f13.net

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=gawker+bankruptcy&tbm=nws

Not sure how it quantifies its assets at $50M+ but heyyyyyyy

get the fuck outta here gawker

and nothing of value was lost.

I used to like Deadspin before it became mostly soccer talk and promoted ads.

I still like Deadspin. Heavy on the ads, though.

I wondered how they were going to respond to Hogan's judgment.

Good riddance.

What'cha gonna dooooo, brother?

Daulerio drove Gawker into the ground? Stop, the room is spinning.

I kind of like io9 and hope that it reconstitutes somewhere else under some other label, and Peter Thiel is a major asshole, but...yeah. Gawker could occasionally publish an interesting piece here and there but it was mostly an unending garbage fire of adolescents who were told they could do as they pleased. The number of times that Gawker and Jezebel have run pieces that were either wildly inaccurate--the kind of inaccuracy that literally a single phone call or fifteen minutes with a search engine can avoid--or that were hideously unethical are as numerous as grains of sand on the beach. The thing in the end that was so aggravating was that they believed they were fighting the power rather than just harvesting clicks, or at least they talked that talk--and then like a lot of people in their situation seemed actually shocked when the powerful turned out to be, well, powerful and not particularly welcoming of being hassled by a bunch of creepy gossipmongers.

I'm also in the 'I like Deadspin' camp

io9 has the odd gem. I wouldn't notice the rest if they vanished though.

It's somewhat appalling because a billionaire sued a company out of existence because he was mad at a guy who worked there.

This.

It's not bad that Gawker got sued and that they lost, based on what coverage I've seen of the legal issues. I'm not at all comfortable with the very rich being able to use their money to crush journalists or media outlets. There are too many rich assholes out there who would love to suppress critical or contrarian voices, and the Gawker case may have been the "open season" call.

I agree with Torinak's points as well.

It's a lot less appalling when the lawsuit happens to be absolutely legit and not some "I'm going to sue a dry cleaner for 65 million because they lost my pants" frivolous bs.

You can only serve shit for so long before you have to eat it yourself.  

But they committed an offense that they completely deserved to be sued for. In fact they committed dozens of such offenses.

Why does it matter that he's a billionaire? Should rich people not be allowed to use the legal system?

To me this is like saying "a billionaire got me thrown in jail because he disliked me" while leaving out the fact that you killed his family in a DUI wreck. On some level I understand how maybe it's a bit scary that people with money have more sway over the legal system and can use that to influence media, but in this case it doesn't seem like the legal system is being abused.

If anything the abuse is the fact that all the other people who had cause to sue did not because Gawker had deeper pockets. Ideally we wouldn't have to wait for a rich guy to do it.


If those critical voices are in the business of ruining other people's lives for clicks and can be found guilty in a court of law then I see no downside to them being crushed.

I agree with Marg.  It's capitalism. 

Not everywhere is loser pays, as most cases should be.

Basically, I kind of agree too. For a long time, Gawker published stuff that had no business being published in any sense of public interest. They also published some good essays and every once in a blue moon, a genuine piece of investigation. But if you publish a lot of stuff that dances around and over the edge of libel, as well as stuff that's just plain grossly incompetent in terms of factual accuracy, don't be too surprised when somebody sues and doesn't care that once in every one hundred stories you do a good job. When the somebody isn't just getting a law firm to sue for the prospect of profits but has deep enough pockets to keep going and going and has enough hatred to bankroll other suits, well...

The best defense against that is to not publish semi-libelous bullshit and to not get a reputation for being comically wrong on the facts half the time. And also to not get a reputation for being over-the-top self-righteous while denying absolutely that you have any ethical obligations yourself. There is no society on earth that could protect you from getting enemies under those circumstances, and in any society where some enemies have more resources than others, even the most iron-clad version of the First Amendment could not guarantee you absolute protection from any consequences.

The big media companies know this already. It's not just that they're controlled by corporate suits that makes them cautious--they know it's actually important to get it right and do a good job as a baseline defense against any enemies you might make in the course of doing basically good work. Nick Denton and Gawker's writers and editors laughed at that kind of due diligence.

Turns out if you pretend to be a news site and throw out all the rules of journalism you get sued and take it up the tailpipe. I'm not sorry for any of them. I'm more sorry at the state of news reporting

Hogan's lawsuit had merit, but Thiel didn't fund it out of the goodness of his heart, he did so to get back at Denton.

Watching a billionaire fund lawsuits to destroy someone else's company isn't a good idea.  It's a recipe for less coverage of billionaires, if nothing else.

Gawker was behind some of the most egregious social justice initiatives, intentionally turning Que Zinn's fucking for reviews and more fucking into the shitpile that continues to be GamerGate. Gawker made GamerGate to push an agenda and get clicks. ANd that's just one of their many "campaigns".

Fuck them, I'm glad they're dead or at least dying, and I'm pleased as fucking punch that many of the people behind social justice being shoved into gaming are now finding themselves unemployable and begging for money or work.

Or maybe it's a recipe for actually covering billionaires intelligently, mindful in part that they have a billion dollars and so you'd better get your facts right and you'd better not be reporting on trivialities, like "That billionaire is gay! He totally sucks cock!".

Remember the scene in All the President's Men where Ben Bradlee says, more or less, that if you're taking on the President of the United States, don't fuck up? Woodward and Bernstein, especially back then, might not have had much more moral compass than Hamilton Nolan or any other dickface "reporter" at Gawker, but at the 70s Washington Post there were still quite a few grown-ups in the room to remind the two of them that they'd better not fuck up because the stakes were high and power was a real thing. At Gawker, there weren't any grown-ups, so not only was there no one reminding the li'l Minions that that people like Thiel were genuinely powerful, not just I-studied-hegemony-in-college powerful, nobody was telling them "If you're gonna tweak power, make it worth it."

