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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Nick Denton
Nick Denton (born 24 August 1966) is a British Internet entrepreneur, journalist and blogger, the founder and former proprietor of the blog collective Gawker Media, and the managing editor of the New York-based Gawker.com, until a lawsuit by Hulk Hogan bankrupted the company. For years after starting Gawker Media in 2002, Denton ran the company out of his apartment in SoHo. 2Life and career Denton grew up in Hampstead, the son of British economist Geoffrey Denton and his wife, Marika (née Marton), a Hungarian Jew who survived the Nazis and escaped the Soviet occupation at age 18. A psychotherapist, she died of cancer the year before her son moved to New York City. Denton has a younger sister, Rebecca. He was educated at University College School and University College, Oxford where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He also became the editor of the university's magazine. He began his career as a journalist with the Financial Times. He co-wrote a book about the collapse of Barings Bank called All That Glitters. He was a co-founder of a social networking site, First Tuesday and co-founded Moreover Technologies with David Galbraith and Angus Bankes, schoolmates from UCS. Denton is the founder of Gawker Media which is now defunct and most of its assets were sold to Univision as a result from losing Bollea
The embrace of unusual writers led one veteran to describe Gawker as the ‘island of the misfit toys’. We took that as a compliment.
At the peak of our confidence, we saw ourselves as the freest writers on the internet, beholden to no one but our readers. Gawker was an experiment in journalism free of commercial pressures and the need for respectability, constrained only by law.
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.
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.
It is a fitting conclusion to this experiment in what happens when you let journalists say what they really think.
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…
Peter Thiel has gotten away with what would otherwise be viewed as an act of petty revenge by reframing the debate on his terms.
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.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.