![]() Gawker’s willingness to publish seemingly anything made it a long list of enemies, not just Thiel. … Peter Thiel decided it wasn’t part of the deal.” “If you’re a Wall Street billionaire, you understand that when you acquire power and you wield it, that there’s people whose job it is to try to check that. “We have a lot of heads mounted on the wall that I’m pretty proud of,” said John Cook, executive editor of Gawker Media. Thiel was “a malevolent supervillain” who waged “a covert legal war against us for a decade,” Deadspin editor Tim Marchman said. Thiel later admitted to secretly bankrolling legal action against some of Gawker’s more questionable posts - including Bollea’s. ![]() 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. “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. ![]() The company also secured an $8 million loan from Silicon Valley Bank last summer.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. (Denton said last summer, “ We don’t keep $100 million in the bank, no.”)Įven aside from the lawsuit, 2015 was a bumpy year, with high-profile resignations and a new focus on political news for the Gawker site. an insurance policy in case Gawker loses the suit. It’s not clear how much the funding is intended to cover legal fees vs. Hogan, whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea, has filed a $100 million privacy lawsuit against Gawker over a sex tape that the company’s flagship gossip site published in 2012. Gawker declined to comment further, but the fundraising process has “reached an advanced stage,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Until now, Gawker Media has been funding the Hulk Hogan legal expenses from general revenues and given the expenses of continuing to defend our First Amendment rights, the management of Gawker Media has concluded that additional financing should be locked in before the trial begins. Gawker Media is the most heavily trafficked digital media company that has not raised institutional funding and continues to grow at double-digit rates, with significant untapped opportunity across its seven core brands. With the Hulk Hogan trial beginning in early March, Gawker Media is fortifying its finances to ensure full resources are in place for the continued cost of litigation. When we reached out to Gawker founder Nick Denton (pictured at left in the photo above) the company sent us this statement: We’ve confirmed the news with a source of our own, but it turns out we didn’t need to. Gawker Media is raising outside funding, and for a specific purpose - it says it’s getting ready for its legal battle with Hulk Hogan.Īs first reported in the International Business Times, the company has called for an “extraordinary general meeting” of shareholders on Thursday, where it will discuss changing its capital structure to accommodate new financing.
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