The company is about to move into much larger and more expensive offices in Manhattan. And Mr. Denton, who with his family owns about 68 percent of Gawker, has been hoping to sell a minority stake in the company.

Maybe most significant, Gawker faces a $100 million lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan, claiming that the site violated his privacy by posting excerpts from a videotape of him having sex with a woman who was then the wife of a friend of Mr. Hogan’s. The latest scandal may not have a material effect on the case, but from at least a public relations standpoint, it is not going to help Gawker advance its image as torchbearer for the values of the First Amendment. (In the midst of the controversy on Friday, Mr. Hogan sent a one-word Twitter post: “Gawker.”)

Mr. Craggs first told Mr. Denton about the initial post concerning the media executive at a meeting Thursday afternoon, a few hours before it went up. Mr. Denton expressed qualms about the article at the time. “I couldn’t imagine the headline and couldn’t see the point,” he said in an email. “What was revealed?”

Nevertheless, he did not interfere with the editorial process or ask to see a copy of the article before it was published that evening.

The next day, as criticism of the article intensified, Mr. Craggs proposed that he issue a statement. It was not exactly an apology. In the statement, which Mr. Craggs sent to Mr. Denton but which was never published, Mr. Craggs noted that Gawker was founded as a media gossip site and had always covered the lives — “unapologetically and often mercilessly” — of the people who work in and run the industry. “We stand by the story, which meets our simple, unwavering standard of being both true and interesting,” he wrote. “But too many people whose opinions we trust were appalled by the post for us not to have a conversation about how we approach these kinds of stories going forward.”