Gawker is the hardest of our sites to define. It started out as a Manhattan media gossip site — and retains that initial personality. But that topic only appeals to 100,000 or so people. And Gawker.com now has a monthly global audience of 10m. It needs that scale to get internet advertising and to…
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Nick Denton
Nick Denton (born 24 August 1966) is a British Internet entrepreneur, journalist and blogger, the founder and former proprietor of the blog collective Gawker Media, and the managing editor of the New York-based Gawker.com, until a lawsuit by Hulk Hogan bankrupted the company. For years after starting Gawker Media in 2002, Denton ran the company out of his apartment in SoHo. 2Life and career Denton grew up in Hampstead, the son of British economist Geoffrey Denton and his wife, Marika (née Marton), a Hungarian Jew who survived the Nazis and escaped the Soviet occupation at age 18. A psychotherapist, she died of cancer the year before her son moved to New York City. Denton has a younger sister, Rebecca. He was educated at University College School and University College, Oxford where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He also became the editor of the university's magazine. He began his career as a journalist with the Financial Times. He co-wrote a book about the collapse of Barings Bank called All That Glitters. He was a co-founder of a social networking site, First Tuesday and co-founded Moreover Technologies with David Galbraith and Angus Bankes, schoolmates from UCS. Denton is the founder of Gawker Media which is now defunct and most of its assets were sold to Univision as a result from losing Bollea
To follow the daily or hourly news cycle is the media equivalent of day-trading: it's frenzied, pointless and usually unprofitable. I'd much rather read an item which just showed me the photos or documents. And if you're going to write some text, take a position or explain something to me. Give me…
To follow the daily or hourly news cycle is the media equivalent of day-trading: it’s frenzied, pointless and usually unprofitable. I’d much rather read an item which just showed me the photos or documents. And if you’re going to write some text, take a position or explain something to me. Give me…
When I was disengaged, I didn't leave any real authority in place. In my absence, the company ticks along nicely; with the challenge of Buzzfeed and Vox, ticking along nicely is no longer enough. Even when I'm here, if I'm obsessed by something, other parts of our common project can spin off in…
I still believe that writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
The natural form of online media is the exchange, not the blast. Tommy's ethos gives us the best chance of recapturing the honesty of blogs, before their spirit was sapped by the tastes of the Facebook masses. 'We put truths on the internet.' That's Tommy's motto. I can subscribe to it. Dauntingly,…
This company was founded by a gay man and two women. I have never been comfortable with the role of a traditional CEO. And for obvious reasons I have never been comfortable in a company dominated by territorial men. I hope I have made space for others who don't fit the mould. And I pray that my…
For Silicon Valley, the media spotlight is a relatively recent phenomenon. Most executives and venture capitalists are accustomed to dealing with acquiescent trade journalists and a dazzled mainstream media, who will typically play along with embargoes, join in enthusiasm for new products, and hew…
We, and those you have sent into battle against us, have been stripped naked, our texts, online chats and finances revealed through the press and the courts.
One of Gawker’s most cherished tags was ‘How Things Work,’ a rubric that applied to posts revealing the sausage-making, the secret ways that power manifests itself. The phrase has a children’s book feel to it, bringing to mind colorful illustrations of animals in human work clothes building houses…
It’s difficult to recall now, but at Gawker’s founding there was a sense that the internet was a free space, where anything can be said. An island off the mainland, where people could be themselves. Where writers could say things that would get you fired in an instant from a print publication. Where…
awker did overextend itself, as an enterprise. We were internet exceptionalists, believing that that from blogs, forums and messaging would emerge a new world of unlimited freedom to associate and to express. We still believed we could, like the early bloggers, say everything.
The chief rule of establishment journalism that it violated to its detriment, it seems, is the one that recommends against pissing off billionaires.
For a site as reckless as it is purported to be, there have been no Jayson Blairs, no conflict-of-interest or plagiarism scandals, no career-ending corrections.
The flip side of that fearlessness, the epithet that even our defenders throw at us, is recklessness. Gawker deliberately pushed the envelope, went further than our establishment forebears, and should be held responsible for the result. Did we invite this fate?
The greatest compliment one could ever pay to a Gawker writer is fearlessness—the willingness to say what needed to be said irrespective of the consequences.