Gawker

Gawker Media is run by CEO Nick Denton, who owns 68 percent of the company as of 2014, along with five other managing partners. In 2014, the company made a $6.7 million profit from $45 million in revenue, mostly from advertising ($35 million) and e-commerce ($10 million).

Gawker is a network of blogs built on gossip. In 2012 it was incorporated as Gawker Media in the Cayman Islands, an international tax haven. The corporate headquarters are in the New York City neighborhood of Nolita. Denton reorganized the company at the end of 2014, following what he called "editorial and management mistakes." In November 2015, he announced that Gawker will "ride the circus of the 2016 campaign cycle, seizing the opportunity to reorient its editorial scope on political news, commentary and satire."

In addition to its flagship site, the Gawker Media empire consists of seven other blogs: Gizmodo (design & technology), Deadspin (sports), io9 (science fiction, fantasy and futurism), Jalopnik (cars), Jezebel (feminism), Kotaku (video games), and Lifehacker (lifestyle tips and tricks). Pornography blog Fleshbot and Washington, D.C. politics and gossip blog Wonkette were previously owned by Gawker but have since gone independent.

Gawker blogs pull in 64 million unique US visitors a month. The flagship site’s tagline is "Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news."

Denton, a "modern-day Citizen Kane," founded Gawker Media in 2002 and has since built it into $45 million per year media empire with around 300 employees based in five continents. Before that he was freelancing for a number of European publications and co-founded a networking site called First Tuesday, which made him a millionaire by the late 1990s. He does not hide his embrace of modern ‘yellow journalism’ or that Gawker openly pays its sources for scoops.

"The staples of old yellow journalism are the staples of the new yellow journalism: sex; crime; and, even better, sex crime," he has written to staff, according to Village Voice. "Remember how Pulitzer got his start."

Gawker’s no-holds-barred nature has landed Denton a fair amount of both friendly criticism and vehement detractors who depict him as a vindictive, Machiavellian schemer.

"I think he’s amoral. I don’t think he has any sense of right and wrong, and he’ll do anything he can to make money and have a successful blog," said Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, which is in competition with Gawker.

Denton has said his politics "are that I like to get things done, so I am centrist and, for obvious reasons, I’m socially liberal".

The deputy editor began at Gawker as a staff writer in 2008, making him the longest-tenured writer. Nolan has long been a proponent of giving writers more power than editors, complaining that "The writers are on the bottom. Above them are editors, who tell the writers what to change. This is backwards. How many good writers has Big Edit destroyed?" He also led the editorial staff in its attempt to unionize, noting that "every workplace could use a union." On June 3, 2015, Gawker Media’s editorial employees of voted to join the Writers Guild of America.

A post in July outed the married chief financial officer of Condé Nast, a Gawker Media competitor, as having attempted to hire a male prostitute, who had subsequently blackmailed the executive. The media industry and the Twitterverse exploded in indignation, which, combined with the threat of a potential lawsuit, forced the website to remove the post after four out of six managing editors voted to do so. In response, executive editor Tommy Craggs and Gawker Editor-in-Chief Max Read resigned, furious that the business side of the organization had overruled the editorial side. Founder Denton admitted that removing the offending post was "such a breach of everything Gawker stands for, actually having a post disappeared from the internet. But it was also an unprecedented misuse of the independence given to editorial." During an at-times contentious, follow-up, all-hands meeting with the founder and Gawker’s general counsel, the writers who remained seemed confused by the new editorial rules ‒ or lack thereof ‒ leading Denton to tweet: "Okay, let me clarify: ‘Don’t out someone who doesn’t want to be out — unless there is a worthwhile story there."

@jessicacoen Okay, let me clarify: "Don't out someone who doesn't want to be out -- unless there is a worthwhile story there."

