Denton grew up in the upscale London neighborhood of Hampstead. “Come with me as I investigate this urban legend.” “The Katie Holmes story was a total classic,” Mr. Above the receptionist’s desk on the third floor was the “big board,” a large screen displaying the company’s best-performing posts, which at that moment included a piece about a team of scientists who had put a common household product to an unlikely purpose - “ Glow-in-the-Dark Tampons Are Being Used to Fix Broken Sewers” - and an investigation into whether the actress Katie Holmes had a secret entrance to her local Manhattan Whole Foods to avoid the paparazzi back in 2012. Employees in sales, technology and the newsroom sat in tight rows at long tables. Denton, who is tall and thin, with close-cropped gray hair, gave me a tour of Gawker’s offices. He is asking a Florida state court for $100 million in damages. Bollea forced Gawker to take the video down, and is now suing Gawker Media and Mr. named Bubba the Love Sponge - and posted a one-minute 40-second edit of it. Bollea having sex with a woman who was then the wife of a friend - a radio D.J. A few years ago, Gawker got its hands on a video of Mr. Gawker is also confronting a more immediate threat, one in the form of an angry, litigious 6-foot-7, 300-plus-pound ex-wrestler named Terry Bollea, a.k.a. But in the face of this new reality, he told me he’s thinking about selling a minority stake in the company. Denton has refused to bring in outside investors he and his family own about 68 percent of the company, with the balance held by employees or former employees. Like them, it has to distinguish itself in a crowded, frenetic ecosystem, and decide how much, if at all, to tailor its content to the various social media platforms that increasingly determine what people read and watch.Īnd unlike some of its competitors - BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox - Gawker doesn’t have tens of millions of dollars in venture-capital money at its disposal. The original new-media insurgent is now confronting the same challenges as a lot of establishment media companies. Denton has been overtaken by the populist digital revolution he helped spur. Denton signed a 10-year lease that will cost Gawker about $280,000 a month.Īt the same time, Gawker is going through something of an existential crisis. In a show of confidence about Gawker’s future, Mr. It has outgrown the walk-up on Elizabeth Street that has been its home since 2008, and will move this summer into a vastly larger space in a proper office building in the Flatiron district. Gawker Media says it generated about $45 million in advertising revenue last year, and was profitable, earning about $7 million. The company had two freelance bloggers who were paid $12 per post.īy most measures, the company is doing fine. It was initially just two blogs, the snarky - though the term was not yet in popular usage - media gossip site Gawker, and a technology blog, Gizmodo. Denton started Gawker Media 12 years ago in his living room. Like when they’re standing on a fire escape, in a haze of pot smoke. Denton himself has put it, what journalists put in their stories is inherently less interesting than what they say after work. By Gawker’s definition, if it’s interesting, it’s news. His various websites have stood for nothing if not the proposition that decorum should never stand in the way of entertaining readers. After all, he has probably done more than any individual to loosen up the mainstream media. Craggs insisted that I could, and I would. “You can’t use that - I mean, realistically, in The New York Times.”
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