March 21, Goldberg hires a controversial editor-in-chief who wants to make Gawker 2. July 30, Bustle lays off the entire Gawker staff and cancels the relaunch. On July 30, the New York Post reports that Bustle laid off the entire staff that day , and that the the relaunch has been postponed indefinitely.
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But when all of Gawker came crashing down, it was gratitude—for launching their careers, for letting them write whatever they wanted, for giving them a home—that these writers generally felt. Most, if not all, was forgiven. Take A. Daulerio, who, as editor of gawker. Craggs resigned to protest that decision, mainly because it was made in consultation with a group that Denton had put together that included two people from the business side.
Mostly, he is relieved. And, thank God, with Univision taking on all of his employees, the only person to lose his job was he. Still, he admires Thiel—or, at least, says he does, having learned that flattering Thiel makes more sense than pissing him off. Denton sees in him those traits, notably ruthlessness, that Denton and other successful gay men of their generation needed to survive.
He thinks Thiel is just insecure, that he needs to be a genius and hates ridicule. Denton even admires his stagecraft—how he managed to present as a blow for privacy rights something Denton sees as an act of petty revenge. Asked, prior to the settlement, for details on the meeting, Denton, who built Gawker on the gospel that everybody has the right to know everything, clammed up.
Eventually, though, he supplied corroboration of a kind. Thiel declined to participate in this story. Denton grew up in North London. A picture from his adolescence shows a nerdy boy reading a book by Isaac Asimov in his backyard. In he persuaded the F. During the next two years, while shuttling between London and the Bay Area, he founded two start-ups, a news aggregator and a social-events business.
The success of the second, along with some real estate investments, provided seed money for something else. It was in San Francisco that he briefly met Thiel, whose ideas—like a system of money that transcended governments—he found interesting. Denton found San Francisco surprisingly boring. And Silicon Valley, overwhelmingly white or Asian and straight and stilted, was still more unappealing, whatever secrets it held.
So he came to New York in , and, almost as a hobby—until some tech thing came along—he launched his blogs. Gizmodo came first, in mid, and several months later there was Gawker. Other Web sites, some that stuck and many that did not, quickly followed. But, still interested in tech, Denton commuted to San Francisco in late to run his Silicon Valley blog, Valleywag.
Denton dates his own coming out to the mid- to late s, but others put it later, and say he remains ambivalent about embracing gay culture generally. Perhaps because he had been slow to come out himself, Denton was emphatic about outing others, at least well-known others. And what cost was there if it was already common knowledge among the cognoscenti? Journalists, he believed, had no business keeping open secrets.
Running out of time and unable to find some non-gossipy way to write the story, Denton says, he shelved it. Owen Thomas, the technology journalist to whom Denton had passed the Valleywag job in July , was more persistent, and ingenious. In fact, for anyone paying any attention, he already had. In a blog from October , he described how a smitten young woman had asked Thiel to sign something for her after he had given a talk at a college in Tennessee.
So what is one to make of that polite e-mail exchange with Denton? A year earlier, Thiel had even enlisted both a New York lawyer and Choire Sicha, the former Gawker editor widely credited with devising its distinctive style, to help him make nice with the press in general and Gawker in particular. Gawker reporters knew how obsessed Denton was with outing household names, and catered to his wishes. Or rather, I am. And I choose to work with fellow spirits. If, as one Gawkerite says, Denton developed crushes on straight male editors whose fortunes waxed and waned with the state of his infatuation a suggestion Denton laughingly dismisses , his fiercest and most durable crush was on Daulerio, a rough-hewn throwback to the Five Star Final era of journalism, fueled by sex, controlled substances, and a passion for great and gritty stories.
And it was Daulerio who, in early October , posted the Hogan video and his accompanying story, a rumination on how obsessed ordinary people were with boring celebrity sex. But none of the specifics of the story really mattered, because ultimately Kotaku was being targeted less for specific ethical violations than for its critical coverage of the portrayal of women and minorities in video games and the sexism of the gaming community.
That fall, Gamergate began waging a hugely annoying, and sometimes genuinely menacing, war against Kotaku. I personally came to the attention of Gamergate in October , not for a fearless act of journalism, but because I was messing around on Twitter and I stepped in it.
