In Fairness to Nick Denton
Posted on July 20th, 2015 in Uncategorized | 24 Comments »
This response to the resignations of two of his editors feels much more honest and thoughtful than the note I criticized in the post below.
This is the company I built. I was ashamed to have my name and Gawker’s associated with a story on the private life of a closeted gay man who some felt had done nothing to warrant the attention. We believe we were within our legal right to publish, but it defied the 2015 editorial mandate to do stories that inspire pride, and made impossible the jobs of those most committed to defending such journalism.
Better.
Though I would delete the words “some felt.”
24 Responses
7/20/2015 2:48 pm
While I admit this statement is somewhat better, I still take issue with Denton’s core premises.
First, he takes it as a given that the subject of the story is in fact a “closeted gay man”. Everything I’ve read to date indicates that said publishing executive claims that he is the victim of a fabricated attempt at extortion. He does, of course, have an obvious motivation to deny the story, so perhaps his denial isn’t true. On the other hand, Gawker’s source is a gay escort who was blackmailing the publishing executive, so this source also has an obvious motivation to lie. My take, based on the evidence to date, is that we simply don’t know whether or not the story is true. All of which gets us back to one reason why running this story was such a horrible decision in the first place, and why respectable journalistic outlets are highly reluctant to wade into situations where they are abetting blackmail. (The other reason is that the story, even if true, probably isn’t newsworthy because the executive isn’t a public figure.)
Second, the notion that Gawker’s mandate is “to do stories that inspire pride” is simply laughable. Gawker’s clear mandate is to produce clickbait stories that rile up emotions and let its core readership feel like morally superior “cool kids.” A tone of “snark for the sake of snark” and a complete lack of civility run across Gawker, Deadspin, Valleywag, and Jezebel. Denton would presumably dress it up as “speaking truth to power”, but that’s BS rationalization. The vast majority of their content has the same maturity and moral character as a bunch of high schoolers spouting profanities about the people they don’t like. Gawker’s properties are on the whole characterized by (i) lack of civility or empathy, (ii) questionable knowledge of any serious subject that they attempt to tackle, and (iii) reading like forums for people of mediocre success to take our their jealous frustrations on those who are more successful in their fields. While this recent piece took all of those negatives to an extreme level, it was in line with Gawker’s ethos.
Anyone who would “take pride” in producing most of Gawker’s dreck is a moral midget who should be engaged in deep soul-searching about why they want to, in their small way, make the world a worse place. That’s exactly the question that I’d ask Nick Denton, if I ever had occasion to meet him.
7/20/2015 2:48 pm
Baby steps are steps nonetheless.
7/20/2015 3:51 pm
The man is 49 years old, has been married for 23 years and has 3 teenage children. The story as related (that he proposed to pay $2,500 plus airfare for a Texas prostitute to meet him in Chicago) smells to begin with and even if accepted at face value would indicate he does not do this routinely (no hustlers in New York or Chicago?).
A little skepticism wouldn’t hurt you all.
7/20/2015 4:16 pm
We have a generation-plus of people who were raised by parents who thought it was inappropriate to try and instill right and wrong in their kids, so why is everyone so surprised that we have so many people who don’t know the difference between the two? What none of these moronic parents seemed to have realized is that their kids needed a starting point — whether the parent’s view was indeed correct was beside the point — to start forming their own opinions.
So what we have now is a generation-plus who say it isn’t their place to judge others and who claim to aspire to civilized behavior but who act in this shameful manner. While in the aggregate it’s fair to say that the right is every bit as bad as the left in its own ways, it’s also fair to note that this particular problem in a creation of the left. Witness the gay rights activists who claim to only want tolerance and acceptance and yet who forced Brendan Eich out of his position as CEO of Mozilla for the ‘crime against humanity’ of having to donated to the anti gay marriage movement, even though absolutely everyone said Eich had never let his views enter the workplace. This so-called outing is of a piece with that, although for no discernible good reason as to why the executive should have been targeted.
