Attempts to find a separate buyer have been unsuccessful. The most immediate and least meaningful cause is that Univision, after buying Gawker Media for a hundred and thirty-five million dollars at auction, and absorbing Gawker Media’s lease, union contract, and six other sites, has declined to continue operating. Starting next week, the flagship site of Gawker Media-where I worked for the last two years, editing the women’s site Jezebel- will no longer exist. But no “long live Gawker” follows the declaration this time around, and that is a first. But in the instance of the Conde Nast executive Gawker maligned, the article is so completely devoid of any journalistic justification that it should be mandatory reading for every aspiring reporter, a cautionary tale of what not to do.Gawker is dead, and not for the first time. In Gawker’s legal standoff with Hulk Hogan, there’s at least some semblance of an argument to be made for publishing excerpts of the wrestler’s sex tape. Then there’s Denton’s own glib litmus test for what constitutes a story being newsworthy–“it is true and it is interesting”–and you understand how a publication leaves the door wide open to this kind of ineptitude. It’s a toxic stew filled with other ingredients including an obsession with denigrating its rivals (Conde Nast owns longtime Gawker antagonist Reddit) and a preoccupation with outing people in the closet. Upper-class resentment doesn’t explain Gawker’s story entirely. Good journalism has always been energized by a “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” sensibility but this takes that notion to a ridiculous extreme. These comments suggest there’s little rationale here beyond some kind of free-floating hostility toward anyone a few tax brackets higher than the ones they occupy. Taken together with Read’s classification of “c-suite executives,” a pattern starts to emerge that may have to suffice in the absence of a defense of Gawker’s decision to publish. Maybe it was Natasha Vargas-Cooper, a senior reporter at Gawker sister site Jezebel who said it best when she tweeted this explanation: “I’m EXTREMELY suspicious of those who do not want press to have an antagonistic relationship to people in power.” Other editors, like John Cook, tweeted their own dissension without justification. Perhaps the closest thing to an actual rationale came in the form of a tweet issued by Gawker editor Max Read: “given the chance gawker will always report on married c-suite executives of major media companies f**king around on their wives.”Įloquent as that is pithy, it’s not exactly convincing unless Read is trying to put Gawker in the dubious position of being some kind of morality watchdog. But principled stands generally benefit from an articulation of actual principles. In lieu of an explanation of their position, they released a statement objecting to the business side of the publication yanking the article. What exactly Gawker editors were thinking still isn’t entirely clear.
![conde nast gawker conde nast gawker](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cXykyxdcZ48/hqdefault.jpg)
![conde nast gawker conde nast gawker](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hv6L-L_-Nbm6oq7E9afvGB2vKNU=/71x0:1208x853/1820x1213/filters:focal(71x0:1208x853)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/49526417/asa_4537.0.jpg)
Not helping matters is un-publishing that article, a meaningless gesture on the Internet given the ease with which this content already spread virally and can still be retrieved outside of. That’s the kind of environment that produces an article essentially aiding a porn actor attempting to blackmail an individual who isn’t a public figure nor has any other remote claim to newsworthiness.