Hulk Hogan trial is itself a bit of a stretch. Plus, Denton’s characterization of the Gawker vs. That said, in lionizing Gawker for its take-no-prisoners, form-no-allegiances approach to muckraking, it’s easy to champion them for the wrong things – or to mischaracterize morally bankrupt editorial decisions as simply being on-brand: Denton wrote that the Thiel imbroglio was “a misjudged story about a media executive’s secret sex life” and “a throwback to an earlier web era” that “set off a swirl of industry outrage.” It was actually just irresponsible journalism. It was good, in other words, when it was doing its own thing when it wasn’t trying to beat old media at its own game. Gawker was wonderful for Richard Lawson’s recaps of NYC Prep for its reporting on the Hipster Grifter for this one email exchange I had with Hamilton Nolan about orange pie for the early masthead’s attempts – with theatrical asides built right in its italics – at deconstructing and toppling through irony and mockery what it perceived to be New York’s (and eventually, the world’s) elite. You know how the Internet is basically just a hot-take clearinghouse these days? Gawker hit that stride early, hilariously, irreverently and intelligently. The idea, Read wrote, was that the story writers told each other was always more interesting than the story on the page that commentary and lines-between-lines help push conversations forward, once everyone already knows the facts. What establishment types and Peter Thiels alike hated about Gawker was that it, among other things, was consistently thumbing its nose at everything it covered. Nonetheless, mockery remains an essential service. It began to go sour when it began to question whether mockery was a valiant journalistic pursuit. Gawker was terrific when it was a bunch of smarmy, snarky, holier-than-thou hipsters with impressive vocabularies and preternatural media savvy writing stuff about Tina Brown. Then it started taking itself seriously: publishing longreads on Saturdays (great idea!) and, in late 2015, announcing it would retool as a political website (shot in foot!).
#Gawker site definition tv#
In 2008, when I was combing through what was then a five-year-old website, it was all over the place: TV recaps and media gossip packed against a few oddball scoops and things like rankings of fruit. There is something about it that threatens editorial freedom.
But there’s something about its death that is beyond just being sad something that goes beyond anything that a coroner’s report might provide. Certainly, Peter Thiel put the nail in the coffin and, of course, Hulk Hogan was there with the hammer. Perhaps the most compelling of which have come from former editor Max Read, in a New York Magazine essay entitled “Did I Kill Gawker?” Read maybe did kill Gawker! It was also, as he theorizes, possible that Nick Denton, the site’s founder and overlord, did it in. Which is not to say that tens of thousands of words haven’t already – and won’t continue to be – spilled on Gawker’s demise.
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