7/21/2015 5:42 am
So if the subject had been straight it would have been okay to publish dirt on him?
7/21/2015 11:29 am
There is something more than a little bit ironic and hypocritical in Denton saying that the editorial department at Gawker was out of control… presumably this is not really news to him and it is of concern to him now only because of the immediate potentially disastrous financial implications.
7/21/2015 12:27 pm
There are serious problems with corporate governance at Gawker, and I think that Interested Observer identifies the upshot of that.
One has to be “extremely naïve” to have an “independent” editorial director on the governing body of an enterprise. One has to be “extremely naïve” to have your general counsel — the woman who vetted this article — on the governing board. And, note the ambiguity in Gawker’s own statements as to whether she voted to remove the article or not.
Even odder is that foolish Nick Denton still refers to the victim of the removed post by name in his blog posts. It’s as if he’s passive-aggressive: listening to Guns & Roses “Appetite for Self-Destruction” while drafting non-apologies.
At some point, their insurer will have to take over.
As for the writer and editorial director leaving the company; as Michael Wolff pointed out in the Hollywood Reporter, one is hard pressed to imagine them landing at another job in journalism.
7/21/2015 12:32 pm
In reading Tommy Craggs and Max Read’s resignation notes, it’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that these are two of the most self-important and deluded individuals walking the face of the earth. If they (and their minions) are really the best the world has to offer, what the hell are they all doing working at Gawker instead of some media company that provides real societal value? …God help us if they are really the best of the best.
Craggs in particular comes across as some petulant grade school whiner. Does he really think that saying that kind of stuff about others in the organization and behaving the way he did is mature, adult behavior? He must be one of those adults who spent their childhood getting trophies for just showing up and being told how special they were, without actually ever doing anything of note or even participating. The wonder of it all is that Denton even had a semi-functional organization after populating senior management with the likes of these two clowns.
Finally, Denton’s treating any resignations as ‘constructive dismissals’ and giving them severance is both an outrage and calls into question everything he says and claims to believe. It’s an outrage because they will be entitled to unemployment benefits — on my tax dollars! — when they clearly quit in a fit of rage over not getting what they wanted; and it calls into question his basic honesty because doing that flies in the face of truly being ashamed of what they did. All in all, Denton’s apologies have the air of a prison religious conversion on the eve of execution.
7/21/2015 1:59 pm
As odious a thought as this is, in the same way that school yard bullies only quit bullying others when they have the absolute shit kicked out of themselves, perhaps it’s time for others in the media to start digging up truly embarrassing personal information on Denton, Craggs, Read, and all the other employes of Gawker and outing them… perhaps then these evil cretins will crawl back under whatever rocks they came out from under and never surface again.
7/21/2015 3:55 pm
Unemployment insurance (as any employer and most employees know) is ENTIRELY paid by the employer, not taxpayers. “Constructive dismissal” in this matter is a violation of Nick Denton’s fiduciary duty, not a matter for taxpayers.
There is a strong whiff of lunacy in this matter with respect to their claims of “radical transparency.” Why don’t they publish every email they have ever received and sent? Why did these “radical transparents” omit the name of the lunatic male prostitute accuser in this case?
Regardless of the foolishness of Messrs. Craggs and Read, they and everybody else are entitled to an opaque private life. Nick Denton has chosen his own course — as illustrated by his smoking a joint on a balcony a few weeks back while he was being interviewed by a reporter for the New York Times. It’s in the lede of the article.
7/21/2015 4:01 pm
oops. Standard unemployment benefits (26 weeks) are entirely paid by employers. Extended unemployment benefits (during periods of high unemployment) can be covered by states and the federal government. Since Messrs. Craggs and Read are unlikely to be constructively employed in journalism anytime soon (( will concede they may have never been constructively employed in journalism) they are likely to tap into extended unemployment benefits.
7/21/2015 4:34 pm
Spud Hosnick —
I have to respectfully disagree with you — anyone who makes it their life’s work to violate other people’s right to an opaque private life forfeit their own right to one.
