Final Words From Gawker
Quotes from current and former Gawker employees on the site's final day in operation
Jacob Geers
August 22, 2016
August 22, 2016
“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.”
Tagged:
Gawker, Nick Denton
“It is a fitting conclusion to this experiment in what happens when you let journalists say what they really think.”
Tagged:
Gawker, Nick Denton
“Many liberals and journalists are alarmed by the ease with which a rich and powerful man—a Trump supporter—can use the legal system to destroy an outlet that criticized him and his friends. To my mind, Gawker’s ultimate fate was predestined.”
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Gawker, Nick Denton
“Gawker’s remit was eventually so broad, news and gossip, that subject matter proved no barrier. And Gawker’s web-literate journalists picked up more story ideas from anonymous email tips, obscure web forums or hacker data dumps than they did from interviews or parties.”
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Gawker, Nick Denton
“The embrace of unusual writers led one veteran to describe Gawker as the ‘island of the misfit toys’. We took that as a compliment.”
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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.”
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Gawker, Nick Denton
“Mockery, of course, is the cheapest and most available tool that the powerless have against the powerful; it has historically been the one thing that they can’t silence.”
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Gawker, Nick Denton
“It was a matter of pride that Gawker ran stories that could not be published elsewhere.”
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Gawker, Nick Denton
“As if media players and celebrities were not enough, Gawker was, by the late 2000s, poking at some truly powerful people.”
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.”
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.”
One was Peter Thiel.”
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.”
Tagged:
Gawker, Nick Denton
“That Thiel had a boyfriend was already an open secret in the Valley and the San Francisco gay scene, but Thiel says he had a right to control the sequence of his coming out. That is also the most sympathetic rationale for his animus.
But Valleywag also complicated Thiel’s business ventures, which is the more powerful reason. Writers watched for every problem with Clarium Capital, Thiel’s hedge fund, which failed spectacularly.”
But Valleywag also complicated Thiel’s business ventures, which is the more powerful reason. Writers watched for every problem with Clarium Capital, Thiel’s hedge fund, which failed spectacularly.”
Tagged:
Gawker, Nick Denton
“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.”
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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.”
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Gawker, Nick Denton
“Gawker, which had been accused of unfairly caricaturing so many others, was itself undone by a few well-chosen quotes.”
Tagged:
Gawker, Nick Denton
“But even Gawker’s natural allies had no enthusiasm for a free press defense of a story about a sex tape. Journalists were aware of the public’s growing sensitivity to anything that could be characterized as revenge porn or cyber bullying.”
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.”
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Gawker, Nick Denton
“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.”
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?”
Tagged:
Gawker, Nick Denton
“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.”
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Gawker, Nick Denton
“The chief rule of establishment journalism that it violated to its detriment, it seems, is the one that recommends against pissing off billionaires.”
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.”
Tagged:
Gawker, Nick Denton