Gawker had been part of a new generation of news reporting. It’s been a generation that was truly best simplistically described in the first season of the hit Netflix series, House of Cards. Journalism no longer has to be written by college graduates, but can be reported by anyone with a smartphone, a blog, and an opinion. Gawker fell into a category of what I, and I’m sure many others, call new media. Sites such as The Daily Dot, Vox, and even Gawker eventually developed a paint-by-numbers design for how they would write, present, and even push their stories. You might even argue that BuzzFeed had a hand in the way this medium was shaped as they perfected the click bait headline before readers realized what it even was. The thing with new media is that it comes on the heels of years of disdain for a mainstream media that presents bias, drops the ball on facts and necessary information, and paints a narrow story of what really happens, answering only to corporate sponsors, and people in political power. The rise of new media almost runs parallel with a rise of what’s called alternative news, and what I mean by that is specifically InfoWars and Prison Planet, or anything related to Alex Jones, but it also extends to smaller, similar sites that report shotty news based not on any facts or evidence, but conspiracies. Both mediums have caught on, but new media has always caught the attention of millennials.



The difference between The Daily Dot and Vox versus Gawker is that Gawker was always careless, neglectful, and even lacking compassion in the way they presented stories. While most of these new media sites will be chock full of double standards, especially BuzzFeed, Gawker went out of their way to humiliate others and ruin lives. The straw that finally broke the camel’s back, the famous Hulk Hogan sex tape, was not the first time that Gawker ever bought a sex tape and published it online. Hogan’s just happened to be the most notorious at that time and happened to come from a guy who spent his life body slamming dudes bigger than him and becoming one of the modern world’s most well-known athletes/actors. After over a decade of building a company that was often associated with smear tactics, even buying up and branching off new sites such as Kotaku, and Jezebel (who would employ the same techniques as a way to push their own biases), Gawker was back in court defending their malicious, and illegal, actions; believing they had enough annual insurance set in place to protect themselves. The one problem being was that years prior, they had pissed off the wrong person, and that person had the foresight to pounce at their vulnerability as they were about to start having to dip into their own company assets to defend themselves, and financially backed Hogan in court via a different jurisdiction, and sought damages in the range of millions of dollars. The result was that Gawker was finally given the shit kicking they deserved for so long and were found in judgment of $140 million to be paid to Hogan and his legal team. During the early GamerGate days, as the “Gamers are dead” articles ran, including by sites like Kotaku, major campaigns were started by the community supporting GG, to pressure their sponsors to pull funding and supporting. A huge chunk of high-end sponsors did pull out of Gawker, and it presented the case that Gawker would see its revenue stream start to plummet; all the while various writers for their sites heckle GamerGate supporters over newly written articles or via their Twitter accounts. But in the end, this was the case that put Gawker in the ground. Their company was placed for sale, concluding in a sale to Univision, and ultimately shutting down August 22nd, 2016 - just one month ago.

It was the ultimate form of justice porn. A big fish that continually bullied and hurt anyone they felt compelled to do so against, believing that the law and ethics don’t apply to them, was knocked down by a whale and put into submission. But it’s interesting when you consider the responses of their now former staff.

Per former editor, Tom Scocca, “Gawker.com is out of business because one wealthy person maliciously set out to destroy it, spending millions of dollars in secret, and succeeded. That is the only reason.”



This is to suggest that the foundation of Gawker’s demise rests on the conscience of billionaire investor, and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who was the man that funded Hogan’s suit against Gawker. Scocca charges that after a published article regarding Thiel almost 10 years ago, Thiel held a major grudge ever since. That grudge being that Thiel’s sexual orientation was publicly outed, without permission, by Gawker. The meaning behind the piece, which Gawker to this day has never removed, was well intentioned. It meant to skewer the supposedly, but perhaps back then highly probable, homophobic culture in the world of venture capitalism. It meant to empower people like Thiel, except there’s one thing: Thiel did not need empowerment. Thiel wielded success and respect, as he still does. What’s more is that they did not do their ethical due diligence of contacting him in advance to let him know, “hey, we’re doing this piece on homophobia, and we want to highlight you being gay as a means to criticize homophobia, do you have a problem with us doing this?” Obviously, we still live in a world where “coming out” is a big deal when you’re not straight. However, the damage (if there arguably was any) was done, it was too little too late. A day after the judge refused to overturn his decision in the case, Gawker co-founder Nick Denton issued an open letter to Peter Thiel, the sort of butthurt letter you write to someone who effectively wrecked your horrible place of business, and you want to say mean, critical things to them knowing that it doesn’t matter anymore anyways. Despite that Gawker never did pull down their article over Thiel being gay, for some reason they did decide to pull down the open letter to him. Thankfully there’s Google Web Cache to provide at least a temporary archive before it gets shuffled out of their servers, and archive.is to provide a permanent archive, so this way anyone can re-read the words of Nick Denton as he criticizes Thiel’s billionaire status and the way the public is growingly showing a disdain for the billionaire class. He says this hypocritically as his net worth is (was?) $320 million. Sure, that’s not billionaire status, but I don’t think people really see apples and oranges between the two. In the write-up Denton desperately searches for a means to fish hook Thiel on the heels of this major loss, even characterizing the potential media back-and-forth as a ‘story [that] will play out in the press and the courts. Both are adversarial forums, in which each side selects facts and quotes to undermine the reputation and credibility of the other.’ Denton is almost relying on the same grotesque nature on which he built his company on to work in his favor as far as public perception is concerned.

