Denton told me that this phenomenon played a part in the outcome of the trial. 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. whose lives we were being invited to peer into it was people just like us. Suddenly, it was not just the fabulously famous - Michael Jackson and John F. “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.” “ These things do pass,” the former Deadspin and Gawker editor, A. At trial, Hulk Hogan’s lawyers presented emails of the woman’s desperate entreaties to take it down and Deadspin’s lighthearted refusal.
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. It drew indignant howls, and Gawker retracted the piece. 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. 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. 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.īut Spy, as its co-founder Kurt Andersen pointed out to me, was not in the constant-search-for-clicks business. Denton sold Fleshbot in 2012.) Far from threatening to bring the house down, it helped solidify Mr. Interestingly, one of Gawker Media’s first big hits was a Paris Hilton sex video, which ran on its Fleshbot site in 2003. I’ve at times been part of the pack, especially during the early part of my career, which included gossip-writing stints at The New York Post and The Daily News. I do not come at the question from the monastery. But I was after a bigger question: Have we finally found the bottom, or more generously, the limit? After decades of journalistic scandal-mongering, each more intrusive than the last - and then juiced by the Internet - was the jury in Florida that ruled so decisively against Gawker speaking for the entire culture in saying, “Enough”? I visited those offices last week in part to find out whether the $140 million in civil awards against Gawker, for showing a private sex tape starring the retired wrestler Hulk Hogan, would be its undoing. They were paid for in secrets, exposed with a joyful ferocity that enriched Gawker’s founders and helped redefine how far our reality-TV culture could go to satisfy its appetite for gossip and news about the famous, the powerful and, increasingly, just the mildly interesting.
They’re all glass and steel, clean lines and modern fixtures. The brand-new Gawker Media offices in downtown Manhattan are the bomb, as in great.
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