

On Friday, July 17 - less than 24 hours after the story was published - Denton announced that it had been removed from the website. Given the chance gawker will always report on married c-suite executives of major media companies fucking around on their wives However, some Gawker journalists, including Read, defended the piece: It’s a flagrant abuse of the incredible power those of us in the media have. Beyond cruelly wrecking an innocent man’s life, the only thing Gawker and Sargent achieved was a temporary traffic boost. The piece evinces a subtle homophobia, since part of what the reader is expected to do is recoil in horror at the thought of a married man hiring a gay escort. As Gabriel Arana wrote for the Huffington Post: Several journalists and media outlets quickly expressed outrage and disgust in response. In publishing the story, Gawker played into Truitt's game of blackmail.

Gawker's report alleged that Truitt pressured the executive to aid him with a housing dispute he believed the executive could pull some political strings to help him out, and threatened to go to the press if he refused. The messages contained discussions of payment and the logistics of the meeting, and later devolved into a form of extortion. On the evening of Thursday, July 16, Gawker writer Jordan Sargent published screenshots of several text messages that were allegedly exchanged between the executive and porn star Brodie Sinclair, a.k.a.

Read and Craggs's resignations are rooted in a controversial story about a Condé Nast executive who allegedly tried to pay a gay porn star to spend the night with him in a Chicago hotel. Gawker outed a married man who isn't a public figure On Monday, July 20, Read and executive editor Tommy Craggs resigned.īut behind this flashpoint is a broader struggle within the company: Gawker's founder and CEO, Nick Denton, believes the site's editorial ethos needs to change. Gawker had become the type of story Gawker reports on. The site ran an awful story outing a married Condé Nast executive, and then the business side of Gawker Media overruled the site's editorial staff and took down the post. " New Republic brand ambassadors haven't been this self-satisfied since the magazine was publishing racist pseudoscience on its cover!" he added.īut this past week, Gawker's journalists Took A Stand. He was snarking on the smugness of the people who were leaving the place.

Unless maybe you want to clean house without all the messy firing," Gawker's then-editor-in-chief Max Read wrote about the New Republic's implosion. "Never give a journalist an opportunity to Take A Stand. The kind of person you want to hear talking about other people, but you never want talking about you. People went to Gawker because they could rely on the site to explain what had happened in the voice of a really judgmental, nosy friend - the kind of person you want to sit next to at a wedding, the kind of person who will tell you who's slept with whom and what kind of crazy diet the bride is on. It wasn't because Gawker had the news first (the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza had tweeted a mass-resignation list), or because it had better reporting than other outlets. They cited loyalty to Foer and expressed fear that the New Republic was in danger of ruining its own legacy.Īt the time, you could have learned all this on Twitter, or eventually from The New Republic itself, but really, everyone in the media world knew they had to go to Gawker. A new editor-in-chief was appointed, existing editor-in-chief Frank Foer was pushed out, and a majority of the publication's staffers, many of whom are excellent journalists, quit in response to Foer's ousting. In 2014, The New Republic - a respected political magazine - self-destructed.