But one month later, it doesn’t matter. Gawker is dead. And no one cares. Peter Thiel is still successful. Peter Thiel has lost nothing. He only perhaps has gained the respect of the many people who have long noted Gawker’s history of bullying others. As Scocca reflected that Gawker was built on a “business model on which it had thrived—writing things that people were interested in reading, and selling ads to reach those readers” it’s important to note that the key element he misses here is that they were things that people were interested in reading, no matter what innocent parties were hurt. Throughout the court battle, it was presented that Gawker published a video publicly that showcased a woman possibly being raped in a bar bathroom. When the victim contacted Gawker requesting the video be removed, stating what sort of harm it could present to her personal life, their complaint department told the victim “blah, blah, blah” and the editor who posted the video responded to her stating, “I’m sure it’s embarrassing but these things do pass, keep your head up.” It’s quite despicable for a website that attempts to subliminally tout itself as a journalistic leader within the feminist movement, to tell a possible rape victim to more or less get over it, it’ll eventually go away. Despite what Nick Denton hoped to publicly drive home in the wake of the Hogan case verdict, this could be argued as one of the biggest nails in the coffin to immortalize the public perception of what Gawker was as a website, and as a company - meaning once again it was too little too late.



When you look at the last words of Gawker’s now former bloggers, you can see why it was time for that site to be laid to rest. They can reflect on their years of horrible journalism, lack of integrity, willingness to ruin anyone’s life for a quick buck, and still conclude that it’s still not fair for the site to have to go under. Perhaps that’s subjective. I will guarantee you that if this was Fox News, this would not be the opinion that Gawker would be sharing to its readers. They would not be speaking in support of Fox News’ right to present spin journalism devoid of real facts, and that their overwhelming layers of sins should financially force them out of business when they publicly post something that has no business to be in the public eye, whether people want to see it or not. What Gawker and their hyper-liberal left-wing ilk and reader have been doing to others came back to bite them in the ass. When feminists and white knights were brigading against any person on Twitter who supported GamerGate using their real name, face, and location by way of contacting their employers until they were fired, Gawker was nowhere to be found to say, “Hey, we may not agree with their stance or what they’re doing, but they don’t deserve to lose their livelihoods over it”. They were busy writing about how those supporters were fascists after I (as well as a couple others) screen capped a tweet made by Gawker writer Sam Biddle stating that “nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission” and posted it to Reddit, where it massively blew up in their faces. That’s the thing about Gawker, they wanted sympathy when they felt like they were being treated unfairly, but offered no apology to treating others unfairly.

Peter Thiel, for all of his means of being a part of the 1%, and supporting Republicans like Donald Trump, is one of those rare forms that managed to put a bully right in their place. The argument being made was that Peter waited for the right bad move to be made that led himself and Hogan’s legal team being able to dissect the entire site’s wrongs as a means to drown their defense in court. Maybe he did. But they gave him the tools. If a bombastic war criminal goes off on a spree of killing innocent casualties, while leaving a bunch of undetonated land mines behind all over the place, and a third party gets pissed off enough to take those land mines and use them against you, that’s not the fault of the third party.

Gawker. Did. This. To. Themselves.

In a few years from now, no one will remember Gawker for its early years. They won’t even remember Gawker for its later years, or all of the great click-bait garbage they managed to see plastered all over Facebook on a daily basis. They’ll remember them for this court case and everything surrounding it. They won’t remember that court case as Peter Thiel swinging his gay dick money bags into the less financially affluent blogging gossip site. They’ll remember it as the story of a website that needlessly published a celebrity sex tape without permission, conceitedly not removing it upon demand, being exposed as the demonstrative company they were, losing $140 million as a result, and subsequently going out of business. Nick Denton carved his reputation as an unapologetic, fraudulent ideological bully, and one month after his company’s demise, we reflect on how much better off journalism is without them. You can say what you want about Gawker, but Gawker was not the press. Despite what 1st Amendment privileges they were long granted as a press corporation, what they engaged in for almost 14 years was not what the Freedom of the Press was designed to protect. Saying that withholding publication of a private sex tape of a celebrity is a violation of those rights is a slap in the face to true journalism. Feeling as though you should not be held accountable for telling a rape victim to get over a violation of her privacy is bastardizing and disgusting. Again - this is not what the Freedom of the Press was designed for. Their swansong was not one I feel any sympathy for, and neither should you. Fuck Gawker Forever. May you rest in shit.