Gawker is finally gone. After 14 long and controversial years Gawker has shut its doors to the world. This event comes as no surprise to anyone given the numerous controversies surrounding the site – some of the biggest in recent memory being the “gay shaming” incident and the “Hulk Hogan sex tape.” It was this last controversial publishing event that finally caught up with the troubled site. Gawker filed for bankruptcy just three months after Terry Gene Bollea (Hulk Hogan) was awarded 115 million dollars in damages over the publication of the tape without permission.
End Of An Era
A heartwarming story or sorrowful monologue belongs here but I write this today to bury Gawker, not to praise it. In truth, the website seemed to me to be a mix of shit posts like this and scandalous journalism.
Frankly, the only article I even remotely found to be interesting was Gawker’s article on VICE. In the article they pointed out low wages and other less than ideal qualities about the company’s work environment. Many of the claims included descriptions of a sexist work atmosphere and purposeful wage cuts to entry level workers.
Maybe it was overblown, and contained sources that were disgruntled former workers, but at least that article (and a few others like it) approached real journalism. That said, a handful of small, flawed diamonds awash in a sea of turds is ultimately not a legacy of which Gawker should be proud.
We all knew this was coming. From posting videos of now deceased Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine to refusing to remove a video of a woman being raped, it was only a matter of time before somebody with a large war chest and an ax to grind was going to sue them and win. The sad part about all this is that if Nick Denton (Gawker’s founder and CEO) had even a shred foresight and an slightly greater measure of common sense, Gawker would still be operational today.
Final Thoughts
Instead of posting my own final thoughts on the closing, I will instead leave you with a few thoughtful notes written by current and former staff. This one is from (now former) Gawker Editor Tom Scocca in his piece, Gawker Was Murdered by Gaslight:
“Gawker always said it was in the business of publishing true stories. Here is one last true story: You live in a country where a billionaire can put a publication out of business. A billionaire can pick off an individual writer and leave that person penniless and without legal protection.
“If you want to write stories that might anger a billionaire, you need to work for another billionaire yourself, or for a billion-dollar corporation. The law will not protect you. There is no freedom in this world but power and money.”
Finally, these were last words on the site, written by Nick Denton:
“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 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 itactually 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.”
Featured image screengrab from The Young Turks via Inquisitr.
