Gawker was built on a cadre of young and often poorly paid writers made to work long hours with little or no access to the people they were writing about or the glamorous worlds they inhabited. It proved to be an instance in which a celebrity's private acts proved newsworthy. Gawker was rarely in better form than when, say, writer John Cook showed how Fox News' Bill O'Reilly used his influence with senior police officials and organizations on Long Island, N.Y., to start an investigation of his estranged (and now ex-) wife's boyfriend, who was on the force. The site also bird-dogged the powerful who bullied other people with less stature or fewer resources.
Gawker shutdown crack#
Gawker's reports that its reporter had viewed video of Toronto's then-Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack rightly made his rampant substance abuse a topic fit for wider media scrutiny. Its offerings were often brutally satiric and unsparing in their conclusions. It was, as former Gawker editor Max Read recently wrote, "an endlessly scrolling, eternally accessible record of prattle and wit and venom." He set out to correct that in 2003, with a publication that knit together news analysis and gossip in the same stories. Gawker itself was born of the insight of founder Nick Denton, who quite rightly concluded that what journalists told one another over drinks was invariably more interesting than what actually appeared in print, online or on the air. There's no reason not to do that here, other than the extent to which that impulse might appall some of Gawker's own writers were it a piece about the demise of another publication.
It will be shut down next week by its new owner, a victim of its own poisoned legacy.Īny obituary should start by acknowledging the good the subject rendered to the world.
For Gawker Media's websites to live,, the actual namesake website, has to die.
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