Let’s shuck it down to the cob… Gawker’s corporate mission statement would more honestly state that their ultimate goal is to inflict unimaginable humiliation and pain on anyone who any member of their staff has a petty jealousy or resentment dating from kindergarten with. Gawker serves no purpose other than helping to meet the vile prurient interests of a sick segment of the population who get their thrills from watching other people suffer.
The usual suspects — Glenn Greenwald et al. — say Gawker has done good and useful work without actually making clear what they consider that to be. It’s probably a safe bet to conclude that that mostly includes outing politicians who are homophobic but engage in gay sex; while there is no denying that they deserve to be outed, there is also no denying that someone like Greenwald, who is openly gay, has a huge vested interest in the topic and thus is conflicted… it would be nice to have some honest media coverage of that.
Unfortunately, this is all too common in the current political environment, where it’s considered acceptable to vilify someone soley because they won the genetic pool in terms of having prominent and/or wealthy parents who gave them a leg up in life… instead of trying to go out and better yourself, it’s now considered okay to try and tear them down to one’s own level. This is progress? Or humanity?
7/21/2015 4:42 pm
I get the impression that the reasons that members of the Gawker staff consider this man worth shaming are the same ones that Natasha Vargas-Cooper of Jezebel had to justify its nasty doxing of Amy Pascal (the article is titled “This is Amazing Amy’s Cheap Crotch-Intensive Beauty Regimen). In that case they used hacked shopping information to humiliate Pascal for clicks. Both victims here were executives of large companies and as Richard points out, for some at Gawker that’s indefensible. I’m familiar with the impulse, though, since I live in San Francisco where perhaps a majority behave like an less-organized version of Mao’s Red Guard.
7/21/2015 9:55 pm
Remember, Denton runs an organization that famously called our esteemed host an “idiot” for daring to question Rolling Stone’s Great Virginia Rape Hoax. Kudos to the guy at least for admitting their journalistic “standards” are a work in progress.
Previously Gawker would never have thought to question the uncorroborated word of a blackmailing male hustler (or, say, an evasive undergraduate), especially if such circumspection would delay the public execution of a member of the Establishment.
7/21/2015 11:18 pm
As a recovering journalist, I believe that using creative and not creepy means to deflate a**holes is the best approach. Also as a recovering journalist, I know that most journalist’s sex lives are b-o-r-I-n-g. Finally, putting a creepy “journalists” sex live in the public space will only attract much the same revulsion that the original post by Gawker did.
I accidentally ended up on the Gawker site today. Someone there said the real headline should have been something like “Paranoid gay escort tries to extort closeted publishing executive (that I won’t name).” That’s the real point here: Gawker hurt the victim in this extortion attempt.
I just loved seeing Glenn Greenwald praising in a tweet “some” Gawker reporters. That’s a good sign that the site as is be doomed.
7/22/2015 4:38 am
It’s kind of stunning to think that these imbeciles honestly believe a union will solve all their problems, while in reality all it will do is create a new layer of management above them that they will have to pay for out of their own pockets and who won’t have the the workers’ interest in mind anymore than corporate management does. The only thing left for them to do is to chant “Yes we can!” and drink some more Kool-Aid.
7/23/2015 3:57 pm
Critical thinking skills do not appear to be a prerequisite to working at Gawker.
7/24/2015 11:15 am
Denton is reportedly ‘retooling’ Gawker on Monday to be 10 or 15 or 20 or some percentage kinder, whatever that means, coinciding with when they move into their new quarters, and is offering any staff member who doesn’t agree with the new mandate the opportunity to be true to their principles and not make the move while still getting severance. He makes no reference to when his come-to-Jesus moment came when he threw his old principles overboard, and in typical less-than-honest mainstream media fashion, no one interviewing him has asked. (Perhaps it’s naive of me to think that they might, given that so many of them have professed to having Gawker on their ‘must read’ list, both for professional reasons and for the enjoyment they derived from watching it spotlight everything that was true and good about progressives, cough, cough.)
