For a couple of years, I read the site with a reverence most people reserve for holy texts or classic novels. I thought it was so cool when Choire Sicha, the editor at the time, put up a post protesting a change in the color of Gawker’s own headline fonts, designed to appease the site’s advertisers, and how Sicha and his co-editor, Emily Gould, announced that they were quitting the site at the very end of a meandering account of an evening they had spent with Keith Gessen, the founder of the literary magazine n+1 and a favorite target of Gawker, during which they discussed an essay that had recently run in n+1. They seemed to take real risks, proving the value of pulling back the curtain on the rich and powerful by pulling it back on themselves. I loved the clever writing, a dizzying mixture of sophisticated and immature, but I was mostly captivated by the site’s gonzo style, in which Gawker’s most engaging writers became starring characters in the drama they covered. I became enamored with Gawker as a sophomore in college. It was best known as a diversion for college students and bored office workers, who obsessively refreshed the site to devour its young writers’ acerbic dissections of New York City power players’ comings and goings. In 2009, Gawker, like most of the Internet, operated on a smaller stage. It was then revealed that the suit was financed by the billionaire tech titan Peter Thiel, in retaliation for Gawker’s coverage of Thiel and his Silicon Valley colleagues. After Gawker posted a sex tape featuring Hulk Hogan, the wrestler sued Gawker and won a hundred-and-forty-million-dollar judgment.
This was long before Gawker became the subject of national fascination as a principal player in a drama that resembles something that Trey Parker and Matt Stone might imagine if they were commissioned to write a musical about the First Amendment. It was the first day of my three-shift tryout as the night editor of Gawker. on October 27, 2009, I sat at my desk in the hallway that I used as an office in my Brooklyn apartment and stared at a blank field on my computer screen where I could type words and hit “publish” and the words would instantly appear on a Web site read by tens of thousands of people. PHOTOGRAPH BY LANDON NORDEMAN / REDUXĪt 8 P.M. A Gawker Media employee in 2009 in front of a display of Web sites then operated by the company.
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