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) July 20, 2015

Former professional wrestler Terry Bollea, better known by his alter ego Hulk Hogan, slapped Gawker Media with a $100 million personal injury case. The lawsuit came after the website posted a video of Bollea having sex with a woman whom Gawker claimed was Heather Clem, the ex-wife of his best friend Bubba ‘The Love Sponge’ Clem. The site was ordered to remove the video by a judge, though Gawker refused to comply, noting that "the Constitution does unambiguously accord us the right to publish true things about public figures," and that the judge’s order was thus "risible and contemptuous of centuries of First Amendment jurisprudence." The former wrestler’s media team has also filed motions to discover whether Gawker was behind leaking an "N-word-laden" rant made by Bollea that was published by the National Enquirer in July. The court date is set for March 2016. Denton has said he stands behind the publishing of the story on Bollea because, as his alter ego, "Hogan is a hugely public figure, who was public too about his sex life," he wrote in an email exchange with the Guardian.

Gawker is also being sued by the Daily Mail for defamation after the website published an article in March titled My Year Ripping Off the Web With The Daily Mail Online. It was written by James King, a former Mail Online freelancer. The Daily Mail has called the piece "false and defamatory" and claims that King and Gawker intended to "disparage the Mail and harm its reputation."

Unpaid Gawker interns are pushing a class-action lawsuit alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act; Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino sued after Gawker leaked a copy of his new screenplay; billionaire internet entrepreneur Peter Thiel was outed by Gawker’s Valleywag blog — a Silicon Valley watchdog — leading Thiel to call it "the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al-Qaeda"; Gawker has repeatedly attempted to out as gay Fox News personality Shepard Smith; a man who said he had a one-night stand with former US Senate candidate and Christianist Christine O’Donnell was paid by Gawker to share the story, which ultimately did not even involve sex; television advice guru Dr. Phil McGraw filed a lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement; the email address of former President George W. Bush was released to the public; and Gawker attempted to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire video of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoking crack. Gawker never received the video, so the money was given to charity, and Rob Ford admitted to use of the drug, leading to his eventual downfall.

All of Gawker Media’s websites were compromised in December 2010. Through its Lifehacker site, the company noted that their user databases had been hacked. They pointed out that the passwords in the databases were encrypted, but that simple passwords "may be vulnerable to a brute-force attack." They apologized and said the irony of "relying on the goodwill of the hackers who identified the weakness in our systems" not to publish the passwords. The group that infiltrated Gawker, Gnosis, posted the username and encrypted password file ‒ revealing nearly a quarter-million passwords on the Pirate Bay Bittorrent site after 17 hours of hacking ‒ as well as source code and internal chats. They told the Next Web that their motivation was to force Gawker to be more open and humble. One of the revealed passwords was that of Denton. "The sad thing is he probably believes this password is ‘secure’ because he likes to use it everywhere!" Gnosis wrote.

For its snarkiness, its tabloid tone, its righteous anger, its low blows, and smear campaigns, Gawker has been labeled a flat bully of the internet.

Its most recent and possibly most damaging incident of said "bullying" — which was spurred by a fairly tame joke, as opposed to more mean-spirited fare in Gawker’s past — occurred October 2014, when Gawker.com writer Sam Biddle waded into the GamerGate kerfuffle, which is based around sexism and misogyny within gamer culture. Biddle tweeted, "Ultimately #GamerGate is reaffirming what we’ve known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission," and "Bring Back Bullying."

The ensuing backlash cost Gawker Media "seven figures" in advertising revenue pulled from the sites, as the likes of Adobe and Mercedes-Benz dropped their relationship with Gawker Media. By the end of the uproar, Denton announced in December via an epic 4,000-plus word internal memo that he was stepping down as president of the company — while remaining CEO — and a new executive editor was named.

In 2012, Gawker writer Adrian Chen revealed the identity of Reddit moderator Violentacrez, or Michael Brutsch, who was responsible for the subreddit r/jailbait, dedicated to sexually-explicit material regarding underage girls, and "an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed." For this outing, Gawker was temporarily banned in popular subreddits such as r/entertainment, r/gaming, and r/politics, while Gawker and other links about the controversy were censored from the site by voluntary Reddit moderators.