#Gawker site professional

It was recently revealed that Bollea’s suit against Gawker was the culmination of a secret, years-long vendetta by Thiel, cofounder of PayPal, whom Gawker outed as gay back in the 2000s.

That, in a true tabloid turn, is what led to Gawker’s demise at the hands of tech investor Peter Thiel. Gawker has unmasked trolls, brought down congressmen and embarrassed captains of industry in Silicon Valley by publishing the kind of exposes it published about business tycoons in New York. Its predominant literary influence seems to be Slack or Gchat, with posts often written in the voice of an ultrasmart twentysomething trashing a more successful enemy while trying not to come off like too much of a snob. It influenced the way younger writers now write online. Over the years, Gawker grew into a nationally read publication whose alumni can be found everywhere, from such legacy media like the New York Times and the New Yorker to cutting-edge digital operations like Vox Media and the annotation site News Genius. It was really singular in the amount of freedom that we had.” “When I talk to people who worked there, we had the same lament: that we were spoiled, we didn’t know what we had when we were there,” Ryan said. Some of Ryan’s most popular posts included “How to Tell the Difference Between All the Dudes Running for President,” “What We’re Really Talking About When We Talk About Hillary Clinton Without Makeup,” and a reported story about a college rugby team that had chanted about rape, necrophilia and violence against women.

Ryan was working in finance in Chicago when Jezebel hired her - because it liked her comments beneath Jezebel stories.

#Gawker site professional

“It was like a place that always gave people a shot, who other places would maybe not give a shot to - people who weren’t maybe professional writers by trade, hadn’t gone to J-school, didn’t have a reporting background, but had a funny perspective,” said Erin Gloria Ryan, a former managing editor of Jezebel. Gawker Media offered new writers a chance, and it offered them the opportunity to say almost anything they wanted to say, as long as it was interesting. So it could be goodbye for Denton’s reign over an empire that started as a gossip blog about New York media - often small-fry stuff that infuriated its targets but made for great lunchtime reading for people with stuffy office jobs.