Then, in 2007, Valleywag, a tech-focused subset of Gawker, outed the technology baron Peter Thiel without his permission. Gawker outed a publishing executive at Condé Nast, triggering a wave of ire. “By Gawker’s definition, if it’s interesting, it’s news,” the Times added.īut that definition came unstuck when Gawker’s interests crossed over into sexual preference. His various websites have stood for nothing if not the proposition that decorum should never stand in the way of entertaining readers.” The publisher, the Times said, “has probably done more than any individual to loosen up the mainstream media. Online outlets like Vice, Buzzfeed and Vox followed, giving reporters a way into a business that was dominated by staid organizations that had yet to adapt to the democratization of access proposed by the internet.ĭenton told the New York Times in 2015 that what journalists put in their stories is inherently less interesting than what they say after work. It added to its stable with sports (Deadspin), tech (Gizmodo) and gaming (Kotaku) sites. Over time Gawker – and a host of other plucky blogs – helped revolutionize US publishing. The company had two freelance bloggers who were paid $12 per post. Photograph: Tim Knox/Tim Knox (commissioned)įounded by former Financial Times reporter Nick Denton in his living room in 2002, Gawker was initially just two blogs, a media gossip site (Gawker) and a technology blog (Gizmodo). Nick Denton, editor of Gawker in New York. “People are too worried about how they will be perceived, and they’ve ceased to be playful, so anything that starts to be like that again is welcome,” Brown adds. “Editorials are uptight, and comedy is seen as in a field outlet of its own.” “It seems now that social media is so flooded with humor and irreverence that people no longer see it as having a place in the mainstream media,” he told the Guardian. Purchased by Bustle media and led by a new editor, Leah Finnegan, Gawker’s reboot has added (or returned) a welcome blast of satire to a US media landscape that often lacks it.Īccording to James Brown, founder and editor of Loaded, a British magazine that started the lad-mag revolution of the 90s and whose account of that era “Animal House” has just been published, the mainstream US press has all-but abandoned satire. The rotation of subjects, relatively ideologically unrestrained, marks a return for an organization that had been dead. Over the past week, the site has run stories that much of the media would sooner swerve: alleged anti-British, anti-Royal sentiments at the New York Times whether it was wrong for Meghan and Harry to hold hands at the Queen’s funeral (“Even for a family filled with perverts, this is beyond”) and if the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills are “too mean, too callous, too focused on tedious drama” to merit a show. And yet Knappenberger doesn’t particularly address the question of what happens to individual journalists in a media outlet lawsuit he only focuses on the outcome for the publication itself.Since a quiet relaunch a year ago, under entirely new owners, Gawker is once again starting to attract interest and readers – still purveying snark, still relying on attitude against elites – but without the edge of nastiness that got its original iteration in such trouble. Daulerio’s account is just one side of the story, of course, but it doesn’t get much space in Nobody Speak, which generally presents Denton as a pillar of the free press and a protector of journalists. itself was shuttered, but Gawker Media, and Gawker’s sister sites, were able to survive. When Daulerio published the infamous Hulk Hogan sex tape, and Hogan successfully sued over invasion of privacy, Denton and the company protected themselves with bankruptcy filings. True, that structure does parallel the way Daulerio claims Gawker Media and Denton left him to grapple with the lawsuit’s $115 million penalty on his own. Instead, the film heavily prioritizes Denton’s perspective. Daulerio, then completely abandons him by its end. It’s odd that Nobody Speak opens on former Gawker editor-in-chief A.J.
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