It brings up the interesting question of if his real motive is to try and fool some of his more vocal dissenting employees into quitting, now that they are unionized and thus in an even stronger position to criticize him and his actions.
It also brings up the interesting question of how many of them if any will be stupid enough to do so, notwithstanding the fact that most of the are among the strongest candidates for stupidity awards in a pool consisting of the world’s most stupid people. Who would hire them? They’ve already made clear that the number one reason they are at Gawker is because there is no adult supervision and they can write whatever they want about whoever they want, and that no where else is like that. And the union probably strengthens their position to continue behaving that way, even as their doing so puts Gawker in an ever-more tenuous position on the endangered specied list. Even if they realize that they are on a sinking ship, how do they disavow their previous work to potential new employers?
7/24/2015 5:40 pm
The motivation for changing Gawker is clear. Traffic at their other sites is up, year over year, by 7 or so percent. Traffic at Gawker.com is down by double that. Laid off employees can get up to $425 a week in unemployment insurance (no pay for the first week) for up to 26 weeks, then they can return to Starbucks. Unions don’t protect shrinking ships even when the employees take over. See: Bethlehem Steel.
7/26/2015 1:02 am
The planet’s problem is not overcrowding but the fact that 90 percent of humans are shit and should be turned into fertilizer.
I don’t think this is a controversial proposition, the only problem is that agreement on which 90 percent to eliminate is impossible to obtain.
7/26/2015 9:48 am
In spite of the seriousness of Gawker’s various sins, there is an element of outrageous hilarity to the schadenfreude of the ‘progressive’ media and its writers, given that Gawker and its employees label themselves the same way (it seems to be a pissing contest as to who can fool themselves into thinking they are the most ‘progressive’ people in the world simply by attaching the ‘progressive’ label to the most inane of things). The list is too long to do anything beyond highlight a few examples of the candidates for the ‘hypocrite of the century’ award:
1) VOX. When you have the White House press flack earnestly (sorry - I couldn’t resist) constantly saying that a headline on VOX says it all, why would VOX possibly think that they’re not in the tank for Obama? Too much Kool Aid?
2) Salon.com ‘Et tu, Gawker’ is another one of their stereotypically tendentious pieces. There is a line in the story asking who appointed Gawker the guardian of media morality… my question is, Salon and its writers have plenty to say on various matters of morality — who appointed them?
3) Arthur Chu. Chu, who writes for Salon, tweeted in following in response to the Gawker / Mary Beth Williams contretemps: “I want there basic norms of decency. I want those norms to favor & protect most marginalized & vulnerable. I want them to be firmly enforced”. Right on! As a white male who is feeling increasingly marginalized and vulnerable in my own country for no sin except for being a white male (I’m obviously guilty of not having chosen my parents very well), a situation largely brought on by the likes of Arthur Chu, I say we need to have public executions of people like him… with no trial beforehand. Oh, I’m sorry… is that hate speech?
7/27/2015 8:37 am
Denton, in his memo to Gawker staff about the upcoming changes, said the following about his various media properties:
“They are among the only organically grown web properties, with audiences drawn by stories rather than tricked into clicks.”
Huh? That would surely run afoul of truth-in-advertising laws, if in fact they applied to documents such as this. To say that people aren’t deceived into clicking on Gawker’s and its affiliated sites stories is straight out of the “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” school of logic… Gawker is the personification of stories that are designed to be ‘click-bait’.
Bill Clinton, you can finally stop fretting about it (if indeed,you ever did). Your “It depends upon what the meaning oof the word ‘is’ is” now takes fourth place in the annals of dissembling… Denton takes ‘win’, ‘place’ and ‘show’ all by himself.
7/27/2015 9:18 am
Mr. Bradley obviously does not think that full disclosure requires him to mention that Gawker has written negative things about him.
7/27/2015 1:45 pm
Hasn’t Gawker written negatively of EVERYBODY in the media? I do note that folks like Michael Wolff do so disclose, and almost wear it as a badge of honor.