Final Words From Gawker

Screenshot of Gawker.com

Final Words From Gawker

Quotes from current and former Gawker employees on the site's final day in operation

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

Gawker Nick Denton

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Peter Thiel has achieved his objectives. His proxy, Terry Bollea, also known as Hulk Hogan, has a claim on the company and my personal assets after winning a $140 million trial court judgment in his Florida privacy case. Even if that decision is reversed or reduced on appeal, it is too late for Gawker itself.

— Nick Denton, How Things Work

Gawker Nick Denton Peter Thiel Terry Bollea

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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

Gawker Nick Denton Peter Thiel

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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

Gawker Nick Denton Peter Thiel

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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

Gawker Nick Denton

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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.

— Nick Denton, How Things Work

Gawker Nick Denton

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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.

— Nick Denton, How Things Work

Gawker Nick Denton

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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

Gawker Nick Denton

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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

Gawker Nick Denton

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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.

— Nick Denton, How Things Work

Gawker Nick Denton

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It was a matter of pride that Gawker ran stories that could not be published elsewhere.

— Nick Denton, How Things Work

Gawker Nick Denton

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The site was defined by the sheer range of enemies it had made.

— Nick Denton, How Things Work

Gawker Nick Denton

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As if media players and celebrities were not enough, Gawker was, by the late 2000s, poking at some truly powerful people.

— Nick Denton, How Things Work

Gawker Nick Denton

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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

Gawker Nick Denton

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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

Gawker Nick Denton

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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.

— Nick Denton, How Things Work

Gawker Nick Denton

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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

Gawker Nick Denton

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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

Gawker Nick Denton

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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

Gawker Nick Denton

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Gawker, which had been accused of unfairly caricaturing so many others, was itself undone by a few well-chosen quotes.

— Nick Denton, How Things Work

Gawker Nick Denton

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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.

— Nick Denton, How Things Work

Gawker Nick Denton

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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

Gawker Nick Denton

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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

Gawker Nick Denton

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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

Gawker Nick Denton

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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.

— Nick Denton, How Things Work

Gawker Nick Denton

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The chief rule of establishment journalism that it violated to its detriment, it seems, is the one that recommends against pissing off billionaires.

— Nick Denton, How Things Work

Gawker Nick Denton

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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

Gawker Nick Denton

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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

Gawker Nick Denton The internet

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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

Gawker Nick Denton The internet

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While fearlessness at tackling any topic is its hallmark, Gawker was always terrible at talking about itself, especially at telling the world what it was for.

— Gabriel Snyder, Letters From Our Exes

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Gawker was only whatever the people running it at the time wanted it to be, and Nick’s best idea was to continually stock the site with people who wanted to do good.

— Gabriel Snyder, Letters From Our Exes

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Openness and flexibility is why Gawker was able to make itself home to a generation of writers and editors who will continue to populate your smartphones and magazines long after the site ends. If you need a reason, those people are why Gawker is great.

— Gabriel Snyder, Letters From Our Exes

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Gawker, your death was an absurdity that was only surpassed by the absurdity of your life, and to shed tears at your passing would be to make mockery of the fate we all must face eventually. You are commended into the dirt whence you sprang, with the sorrows of those to whom you brought joy, however briefly.

— Alex Balk, Letters From Our Exes

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Gawker so relentlessly covered ugly truths to the point that they are intrinsic to our understanding of how powerful people operate.

— Jessica Coen, Letters From Our Exes

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Peter Thiel, you make Fred Durst look pretty chill. Hats off to you, I guess.

— Jessica Coen, Letters From Our Exes

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I’m very proud of Gawker’s history of going after risky, difficult stories that would have otherwise been ignored. (And really, if you’re not vacillating between ecstasy and terror in the course of reporting those kinds of stories, you’re probably doing something wrong.)

— Elizabeth Spiers, Letters From Our Exes

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I will also miss the wit and intelligence here. I read Gawker every day and will likely be typing it into my browser for months from sheer muscle memory.

— Elizabeth Spiers, Letters From Our Exes

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I imagine that ‘founding editor of Gawker’ will be the first item on my obituary, no matter what I do going forward or have done since. And that’s less because of what I did there during my short tenure, than what Nick and my various successors built it into. For that, I can only say thank you.

— Elizabeth Spiers, Letters From Our Exes

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Wherever you go in this life, there is some jerk telling you what to do. Almost always. But not always.

— Hamilton Nolan, What Was Gawker?

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Most journalism jobs exist on a continuum between audience and freedom. If you want a lot of people to pay attention to you, you work at a place where the individual writer’s voice is completely subsumed into the institutional voice. If you want complete freedom to write whatever the hell you want, you write on your personal Tumblr, where the whole world will ignore you. Gawker was one of the few places ever to exist that offered both a large, steady audience and almost complete freedom.

— Hamilton Nolan, What Was Gawker?

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Gawker was just a giant, empty page waiting to be filled, every day. It was a page large enough and deep enough to accept whatever you wanted to put on it. Serious things and non-serious things could sit side-by-side. News and inside jokes and essays and whatever idea had popped into your mind last night unbidden. Everything.

— Hamilton Nolan, What Was Gawker?

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Most attempts to explain this publication’s editorial direction tell you more about the person doing the explaining than they do about this publication. With a little cherry-picking you can make it seem like our focus was just about anything. In truth, we had no focus. We had writers.

