Cink

» see cink.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Nick Denton had just finished building Kinja and needed something to point at. Cink went live on 2 January 2013 as the first featured blog on the platform, and it stayed the only Hungarian property Gawker Media ever owned. Szily László founded it. Gazda Albert was editor-in-chief. Inkei Bence, Klág Dávid, Boros András and Zubreczki Dávid wrote for it.

The tone came in wholesale from New York: Gawker's house voice applied to Hungarian politics, which in 2013 meant taking shots at everyone rather than picking a side. The Hungarian media market had already sorted itself into two camps by then and was getting more sorted every year. A site that declined to enlist was a genuinely strange object in it, and that strangeness was most of what people liked about it.

It worked for a while. Daily readership hit roughly 30,000 in 2014 and Gawker set the next target at double that. The ceiling was not editorial. Facebook had become the distribution layer for Hungarian news the way it had everywhere else, and Facebook then began charging for the reach it had been giving away. Organic distribution fell, the traffic followed it down, and there was no budget to buy the difference back.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the kinja experiment ~

Cink was not one blog. It was a group blog with a row of sub-blogs hanging off it, each on its own Kinja host: Anyahajó, Malackaraj, JogIQ, Szálka, Szamizdat, Átlátszó Oktatás. That was Denton's actual pitch for Kinja, that readers and staff would write on the same platform under the same roof and the line between them would stop mattering. Budapest is where he tried it first, on a market small enough that a failure would not be expensive.

~ the phone call ~

On 3 September 2015 Denton rang Szily and the conversation took five minutes. The reason given was that Cink had been founded as an experiment, a playground without advertising or revenue attached, and that it could not be carried any further. The sharper reason, which Szily pointed at himself afterward, was the collapse in readership once Facebook's monopoly on sharing made unpaid distribution worthless and paid distribution unaffordable.

Denton handed over the domain to the writers as a parting gesture. Szily went to 444 and Inkei Bence went to Vs.hu. By November the rest of the staff had scattered, and the following May Gawker fired its remaining Hungarian contributors outright.

~ the part I had to look up ~

Gawker I knew about. Cink I did not, and the reason is only that it was in Hungarian. This is the recurring problem with reading the dead internet from Ankara: the American parent is legible from anywhere, and the local edition is legible to about ten million people. From outside, Cink registers as a footnote in the Gawker story. Inside Hungary it was one of the few places writing about politics without a team jersey on. That lasted two and a half years.

~ two hours on a monday ~

The site kept answering long after it stopped being a job. There were occasional posts through 2016, and the front page still carried something dated August 2020. Then the Wayback Machine has cink.hu serving a working Kinja homepage at 15:23 on Monday 16 November 2020, and a 404 at 17:03 the same afternoon. By December the 404 had become a 410, which is the code for gone on purpose.

Gawker had gone through Univision and then G/O Media by that point, and a Hungarian blog nobody had updated in years was a line in a hosting bill that somebody finally got around to deleting. cink.hu today returns a 500.

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