Gawker down
The headline was, “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” He’d claimed to have exacted revenge over a story on Valleywag (formerly a Gawker Media website) that outed him as gay in 2007. That lawsuit and several others were secretly funded by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. Gawker was sued into bankruptcy after it posted a sex tape of Hulk Hogan against his will and then refused to take it down. In his goodbye letter, Denton wrote, "It is a fitting conclusion to this experiment in what happens when you let journalists say what they really think." Even the site's founder, Nick Denton, took a fatalistic tone when reflecting on the site being closed by Univision, which scooped up the Gawker Media network of sites from bankruptcy, but shuttered the Gawker site itself. Gawker will forever become a cautionary tale in journalism schools, not only because it was taken down by a billionaire but also because of how it acted. “The way it went out of business was a tricky question, but I will not miss them,” said Jess Cagle, the editor in chief of People who is also editorial director for Time Inc.
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“Smell you later,” said Henry Goldblatt, editor in chief of EW, during a panel discussion at NLGJA’s opening reception last week in Miami. But the out editors of People and Entertainment Weekly are’t grieving for the media gossip site.
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After Gawker closed, many in the media wrote hand-wringing stories about the ability of a billionaire to take down a publication.