In retrospect: This was extremely stupid. Even in , Twitter had already become a mechanism by which indiscreet people lost their jobs. More problematically, it would turn out, I was also, unconsciously, messing with the only group even less able to grapple with irony or context: brands.
Like, say, contacting major advertisers. And so Gawker went into full-on crisis mode. Bean, a Gawker advertiser, was considering pulling its ads. Nick asked me to draft a non-apology apology — a clarification, basically, that we did not, institutionally, support bullying. Sam was compelled to tweet an apology. Joel, then the executive editor, published on Gawker, over the objections of the editors, another clarification.
Then it all went away. Gawker had taken a hit — thousands of dollars of advertising gone, at least. The sites went back to normal. That the financial pressure had reached the limits of bearability was in large part because looming on the horizon was an enormous and costly lawsuit, one that Gawker expected to win even as it was being thwarted at every turn. In , A. Nine seconds of the video featured actual sex; the bulk showed Hogan and Clem engaged in small talk after the act.
Hogan sued Gawker, Nick, A. The judge who took up the case in ordered Gawker to remove the post. Gawker, citing the First Amendment, declined, though it did take down the video itself, and in March , four years after the original post had been published, the suit moved to trial in front of a Florida jury.
The trial was a disaster, not least because of A. A deposition recorded in , when it still seemed likely that the suit would end in a settlement, featured a damaging exchange in which a lawyer for the plaintiff pushed A. Deadspin, the site he ran, was funny and weird and smart.
It seemed to hit perfectly that characteristically Gawker balance between high- and gutter-mindedness. It was reckless and stupid and useless and thrilling, and it also raised a real concern about a famous football player sexually harassing women. This was what Gawker was supposed to be doing, right? Not just juicy, populist, tabloid stories —juicy, populist, tabloid stories with panache, and a point. This was A.
But he also recognized talent and encouraged it to succeed; he hired and put in positions of responsibility more women and people of color than any editor before or since.
Instead of asking a diverse array of writers to meet similar traffic goals, he treated traffic like its own particular beat and hired a writer, Neetzan Zimmerman, to cover that beat, seeking out and writing up the highly viral content that would help the site reach its monthly targets while other writers pursued their weird interests at their own speeds.
He understood his job as assembling a team of writers he loved to read and giving them the cover to pursue their ambitions. The problem for A. At Gawker, he left the traffic obligations to Neetzan and the day-to-day editorial operations to his gifted junior editors, year-old Emma Carmichael and year-old Leah Beckmann. This was a familiar dynamic at Gawker, where male employees were generally encouraged to be impulsive and reckless, while female employees were expected to pick up the actual work of maintaining a continuously operating website.
Meanwhile, A. And when a Hulk Hogan sex tape landed in A. Peter Thiel. But the specifics of the post were ultimately irrelevant; it had become a stand-in for whatever past sin had most offended you. Gawker once unforgivably outed a little-known media executive, or was cruel to me or one of my friends, or was a white-guilt propaganda outlet dedicated to the destruction of gamers; for this, it deserved to suffer.
If Hogan was the agent of that suffering, so be it. But the Hogan case was weird. In most lawsuits like this, where the defendants have a strong free-speech case and a payout is far from guaranteed, plaintiffs are looking to come to a settlement: a decent-size sum and the removal of the offending post.
Or maybe he was willing or obligated to risk trial because someone else was bankrolling his legal team. But by this past winter, there was only one real suspect: Peter Thiel. They ran in similar circles in the Bay Area in the early aughts. It was like an episode of Scooby-Doo where the old man disguised as a ghost still gets away with it.
The Internet. There were certainly people in who thought A. Still, the extent of mainstream condemnation was cheeky expressions of disgust — physical, not moral. What was okay if naughty in is, in , regarded as indefensible. The reaction to the enormous judgment against Gawker makes it clear where public opinion now lies: in sharp if muddled defense of privacy rights, even for public figures. Twitter and Reddit and a dozen other social networks and hosting platforms have out-Gawkered Gawker in their low thresholds for publishing and disregard for traditional standards, and, even more important, they distribute liability: There are no bylines, no editors, no institution taking moral responsibility for their content.
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