BACK in early 2014, Gawker, a website that shut down this week under the weight of a crushing legal judgment, published a story that showed it at its best. Under the headline, “Who Wants to Remember Bill Cosby’s Multiple Sex-Assault Allegations?”, one of its writers, Tom Scocca, explored with admirable clarity how almost everyone seemed to have ignored detailed reports that were public on Mr Cosby’s alleged history of drugging and raping women. “Basically nobody wanted to live in a world where Bill Cosby was a sexual predator,” Mr Scocca wrote. “It was too much to handle.” Gawker was pushing readers to confront the uncomfortable possibility that a beloved figure, who still enjoyed the respect of millions, was something very different. The accusations finally caught up to Mr Cosby and effectively closed down his career. Unfortunately, moments like these were too few in the website’s nearly 14 years of publishing online. Its moral triumphs were overshadowed by the occasions when it was at its very worst. The nadir came on July 16th, 2015. That evening Gawker put up a post about a magazine company executive in New York who had (allegedly) offered to pay a gay porn star for a night of companionship on a trip to Chicago. The article named the executive, who was married with three children, and outed him as gay. It was clear from the story that the male escort had gone to Gawker after attempting to blackmail the executive into giving him a favour. The gossip site had essentially enabled a shakedown artist.

The site’s editors responded with baffling insensitivity to the ensuing storm. The editor-in-chief, Max Read, tweeted defiantly that “given the chance Gawker will always report on married C-suite executives of major media companies fucking around on their wives”, as if the public service provided by such reporting was too obvious to explain. The next day Nick Denton, Gawker Media’s founder, had the post taken down and offered a rare expression of remorse. The site’s editorial leadership objected to the decision, which they called a breach of editorial independence by Gawker’s business executives, and Mr Read resigned.

In the history of First Amendment battles, it was an odd choice of hill to die on. The article on the gay escort and the piece on Bill Cosby were journalistic opposites in terms of their effect, but functionally similar: the provocative telling of truths that influential people don’t want spread on the internet. For years under Mr Denton’s stewardship, such meagre conditions were sufficient for a Gawker post. It did not matter whether the truth being revealed was of public importance, or whether the figure being exposed was powerful. If Gawker was writing about it, the assumption was, its indignation was by definition righteous.

The list of enemies grew long. Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire who co-founded PayPal, says that it was after a 2007 Gawker post outed him as gay that he decided to seek revenge. He quietly started to look into financing other people’s lawsuits against the website in an effort to force the company into bankruptcy. In March, one of his beneficiaries, former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan (whose real name is Terry Bollea), won a jury award of $140m against Gawker Media for invading his privacy. It had posted an excerpt of a sex tape on the site. Gawker is appealing against the decision, but the award forced the company into bankruptcy. Univision Communications, a Spanish-language broadcaster, recently bought Gawker Media’s other web properties, including Deadspin, a sports site, Gizmodo, a tech blog, and Jezebel, a news and gossip site for women. But saving Gawker itself, it decided, was too risky.

That Mr Thiel won in the end is worrying for other media outlets. At a time when journalism’s business model is threatened, he has demonstrated that they can be sued out of existence using funds from billionaires with an axe to grind, even if, as in his case, they are not bringing a case of their own. But Gawker’s errors came partly from its own carelessness. Mr Read admitted this month in a piece for New York magazine that he had been wrong to publish the story about the magazine executive. He had rushed it, he wrote, partly to please Mr Denton, who was having a party that evening. It was not long before that he had warned his staff of the dangers of leaving the website, far in the future, with “regrets of omission—stories we should have run but were too scared to”. That was hardly the danger at Gawker.