How do you break news if you don’t do all the sucking up required to get insiders to tell you secrets? Find the paper trail. Sometimes Gawker did that with Freedom of Information Act requests, but more often, it used embarrassing social media posts. Gawker’s greatest hits were morality tales about people accidentally screwing up their own lives with communications technology that hadn’t existed a decade earlier. Law & Order: The Internet. You have been found guilty of three counts of douchebaggery and your punishment is eternal Google poison.

On Monday, two top Gawker staffers—executive editor Tommy Craggs and editor-in-chief Max Read—resigned over the deletion of a controversial post about a Condé Nast executive paying for sex. The decision to take down the story was made by a vote among Gawker’s managing partnership, not the editors, which, as explained by Gawker media reporter J.K. Trotter, “represented an indefensible breach of the notoriously strong firewall between Gawker’s business interests and the independence of its editorial staff.” In a memo, owner Nick Denton wrote of those who quit: “I respect the strength of your convictions. This is a decision you’re taking to preserve principles you believed I still shared.”



It feels like the end of something. But what? Of course it’s not the end of internet journalism, or adversarial journalism, or even Gawker. Instead it might be the end of the classic Gawker story. The post on the Condé Nast executive was a perfect example: a rich media person foolishly creating a digital record, complete with photos, doing something he presumably would not want the world to know about.

A few examples: A November 2007 post about a bank intern who lost his job because he called in sick but posted photos of himself partying on Facebook. A November 2008 post about two people having sex in their ad agency office, taped without their knowledge. A January 2013 post about the oil company employees who accidentally fowarded their sexy emails to the entire staff. A classic recurring column scoured New York party photos and mercilessly mocked the goofy-looking partiers and their outfits. It was called Blue States Lose, and it combined rage against hipsters and trust-fund kids with liberal anxiety in the Bush era.

Gawker launched in 2003 in a very distinct time in politics, an era when it felt like all of America had lost its mind. The rage against the press—and specific reporters—seemed to flow from that. To get deep in the weeds, take this comment by Ian Spiegelman, who had quit Gawker over a change in how writers were paid, on a 2009 post mocking The New York Times’ incessant coverage of rich people in the Hamptons.