If you’re new to the internet Gawker might not mean much to you, but to some it was a trailblazer that showed you can have a little fun and report the news at the same time.
They definitely overstepped the mark at times, I guess that’s the nature of the beast, but it was Gawker’s relationship with billionaire Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel that ultimately signalled its final curtain call.
You can find out a bit about that HERE, where you can also read the open letter Nick Denton (the founder of Gawker) wrote to Thiel in response to the lawsuit that would eventually shut his site down.
And so we end here, the final post in Gawker’s 13-year history. It’s titled ‘How Things Work’ and it’s long, but to set the scene I’ll pluck a few excerpts from Denton’s final hurrah:
Peter Thiel has gotten away with what would otherwise be viewed as an act of petty revenge by reframing the debate on his terms. Having spent years on a secret scheme to punish Gawker’s parent company and writers for all manner of stories, Thiel has now cast himself as a billionaire privacy advocate, helping others whose intimate lives have been exposed by the press. It is canny positioning against a site that touted the salutary effects of gossip and an organization [sic] that practiced radical transparency…
In cultural and business terms, this is an act of destruction, because Gawker.com was a popular and profitable digital media property—before the legal bills mounted. Gawker will be missed. But in dramatic terms, it is a fitting conclusion to this experiment in what happens when you let journalists say what they really think…
As a group of journalists who had grown up on the web, it also subscribed to the internet’s most radical ideology, that information wants to be free, and that the truth shall set us free. This was a potent but dangerous combination…
At the peak of our confidence, we saw ourselves as the freest writers on the internet, beholden to no one but our readers. Gawker was an experiment in journalism free of commercial pressures and the need for respectability, constrained only by law.
In the end it was the law that nailed them, Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit (funded by Thiel) bringing Gawker to its knees. There’s a good chance you’re not going to read the post in full so I’ll tell you how it ends:
One of Gawker’s most cherished tags was “How Things Work,” a rubric that applied to posts revealing the sausage-making, the secret ways that power manifests itself. The phrase has a children’s book feel to it, bringing to mind colorful [sic] illustrations of animals in human work clothes building houses or delivering mail. Of course it also carries the morbid sense of innocence lost, and the distance between the stories we tell ourselves about the world and the way it actually works. Collapsing that distance is, in many ways, what Gawker has always been about.
And so Gawker’s demise turns out to be the ultimate Gawker story. It shows how things work.
Given that Gawker basically outed Thiel as gay when he wasn’t ready to do so himself, many people’s sympathies will be severely limited.
Then again they’ve also done some good work, good work which will be missed by many. I guess the moral of the story is don’t piss off a billionaire.
Unless that billionaire is Donald Trump, then please push his buttons because it’s so much fun to watch.
[source:gawker]
