You know how the Internet is basically just a hot-take clearinghouse these days? Gawker hit that stride early, hilariously, irreverently and intelligently. The idea, Read wrote, was that the story writers told each other was always more interesting than the story on the page that commentary and lines-between-lines help push conversations forward, once everyone already knows the facts. What establishment types and Peter Thiels alike hated about Gawker was that it, among other things, was consistently thumbing its nose at everything it covered. Nonetheless, mockery remains an essential service. It began to go sour when it began to question whether mockery was a valiant journalistic pursuit. Gawker was terrific when it was a bunch of smarmy, snarky, holier-than-thou hipsters with impressive vocabularies and preternatural media savvy writing stuff about Tina Brown. Then it started taking itself seriously: publishing longreads on Saturdays (great idea!) and, in late 2015, announcing it would retool as a political website (shot in foot!). In 2008, when I was combing through what was then a five-year-old website, it was all over the place: TV recaps and media gossip packed against a few oddball scoops and things like rankings of fruit. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. There is something about it that threatens editorial freedom. But there’s something about its death that is beyond just being sad something that goes beyond anything that a coroner’s report might provide. Certainly, Peter Thiel put the nail in the coffin and, of course, Hulk Hogan was there with the hammer. Perhaps the most compelling of which have come from former editor Max Read, in a New York Magazine essay entitled “Did I Kill Gawker?” Read maybe did kill Gawker! It was also, as he theorizes, possible that Nick Denton, the site’s founder and overlord, did it in. Which is not to say that tens of thousands of words haven’t already – and won’t continue to be – spilled on Gawker’s demise. Now, whether or not that is true in the most journalistically sound, fact-checked sense of the word remains to be seen, but what is true is that it’s dead, and that a lot of successful, profitable, still-living digital media properties owe Gawker a debt of gratitude that most are too haughty or self-serious to pay. It was also, as Nick Denton wrote in his eulogy-cum-farewell note on the site earlier this week, not in the business of making friends. Gawker was instrumental in making online-only media serious, credible and – as it turns out – dangerous, in the way all good media is capable of being.
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