Gawker

» see gawker.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

gawker was a new york blog about new york media that grew up into a real publication and then died of a lawsuit it provoked. nick denton ran it. elizabeth spiers wrote the first posts in december 2002. the house tone was the one a junior media reporter uses about the people who make her rent feel insulting, applied to the entire manhattan editor-and-agent class, and it scaled.

gawker sat in the part of the english-speaking internet i could read but did not particularly need. a turkish engineer reading us tech news in 2010 ended up on hacker news and the verge, not on a manhattan gossip blog whose subjects you had to already know to find funny. the gawker pieces that crossed over to my reading list were mostly the technology-adjacent ones from valleywag, plus the occasional cross-platform story like the violentacrez doxxing in 2012.

the death was not an accident. gawker outed peter thiel as gay in 2007. thiel waited nine years and bankrolled hulk hogan's privacy lawsuit over a sex tape gawker had published. the jury came back with $140 million in damages and the company filed for chapter 11 within months.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

nick denton was a british ex-financial-times reporter living in manhattan, and gawker started as one of his blogs in a small network that also included gizmodo, jezebel, kotaku, deadspin and lifehacker. the original gawker.com beat was new york media gossip. the writers got paid for pageviews. that incentive structure produced both the funny pieces and the cruel ones, and gawker leaned on the cruel ones when traffic dipped.

by 2015 the network was pulling roughly 23 million visits a month at gawker.com alone, with the broader gawker media properties together making up one of the largest independent publishers in the united states. it was a real business, not a side blog, and that is what made the verdict big enough to kill it.

~ the fall ~

peter thiel was outed by valleywag in december 2007 in a post titled "peter thiel is totally gay, people." he found out who had paid for the lawsuit when forbes broke the story in may 2016. by then the case was already past trial. thiel had spent roughly $10 million funding a-team lawyers under several plaintiffs, of whom hulk hogan was the one with the strongest claim.

hogan v. gawker went to a florida jury in march 2016. the published video clip was about two minutes long. the jury awarded $115 million in compensatory damages, then added $25 million in punitives. gawker's appeal would have required posting a $50 million bond it did not have. denton filed for bankruptcy in june.

~ the inheritance ~

univision bought the surviving gawker media properties at auction for $135 million. it kept gizmodo, kotaku, jezebel, deadspin and lifehacker, and considered gawker.com itself too contaminated by the lawsuit to revive. the flagship site went read-only on august 22, 2016 with a final post by nick denton. univision later spun the rest of the network off as g/o media, which slowly dismantled most of what was left.

the thiel-funded lawsuit became its own genre of legal commentary. some of that commentary made the case for free press protections. some made the case that gawker had earned the verdict. both readings agree on the precedent: a billionaire can wait a decade and end a publication by financing a stranger's lawsuit. that is the part that has not gone away.

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