At some point the word ‘strategy’ becomes a euphemism for procrastination.
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A stunning story about how power works in the modern age--the book the New York Times called "one helluva page-turner" and The Sunday Times of London celebrated as "riveting...an astonishing modern media conspiracy that is a fantastic read." Pick up th
Discretion is the responsibility of freedom.
Loss inherently makes the loser sympathetic. We can easily be made to feel bad for the person on the other side of a true catastrophe, even if just minutes before we thought they had it coming to them.
To try to break a man is one thing, to see him broken before you is another.
When everyone tells you you’re wrong and you turn out to be right, you learn a dangerous lesson: Never listen to warnings.
The alt-right leaders are the most like Gawker.
I came to believe that the nastiness of the internet was not a function of a technology or various things that have gone wrong, but the function of one particularly nasty media company led by a particularly sociopathic individual and that if I defeated Gawker, it would actually change the media land…
We live in a world where people don’t think conspiracies are possible. We tend to denounce ‘conspiracy theories’ because we are skeptical of privileged claims to knowledge and of strong claims of human agency. Many people think they are not possible, that they can’t be pulled off.
I felt like I was in a Black Mirror episode, trapped in my own Gawker story and I can’t say anything.
But a trial is not about a judge— who is an arbiter in matters of law. It’s about a jury— who are arbiters in matters of fact, but make decisions, like all human beings, based on emotion.
It would be like the scene in Sweet Smell of Success where the baby-faced challenger stands up to the terrible and powerful gossip columnist who treats people like playthings: “The terrible thing about people like you is that decent people have to become so much like you in order to stop you— in ord…
When someone categorizes something evil, as Sherman did, as Peter and Mr. A repeatedly did, he implicitly gives himself permission to do what needs to be done to destroy it.
The job of a journalist would be unbearable if one was always to put oneself in the shoes of a subject.
By 1939, Franz Halder, a German general, had taken to carrying a pistol so that when he was in the room with Hitler, he might assassinate him. But he could never pull the trigger. He could not reconcile how he could take up as “human being and a Christian to shoot down an unarmed man.”
They find that Gawker’s female writers relished going after people, too, particularly other women: “Christina Hendricks Says These Giant Naked Boobs Aren’t Hers, But Everything Else Is”: 280,000 page views. “Olivia Munn’s Super Dirty Alleged Naked Pics:”: 680,000 page views. They discover that Gawke…
It was founded, remember, by paying writers for each morsel they dropped into it, not how nutritious each morsel was.
I came to believe that the nastiness of the internet was not a function of a technology or various things that have gone wrong, but the function of one particularly nasty media company led by a particularly sociopathic individual and that if I defeated Gawker, it would actually change the media land…
If the continued effect of Valleywag is that it makes Silicon Valley 1 percent less ambitious, what is that cost?
What he knew was that most people did not have the stomach— or the cash— to actually take it very far against a media outlet. He felt protected by the moat explained in the old twentieth-century proverb: Never fight a battle against someone who buys ink by the barrel. It’s easier to just let the who…
Gawker’s first editor, Elizabeth Spiers, was paid $ 2,000 per month for twelve posts a day, seven days a week.