Nick Denton Talks to David Remnick About Gawker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2016
⏱️ 19 minutes
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Summary
As the founder of the Web site Gawker, Nick Denton brought a British-tabloid combination of scandal and sharp commentary to the Internet, and it went big. “When in doubt, put it out,” was the site’s publishing mantra, Denton tells David Remnick. But, after years of antagonizing C.E.O.s and celebrities alike, Gawker went too far. After running a sex tape of Hulk Hogan, the company ended up in court, and a one-hundred-and-forty-million-dollar judgment left it in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It soon emerged that the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whom the blog once publicly outed as gay, had bankrolled the lawsuit. Denton is unapologetic about outing public figures—being gay, he says, is not a shameful secret that journalists are obliged to keep—but he admits that the Gawker trial did contain a certain “karmic justice.”
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| 1:11.4 | I'm Dorothy Wickendon on today's Politics and More podcast, David Remnick talks to Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media. |
| 1:20.1 | Gawkers, when in doubt, put it out, philosophy, made it one of the most popular tabloids on the internet. |
| 1:25.6 | But a recent court decision has led the company to declare bankruptcy. |
| 1:30.1 | Now, you don't have to be an avid media nut to know that the lawsuit, Balea versus Gawker Media, |
| 1:36.1 | is a case that's fascinating in a kind of a salacious way, but also genuinely important. |
| 1:42.1 | Terry Jean Balea, the plaintiff, is also known as Hulk Hogan, the former pro wrestler. |
| 1:48.0 | And the defendant Gawker Media is the parent company of Gawker.com, |
| 1:52.0 | which ran an article accompanied by a video of Hulk Hogan in bed with his friend's wife, Heather Clem. |
| 1:59.0 | The case pitted the rights of a free press against the privacy rights of a public figure, |
| 2:04.6 | and the judgment of $140 million against Gawker stunned everybody, even Gawker's fiercest critics. |
| 2:12.6 | Nick Denton is the founder of Gawker Media, and he's not a typical American suit. |
| 2:17.8 | Without any apology, he modeled Gawker from the start after the British tabloids with all their rudeness and half-truths and sarcasm. |
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