berto. “It was horrible. It’s really addict behavior. There’s no reason to pay money for that fight.”

As far as other sports go, Nolan says he “watches the Jacksonville Jaguars the one time a year they’re on TV in New York.” But, he saves the best for last. “My uncle is a voiceover guy and he does this show, Too Cute, on the Animal Planet,” Nolan says. “It’s basically just a show like: Kittens! And they just show kittens for a half-hour running around and then it’s my uncle’s voice narrating what the kittens are doing. So, if I get a chance — shoutout to my uncle — I’ll take a look at Too Cute.” Time spent? Another 30 quality minutes.