Not necessarily the stuff to inspire future applicants to the Columbia School of Journalism. And Ms. Dietrick acknowledges the story is “not the Pentagon Papers.” But it comports with Gawker’s longtime drive to be, as its founder, Nick Denton, says, “Uncompromised and uncompromising” in unearthing whatever might drive reader interest, intrigue, truth and web traffic.

Interestingly, one of Gawker Media’s first big hits was a Paris Hilton sex video, which ran on its Fleshbot site in 2003. (Mr. Denton sold Fleshbot in 2012.) Far from threatening to bring the house down, it helped solidify Mr. Denton’s company as a real web player. The tape fit with Gawker’s sensibility — punching up at the arrogance of wealth and celebrity (in this case an heiress who was famously famous for being famous) in the media pirate’s tradition of its forebears at Spy magazine.

But Spy, as its co-founder Kurt Andersen pointed out to me, was not in the constant-search-for-clicks business. And as Gawker’s web traffic grew, it got into trouble when it seemed to be meanly punching down, exposing secrets about people who were not so obviously newsworthy. There was the post last summer, for instance, about a relatively unknown married male media executive and his alleged attempt to pay for sex with a male escort. It drew indignant howls, and Gawker retracted the piece.

Then there was the decision by Deadspin, a Gawker-owned site, to show a random video in 2010 of an inebriated female college student having sex in a bathroom stall. At trial, Hulk Hogan’s lawyers presented emails of the woman’s desperate entreaties to take it down and Deadspin’s lighthearted refusal. “These things do pass,” the former Deadspin and Gawker editor, A. J. Daulerio, told her. “Keep your head up.” It did not play well with the jury, nor did his reason for later changing his mind: “It was possibly rape.”

Suddenly, it was not just the fabulously famous — Michael Jackson and John F. Kennedy Jr. — whose lives we were being invited to peer into; it was people just like us. At the same time, as social media made us stars of our own movies, people like us could increasingly relate to the perils of public exposure once known only by the famous.

Mr. Denton told me that this phenomenon played a part in the outcome of the trial. He pointed to a moment when a potential juror described being moved to ask a friend to remove an unflattering photo of her from a Facebook post. Social media, he said, made the jury pool “more sympathetic to the celebrity publicity machine,” which makes similar requests.

This is all part of the Internet self-correction that my colleague John Herrman wrote about a couple of weeks ago, how the public is recoiling from the web’s raunchiest offerings. Mr. Denton more or less subscribes to that theory, which is why he recently vowed to make his sites “10 to 15 percent nicer.”