Final Words From Gawker

“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, gawker.com

“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, gawker.com

“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…”

— Alex Balk, gawker.com

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

— Jessica Coen, gawker.com

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

— Jessica Coen, gawker.com

“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, gawker.com

“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, gawker.com

“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, gawker.com

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

— Hamilton Nolan, gawker.com

“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,…”

— Hamilton Nolan, gawker.com

“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…”

— Hamilton Nolan, gawker.com

“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, gawker.com

“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 wr…”

— Hamilton Nolan, gawker.com

“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 happen…”

— Hamilton Nolan, gawker.com

“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…”

— Rich Juzwiak, gawker.com

“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, gawker.com

“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, gawker.com

“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 t…”

— Rich Juzwiak, gawker.com

“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, gawker.com

“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, becaus…”

— Rich Juzwiak, gawker.com

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

— Rich Juzwiak, gawker.com

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

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

“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.com

“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.com

“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 thin…”

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

“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 m…”

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

“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.com

“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…”

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

“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 st…”

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com

“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 wan…”

— Tom Scocca, gawker.com