12/30/2023 0 Comments Gawker stalker controversy![]() ![]() Gawker sometimes bullied people, and it sometimes punched down. And it did so with a fearlessness that distinguished it from all established media brands.īut at its worst, that fearlessness bled over into recklessness. At its best, it reported on powerful people who were abusing their power, publishing articles about Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and the hacker Guccifer before many larger mainstream outlets did. Under the leadership of people who, unlike me, were established journalists, it covered politicians, C.E.O.s and anyone who had the power to shape the culture. Over the years, Gawker developed a national profile and a more aggressive posture. I wrote about trucker hats as an important sociological artifact of a newly gentrified Brooklyn, and far, far too much about minute goings-on at The New York Times, which annoyed some of its staff members and caused others to gleefully send me tips. A visit to the cafeteria that Frank Gehry designed for Condé Nast, a monument to the excesses of the media industry, revealed fashion editors steering clear of the cookies. We did not have high-minded aspirations for Gawker, and much of my coverage was inconsequential and silly. One of my first posts was a long interview with a hedge fund employee who was dissatisfied with her cocaine delivery service, if that tells you anything. I wrote about media, fashion, publishing and Wall Street because those are industries that are more or less headquartered in New York, and despite the fact that I was a 25-year-old transplant who grew up in rural Alabama, I adopted the tone I thought a provincial New Yorker would have: fascinated with power and money and oblivious to the world outside of upper-middle-class Manhattan. But when I started the site in 2002, with Nick Denton, a British entrepreneur and former journalist, the goal was more modest: to be a snarky insidery blog with a focus on New York City and a long satirical streak, à la Spy magazine or Britain’s Private Eye. It’s been two decades since I had any role at Gawker, which I left after 10 months, but the news made me think about how much has changed - and how much remains the same - since its debut.Īt its peak, Gawker Media employed hundreds of people at an array of related news and entertainment sites, published tens of thousands of stories and was a large media company by the time it went bankrupt. It was reincarnated in 2021 under different ownership, and with a somewhat different mission, but on Wednesday the news broke that it was dead again. The lawsuit that Thiel underwrote, after Gawker published Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, put the site out of business. All of this is true, except Peter Thiel is not technically a vampire. ![]() I like to respond that I started a website that made a billionaire vampire so angry he deployed about $10 million - and a professional wrestler - to destroy it. “What’s one thing that’s true about you that no one else would believe?” is a recurring prompt on Twitter. ![]()
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