— Hamilton Nolan, What Was Gawker?

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Gawker was anarchist journalism at its finest. Every day, a page to be filled; every day, a chance for greatness, or idiocy. This site contains the very best and worst things that many writers have written. This fact drives many people mad. But to the sort of person who was cut out to be a Gawker writer, it was just right.

— Hamilton Nolan, What Was Gawker?

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A Gawker editor of the past coined the slogan, ‘Honesty is our only virtue.’ That will do as well as anything. Many Gawker readers did not think we were the best writers, nor did they even particularly like us; they read Gawker because they knew that we would tell the truth about whatever was happening. No bullshit. Well, some bullshit. You can’t have great ideas every day.

— Hamilton Nolan, What Was Gawker?

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When I think about the demise of Gawker, I cope by viewing it from a remove and as a narrative. If nobody starves and this somehow manages to leave freedom of press unscathed (the latter obviously being the bigger if than the former), what has been crafted is a tale that would seem too outrageous as fiction.

— Rich Juzwiak, There's Someone Else I've Got To Be

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Because of Gawker’s breadth, and because it didn’t have so much a single voice as a cacophony of several voices at any given time, the site meant many different things to many different people.

— Rich Juzwiak, There's Someone Else I've Got To Be

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What appealed to me, more than anything, was a sensibility that loathed preciousness, that refused to defer to the most sensitive person in the room out of social pressure and smarmy politeness.

— Rich Juzwiak, There's Someone Else I've Got To Be

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The site’s run-till-tackled mentality was exhilarating while we ran—I appreciated that no one ever asked me to reduce myself or change to appease readers, especially because I know that even the best-intentioned among a liberal audience can have a hard time swallowing really gay shit. The tackling that finally took place, wrestling Gawker to the ground and then erasing it from the planet.

— Rich Juzwiak, There's Someone Else I've Got To Be

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I have never felt entirely comfortable in any group, but I came closest at Gawker, because I generally felt like I was working with people who were the best at what they did, making something that would with another staff and (inevitably) more stifling management be impossible.

— Rich Juzwiak, There's Someone Else I've Got To Be

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I think a lot of us—and the site overall—share a sensibility that simultaneously takes the world very seriously while understanding that everything is a big joke. And we’d joke about the overly serious and take serious the overt jokes. I dusted as much as possible with a thin layer of satire, because this world and its inhabitants are fundamentally ridiculous but, overall, endearingly so.

— Rich Juzwiak, There's Someone Else I've Got To Be

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Working at Gawker was somewhere in between doing time in an asylum and worshipping in a cult.

— Rich Juzwiak, There's Someone Else I've Got To Be

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A lie with a billion dollars behind it is stronger than the truth. Peter Thiel has shut down Gawker.com.

— Tom Scocca, Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight

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The message is that Gawker had this coming, that the site was—to some degree, depending on how sympathetic the writer is trying to pose as being—responsible for its own downfall. By now it is conventional wisdom. That conventional wisdom is false.

— Tom Scocca, Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight

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Gawker.com is out of business because one wealthy person maliciously set out to destroy it, spending millions of dollars in secret, and succeeded. That is the only reason.

— Tom Scocca, Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight

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The strange and embarrassing thing about being the target of a conspiracy, an actual conspiracy, is that it undermines one’s own understanding of the world. It is true that Gawker was always a publication that took risks. It had bad manners and sometimes bad judgment.

Occasionally, it published things that it would regret—just as, for instance, the New York Times has published things that it regrets.

— Tom Scocca, Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight

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The change begins with the post about Thiel’s sexual identity in a homophobic investor culture, the post Thiel now cites as the inspiration for his decision to destroy Gawker. It was solidly protected by media law and the First Amendment, as were the other posts that, as Thiel wrote, ‘attacked and mocked people’—specifically, his cohort of rising plutocrats in Silicon Valley. Hurting rich people’s feelings is, in principle, not a punishable offense.

— Tom Scocca, Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight

Gawker First Amendment Peter Thiel

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Rather than fighting the material that he really objected to, Thiel went looking for pretexts. Over time, he came up with them.

— Tom Scocca, Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight

Gawker Peter Thiel

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In one span of a little more than a year, not very long ago, the New York Times mistakenly accepted (and cheered for) a failed Venezuelan coup, printed falsehoods that helped carry the case for invading Iraq, and saw its top editors resign after a humiliating plagiarism scandal. No one suggested the paper had signed its own death warrant.

That the New York Times has the right to exist, to rise above its failings, is taken for granted. No one would mistake the Times for Gawker.

— Tom Scocca, Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight

Gawker Peter Thiel

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Still, the Times reporter asked, what were my own regrets? I told him, finally, that I had worked at Gawker Media for five years, and that all I could say was that nothing in that time was as shameful to me as a story the Times had put on its front page the month before, slanting the results of a study to argue that police weren’t really disproportionately killing black people. I would have been ashamed, I said, if we had run that.

— Tom Scocca, Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight

Gawker Peter Thiel

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Gawker always said it was in the business of publishing true stories. Here is one last true story: You live in a country where a billionaire can put a publication out of business. A billionaire can pick off an individual writer and leave that person penniless and without legal protection.

If you want to write stories that might anger a billionaire, you need to work for another billionaire yourself, or for a billion-dollar corporation. The law will not protect you. There is no freedom in this world but power and money.

— Tom Scocca, Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight

Gawker Peter Thiel

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