The Awl

The Awl is a website about "news, ideas and obscure Internet minutiae of the day" based in New York City. Its motto is "Be Less Stupid."

Founded in April 2009 by David Cho and former Gawker editors Choire Sicha and Alex Balk out of Sicha's East Village apartment after being laid off by the pop culture magazine Radar, the trio decided to launch their own blog, completely "out of pocket with a bare-bones site." The site's name was coined by contributor Tom Scocca, after the small pointed tool used for piercing holes. "He’d always wanted to have a newspaper named The Awl. So we semi bought it from him in a friendly arrangement," Sicha told Vanity Fair.

History

On the site's launch, The Awl's About us page asked readers, “What if there were a website that zippily surveyed a wealth of resonant, weird, important, frightening, amusing bits of news and ideas? And what if it weren’t totally clogged with reality show linkbait?” The first posts on the site were an infographic by Emily Gould of Gawker’s office seating chart, "a video of a Miss USA contestant responding to a gay marriage question from Perez Hilton, and an item linking to a Reuters article about physicist Stephen Hawking being taken to the hospital." Initial expectations by media observers were for the site to be a carbon copy of Gawker, but "instead it was something smaller and focused on the writing, where people can write about the stuff they’re passionate or super nerdy about," says Nieman Journalism Lab’s Justin Ellis.

Awl

An awl is a long, pointed spike. It may be a:

Awl, AWL and similar may also refer to:

Birgenair Flight 301

Birgenair Flight 301 was a flight chartered by Turkish-managed Birgenair partner Alas Nacionales ("National Wings") from Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic to Frankfurt, Germany, via Gander, Canada, and Berlin, Germany. On 6 February 1996, the Boeing 757–225 operating the route crashed shortly after take-off from Puerto Plata's Gregorio Luperón International Airport. There were no survivors. The cause was a pitot tube that investigators believe was blocked by a wasp nest that was built inside it. The aircraft had sat unused for some time without the required pitot tube covers in place.

Passengers and crew

The crew consisted of 11 Turks and 2 Dominicans. The captain was Ahmet Erdem (62), one of Birgenair's most senior pilots, with 24,750 flight hours . The first officer was Aykut Gergin (34). He had 3,500 hours of flying experience. The relief pilot was Muhlis Evrenesoğlu (51). He had 15,000 flight hours to his credit.

The passengers consisted mainly of Germans, along with a few Poles including two Members of Parliament, Zbigniew Gorzelańczyk (SLD), and Marek Wielgus (BBWR). Most passengers had booked Caribbean package holidays with Öger Tours; Birgenair held 10% of Öger Tours. In terms of passenger deaths, Flight 301 has the highest death toll of any aviation accident involving a Boeing 757.