It will be invasive in ways that serve the public interest and in ways that cross a shifting public line. A media organization that is founded on hostility to the powerful and is run with almost no internal hierarchy will naturally be irregular. The incongruity was a feature, as someone from Silicon Valley might put it, not a bug. (That was my first week in the office my last was the bankruptcy-truly, it was an invigorating time.)Ī lively, difficult brand of unevenness was inherent in Gawker’s work, and this still seems to confound people: How could a site seesaw so wildly from the essential to the extraneous, and even the questionable? Why, if it took its work seriously, would it run “ some of both the best and worst of 21st century journalism,” as Salon put it, and all under the same name? But the best and the worst were fundamentally linked: the freedom at Gawker is what made the mistakes inextricable from the good, risky work that Gawker took on. Max Read published a post telling the Gamergaters to eat it. In 2014, the horde of anti-woman Internet denizens behind the controversy known as Gamergate tried to put the company out of business by alerting advertisers to a Gawker writer’s sarcastic call, on Twitter, to “bring back bullying.” Ad sales would eventually take a hit that may have reached a million dollars. These attributes made Gawker singular in the online world. Not Peter Thiel, not Hulk Hogan, not the jurors in Florida-not any of the culprits that Max Read, the onetime Gawker editor, listed in a piece for New York magazine, his new employer, this week-but simply the manner in which the site operated: the combativeness, the lack of respect, the speed of the writing and editing and publishing, the relative absence of organizational hierarchy instituted by Nick Denton and the editors who worked for him. Gawker had modelled plenty of schadenfreude throughout its fourteen years of existence-it had done a great deal to shape the prickly, punchy, intimate sensibility of the Internet that gleefully watched it go.īut Gawker’s real cause of death, people will say, and have said, was Gawker. Hogan’s sex tape had been ruled a matter of public interest by a federal judge and a Florida appeals court, but it was still a sex tape, and the adjudication of the moral case became inseparable from the legal one. (That post was taken down after widespread criticism.) Hovering over the proceedings was the fact that, the previous summer, Gawker had written about the attempted extramarital dalliance of a Condé Nast executive, a far less public citizen than Hogan. Thiel’s team has sued Gawker over a variety of editorial matters, but the chief allies in Thiel’s victory were the wrestler Hulk Hogan, who won a hundred-and-forty-million-dollar judgment in March against Gawker Media for invasion of privacy and emotional distress, and a Florida judge and jury, who awarded Hogan damages roughly fifty to seventy times larger than the typical tort award for wrongful death. This campaign, which started with the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, led Gawker to court, then to bankruptcy, and finally to the sale. “The campaign being mounted against its editorial ethos and former writers has made it too risky,” Gawker's founder, Nick Denton, wrote in a memo to the company. Attempts to find a separate buyer have been unsuccessful. The most immediate and least meaningful cause is that Univision, after buying Gawker Media for a hundred and thirty-five million dollars at auction, and absorbing Gawker Media’s lease, union contract, and six other sites, has declined to continue operating. Starting next week, the flagship site of Gawker Media-where I worked for the last two years, editing the women’s site Jezebel- will no longer exist. But no “long live Gawker” follows the declaration this time around, and that is a first. Gawker is dead, and not for the first time.
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