"It's less about revenge and more about specific deterrence," he said in his first interview since his identity was revealed. Thiel to mount a clandestine war against Gawker, funding a team of lawyers to find and help "victims" of the company's coverage to mount cases against Gawker. Hogan had a secret benefactor paying for the lawsuit, to the tune of about $10 million: Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and one of the earliest investors in Facebook.Ī 2007 article published by Gawker, "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people," and a series of articles about his friends and others that he said "ruined people's lives for no reason" drove Mr. Read the entire article in The New Yorker.What the jury did not know - nor the public - was that Mr. (You can see the beta version here.) The blog format "no longer makes sense," he adds, when you are "publishing some stories that are two thousand times as important as others." And the redesign fits Denton's no-nostalgia personality: To the annoyance of early readers, McGrath says, "Gawker is one of those things which, like neighborhoods, are never as good as when you first discovered them." "I was cut to my core," he says.ĭenton's "steady march toward mainstream respectability" will accelerate when Gawker ditches its trademark reverse-chronology blog format for "a more conventional front page that is dominated by images and headlines," McGrath says. Denton, who has "a famously large head that sits precariously on a thin neck and narrow shoulders," had his "own first internet humbling" in 2003, when somebody blogged about the size of his noggin. "Denton is a staunch believer in the primacy of vanity," McGrath says, "and holds that calling someone ugly will always trump calling him incompetent or a thief." And that conviction comes from personal experience. "You're ugly" is more hurtful than "you're a thief" Take Denton's stated favorites with a grain of salt, says Anthony Ha at VentureBeat, since he carefully "cultivates a specific image of himself." He is, in fact, a "gadget fetishist" and onetime sci-fi novelist, McGrath notes. While he favors the gossipy, media-centric stories, the "geek" sites get twice as many hits as the "gossip" ones - tech-centric Gizmodo is the biggest draw, followed by Gawker, Lifehacker, Kotaku (video games), Deadspin (sports), Jezebel, io9 (science fiction), Jalopnik (cars), and Fleshbot (porn). Gawker's "geek" sites are more popular than its "gossip" sitesĬombined, the Gawker sites get more than 450 million page views a month, but Denton says "neither the stories that I like nor the writers that I like" get the big hits. "Measurability" is the internet's big innovation, Denton says, and it is "actually terrifying if you’re a traditional journalist, and used to pushing what people ought to like, or what you think they ought to like." Gawker took off, says Matt Welch, because mainstream journalism was "deathly boring," and it offered a robustly entertaining alternative. At the time, it was "a supreme journalistic taboo" to let writers know how many times their stories were read - yet Denton told not only his bloggers but his readers as well. When Denton started Gawker from his apartment, his goals included sending up The New York Times, making money, and "pandering," McGrath says. Denton's insight: Give readers what they want
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