![]() ![]() In their pursuit, the Gawker sites occasionally and conspicuously crossed the line they toed, and the ensuing drama could overshadow the work. Even when Gawker announced aspirations to transcend publishing and become a major tech player, those initiatives never came together well enough to displace journalism as the company’s primary business. The company’s goals flowed from its editorial mission rather than its business aims. But others could be touched first only by Gawker sites, unencumbered as they were by financial relationships with major entities. Some of these stories any outlet would have chased and published. All of the titles produced stories like these, from Gawker’s revelation that the mayor of Toronto smoked crack to Jezebel’s documentation of how extensively fashion magazines photoshopped their cover subjects to Gizmodo’s surfacing of an iPhone before it hit the market. In previous years, Deadspin had exposed Brett Favre’s penis (in the process of exposing that he had sexually harassed a woman who worked for the New York Jets) and the finances of professional sports franchises. We revealed that the girlfriend had never existed. Probably the biggest story we published while I was there was one I co-wrote, about Manti Te’o, the All-American linebacker at Notre Dame whose girlfriend’s death had featured prominently in many meaty stories about his season and his life. There was no better way to get ahead there than by publishing a big scoop, one that upset powerful people. I worked at Deadspin from 2011 to 2013 and did so blissfully unaware (as did many of my coworkers) of which advertisers paid our salaries or who Denton’s friends were. ![]() The company was dedicated to the pursuit of provocative and uncomfortable truth. Pressures to produce traffic engendered a fair amount of stress and burnout among the staff.) It took no investment from venture capitalists or old-line media players even as they were aggressively seeding Gawker’s peers. (At least as far as editorial freedom went. The place in its heyday was the rarest of modern publishing concerns, a journalist’s paradise. The sites are losing their independence-and what a loss that is. Gawker isn’t going out of business, but Thiel’s gambit worked. After the trial it transpired that billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel had funded Bollea’s suit and others in hopes of hobbling the company. Gawker is appealing the judgment but would have had to turn the sites over to Bollea had it not entered bankruptcy. Daulerio, a former Gawker editor and the author of a post that included snippets of a Bollea sex tape. A Florida jury awarded Bollea $140 million in March after he won an invasion-of-privacy case against Gawker, Denton, and A.J. ![]() They became sources of media fascination and later competitors to some of the titles that had once figured the company a curio.ĭenton held onto the sites until Tuesday, when they were sold to satisfy Gawker’s creditors, pro wrestler Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea the largest among them. All were driven by aggregation of the news with an irreverent voice-and gossip. site Wonkette, sports site Deadspin, women’s site Jezebel, and others would follow. Its first site was the gadget blog Gizmodo the flagship Gawker, covering New York and the media, came a year later. The company was founded by Nick Denton in 2002 when blogging was new and unusual, cheap and punchy, and liable to reshuffle the publishing world’s established order and so much more. The latest drop in the waterline comes with the gobbling up of the editorial properties of 14-year-old online media company Gawker Media by Univision for $135 million in a bankruptcy auction Tuesday, and it’s one very much worth marking. The pool of truly independent entities-or at least entities with unblemished reputations for independence-grows shallower each year. Most every organization operating in the spheres of media and public life these days has an agenda lurking just below the surface, obscured but not invisible. ![]()
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