Although these editorial voices helped shape Gawker’s brand, the brand itself thrived long after their absence, and will continue to thrive without Craggs and Read. This revolving door included talented editors like Sicha, who went on to found the Awl, Elizabeth Spiers, who later ran the New York Observer, and Jessica Coen, who left for Vanity Fair. But throughout its 12-year existence, Gawker has experienced remarkable turnaround in its top editorial staffers. The loss of Craggs and Read is undoubtedly a blow to the company. And if Gawker does go out of business – or pivots in a way that makes it virtually unrecognizable to longtime readers – it won’t be because of this latest scandal. Fair or not, this stands to place an even greater financial burden on the company which, despite never having relied on outside capital in the interest of staying independent, plans to raise a $15m round of debt financing this year.Īs tumultuous events keep piling up for Gawker, is the company that did more to pioneer the business and voice of digital media at risk of disappearing as we know it? Not likely. “We don’t keep $100m in the bank,” Denton told the Guardian recently.Īll this comes as Gawker editorial staffers are looking to unionize. Denton is no stranger to lawsuits, but the high dollar amount of the damages Bollea is seeking, combined with his refusal to settle out of court, has turned this into a real threat to Gawker Media’s very existence. Meanwhile, the company is looking down the barrel of a $100m lawsuit brought against it by Terry Bollea – better known as Hulk Hogan – who claims that Gawker violated his privacy by posting an edited version of a sex tape staring the professional wrestler. ![]() “For the same reason that most attempts to grow and mature Gawker Media have never worked: for someone who trades in bravado, Nick Denton is, perversely, a coward.” Moreover, Johnson directed the brand’s trademark rage at Denton himself, accusing him of spending $20m on developing the company’s Kinja commenting system, 75% of which, Johnson claims, was “wasteful”. ![]() Last month, fired editorial director Joel Johnson posted secret revenue numbers in a comment under a story about Gawker writers’ efforts to unionize. This is only the latest in a string of recent financial and editorial struggles for Gawker Media. “That non-editorial business executives were given a vote in the decision to remove is an unacceptable and unprecedented breach of the editorial firewall and turns Gawker’s claim to be the world’s largest independent media company into, essentially, a joke,” Read wrote. Livid that a group of executives who worked on the business side of the organization could so easily undermine the supposedly independent editorial team, Craggs and Read resigned from Gawker Media. Its removal went against the wishes of executive editor Tommy Craggs and Gawker editor-in-chief Max Read. Last weekend, tensions between Gawker’s executive leadership and editorial staffers hit a fever pitch after four out of six managing partners – including Denton – voted to remove a distasteful post that claimed to out a relatively obscure media executive as gay. ![]() In the last seven months Gawker has been shaken by enormous financial and philosophical turmoil. Now, that same snark has brought Gawker to crisis.Īs the internet grows up – a bit – Gawker Media, which today includes verticals like Deadspin for sports, Jezebel for feminism and Jalopnik for cars, is struggling to adjust to the new world it helped create. It’s a formula that attracts 54.7 million US readers a month, according to ComScore.Īlong with a rotating cast of bitingly funny editorial staffers, and under the leadership of controversial British journalist turned entrepreneur Nick Denton, Sicha and his colleagues at Gawker did more than any other single organization to help invent the language of the internet – or at least the language used in its meanest corners. The superfluous exclamation points and “scare quotes” Sicha and his successors promulgated underline a rigorously intellectual sense of outrage and a hatred of “hypocrisy”. Sicha helped codify the prose stylings of a Gawker takedown – known universally as “snark”.
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