1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Nick Denton
Nick Denton photo

Nick Denton Quotes

Total quotes: 28
“Peter Thiel has gotten away with what would otherwise be viewed as an act of petty revenge by reframing the debate on his terms.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton, Peter Thiel
“We're no strangers to controversy. That's why people come. And the advertisers come for that audience.”
— Nick Denton, Gawker CEO: I'm 'slightly impressed' by Thiel's 'Count of Monte Cristo' revenge
Tagged: What?, Gawker, Thiel vs. Gawker
“The embrace of unusual writers led one veteran to describe Gawker as the ‘island of the misfit toys’. We took that as a compliment.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
“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.”
— Nick Denton, An Open Letter to Peter Thiel
Tagged: Transparency, Thiel vs. Gawker, Denton’s Strange Realtionship With Transparency
“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.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
“Gawker.com is shutting down today, Monday 22nd August, 2016, some 13 years after it began and two days before the end of my forties. It is the end of an era.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
“It is a fitting conclusion to this experiment in what happens when you let journalists say what they really think.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
“In my time at the company, I started Gizmodo first, and loved Lifehacker most, but Gawker was the only site I edited.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
“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.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
“Gawker’s politics were progressive, but it shared the belief that the real world was staged. Gawker writers, plugged into the journalists’ gossip networks, looked for the story behind the story, the version that was shared over a drink but less frequently published.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
“It was unsurprising that Gawker focused on the privileges of the princelings, the younger members of America’s increasingly hereditary elite. These were the manifestations, in stories readers could understand, of the dry income inequality that had become the focus of politics and economics.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
“Gawker shed an enormous amount of light. It punctured hypocrisy and mocked the ridiculous. The site put out 200,000 posts over its life, about thousands of public figures. Some say we made the right enemies, but everybody can agree: even for journalists, we certainly made a lot of them.

One was Peter Thiel.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
“Hogan was the most popular celebrity in Tampa. While a federal judge and a Florida appeals court panel found the story was solidly newsworthy because it touched a matter of public concern, it was always going to be a challenge to go up against Hogan against a home-town jury.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
“Privacy, especially internet privacy, had become the biggest challenge to freedom of expression. When time came to scurry under the shelter of the First Amendment, we did not have that much institutional support. You can’t easily get the privileges of the profession if you pour scorn on its luminaries.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
“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?”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
“Freedom of expression will always be more popular in principle than in practice. We want to be free to express ourselves, but are less enthusiastic when that freedom is exercised by others with whom we disagree. Nobody likes a critic.”
— Nick Denton, The Hogan Verdict
Tagged: Legal, Lawsuits, Freedom of Expression, Gawker, Freedom of Speech Except
“It’s a shame the Hogan trial took place without the motives of the plaintiff’s backer being known. If there is a lasting legacy from this experience, it should be a new awareness of the danger of dark money in litigation finance. And that’s surely in the spirit of the transparency Gawker was founded to promote.”
— Nick Denton, A hard peace
Tagged: Gawker, Hulk vs Gawker
“Even if we’re full of despair over what the internet has become, it’s good to remind yourself that it’s an amazing thing. In the habits that we enjoy, there are the seeds for the future. That’s where the good internet will rise up again.”
— Nick Denton, Here's What Nick Denton Regrets About That Hulk Hogan Story
Tagged: Digital media, Gawker Media, Publishing, Digital Publishing, Quote of the Moment
“Having spent years on a secret scheme to punish Gawker’s parent company and writers for all manner of stories, Thiel has now cast himself as a billionaire privacy advocate, helping others whose intimate lives have been exposed by the press. It is canny positioning against a site that touted the salutary effects of gossip and an organization that practiced radical transparency.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton, Peter Thiel
“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 opinion or reference; just don't pretend you're providing news. That's not news.”
— Nick Denton, thewire.com
Tagged: Commerical Writing Strageties, Media, Opinions
“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 opinion or reference; just don’t pretend you’re providing news. That’s not news.”
— Nick Denton, thewire.com
Tagged: News, Publishing
“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 or delivering mail. Of course it also carries the morbid sense of innocence lost, and the distance between the stories we tell ourselves about the world and the way it actually works. Collapsing that distance is, in many ways, what Gawker has always been about.

And so Gawker’s demise turns out to be the ultimate Gawker story. It shows how things work.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton, The internet
“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 you could say what you thought without fear of being fired, or sued out of existence. But when you try to make a business out of that freedom, the system will fight you.

As our experience has shown, that freedom was illusory.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton, The internet
“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 satisfy our competitive urges. So we’ve had to range more widely — into reality television, news of the weird, crime news and — yes — sex tapes. Ultimately the audience determines the story mix. Beyond our editorial core, we run what excites audience interest.”
— Nick Denton, Gawker.com
Tagged: Publishing, Gawker Media
“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 information networks are still good enough to identify those leaders too busy being capable to promote themselves. At Gawker, despite the reputation of our journalism, nice guys finish first. And women.”
— Nick Denton, Observer.com
Tagged: Gawker, Media Companies
“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, it's down to our writers to provide a constructive but critical voice in an American culture. And it's down to our product managers, designers and developers to encourage a similar tone in the discussions sparked by stories. ”
— Nick Denton, Observer.com
Tagged: Blogging, Facebook
“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 to the authorized version of a story. They do not have the sophistication, and the thicker skins, of public figures in other older power centers such as New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.”
— Nick Denton, An Open Letter to Peter Thiel
Tagged: Gawker, Valleywag, Silicon Valley, Thiel vs. Gawker
“At some point, however, Thiel’s stance hardened, after a friend advised him that he was the only one who could stop Gawker. He connected with Charles Harder, a Hollywood lawyer who had learned from Marty Singer but was ready to take a more hard-knuckled approach on behalf of clients. Litigation finance, once the crime of champerty but now deregulated, provided the template for their business relationship. This was the dark money of media conflict. Thiel could fund potential lawsuits without being exposed himself.”
— Nick Denton, How Things Work
Tagged: Gawker, Nick Denton
loading next page...