There also wasn't anybody to tell the Li'l Minions that if you're going to get on your high horse roughly 8.5 times a week, you'd better be closer to Gandhi than Ramsay Bolton in your own ethics.

I'd be OK with it if the billionaire had wiped out Gawker in a lawsuit filed about him directly. IMO, it's not the same to use an unrelated lawsuit as a mechanism to punish something you don't like. Moreso if in the process the billionaire may have influenced the unrelated lawsuit in a way to hurt the defendant more potentially at the expense of the plaintiff (i.e., the tweaking of the claims against Gawker to ensure that Gawker's insurance wouldn't cover it, even if a settlement would be more likely if the insurance is involved).

It feels like an end-run around libel laws. The end result is that protected speech is no longer protected if it's about someone rich.

So Gawker ruined the reputation of someone who couldn't afford lawyers, and it is like breaking the rules or something that someone else they pissed off decided to bankroll Hogan? I mean, everybody knows that if you go after somebody smaller than you are, the fair thing is for everyone else to stay out of it, right? Honor among bullies, right?

In a pissing contest between Denton and Thiel, I'm strictly in it for the popcorn. There's no moral high ground to be had.

--Dave

I don't think Torinak's point is that it is bad Gawker got sued out of existence so much as it is worrying that one man had the power to do it. This time it was a deserving target. But what about next time?

I can see that part of it and agree, but at the same time he seems to take the biggest exception to the fact he bankrolled a suit that didn't involve him directly. In this particular case it was deserved suit, at the same time Gawker was creating a narrative that looking at JLaw's leaked nudes was like rape, they were bragging about ignoring a court order to take down the Hogan sex tape. But it could have just as easily been an iffier lawsuit if that had been convenient. Not to mention just grinding away at them bankrolling a near endless line of people suing gawker.

But still, fuck Gawker.

A non-deserving target would presumably win in court.

It took a particular combination of circumstances; Someone with a high profile, that could claim major damages, but that Gawker calculated did not have enough cash on hand to see through a lawsuit. Frankly, they deserved to have their shit packed in over Justine Sacco, but she could never have claimed enough damages (just blew up her life, and she was just a low-level PR flunky).

If Thiel had been funding a hundred lawsuits hoping one of them would hit the lottery or the sheer expense of defending them all would drag Gawker down, I'd be more concerned.

--Dave

Yes.  IMO, this kind of thing is an abuse of the legal system (and an entirely legal one).

I've seen too many legal uses of the legal system where someone with power just grinds down someone or something they don't like. There are anti-SLAPP laws in most states for good reasons, and there's a federal law to prevent libel venue shopping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act), all with the goal of protecting speech. Free speech is really, really, really important to a free country.

To be perfectly clear, I think Gawker should have lost the case. I'm not sad that their loss results in their bankruptcy. I'm bothered by the use of an unrelated lawsuit to punish an entity for what seems to be previously-made protected speech.


According to the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/business/dealbook/peter-thiel-tech-billionaire-reveals-secret-war-with-gawker.html), Thiel has confirmed funding multiple lawsuits against Gawker. He "funded a team of lawyers to find and help “victims” of the company’s coverage mount cases against Gawker." There are quotes from him where he claims he's just trying to stop a bully (Gawker) and that he believes in a free press. Based on discussions with a former colleague who's a well-known libertarian, it's not a contradiction--people should be free to say whatever they want (i.e., no government censorship), but governments shouldn't be able to protect speech either. In the real world, the result is that might (wealth) makes right when it comes to freedom of speech.

Due to the bankruptcy, Hulk Hogan may not even get much of the damage award. I wonder if he'll sue Thiel over that, especially if Gawker's insurance would have paid out more than he ends up getting?

Ch11 Bankruptcy cannot discharge judgements. Hogan will only not not get paid if whomever buys them appeals. (because they will almost certainly win, both on a reasonableness of penalty, and on prior precedent giving journalism a wide berth exactly because of people hitting press because of legit coverage they dont like).

Gawker filed because aren't liquid enough to put up the bond necessary to appeal(and because they expect that the harassment will continue until they fold, making anything throwing good money after bad). But whomever buys them can post that bond if they so wish.

This is exactly what Gawker has done for years to dozens of people. You don't seem too concerned about that.


Yes, it's Gawker who are the poor victims of "harassment."

I will underscore what's already been pointed out: Thiel has been backing a number of lawsuits against them, and his lawyers have apparently approached other possible clients to test their interest in a suit. That's the genuinely worrisome part of this whole thing. The scenario is pretty much, "Billionaire didn't like his sexuality being reported on and didn't like some of the other coverage of Silicon Valley (which included attention to legit stories like the covert Apple-Google collusion over keeping the price of skilled labor lower), so billionaire works with lawyers to come up with a plan for destroying the publication that did it." (Sure, Gawker Media may survive Chapter 11, but I guarantee Denton and virtually the entire existing staff will be gone--whatever remains is going to be something fundamentally different than what it was.)   I completely agree that's unwholesome and worrisome, especially when it comes to Silicon Valley oligarchs, who really need to have a skeptical, even hostile, press looking into their business activities.  I freely acknowledge it is maybe my own failing that I cannot give two fucks about Gawker, but I have been following them for a long time and they really represent the worst tendencies of online culture in multiple respects. This is like the collision of two of the worst aspects of 21st Century American life: a return of Gilded Age corruption and assholery and the impenetrably smug self-satisfaction of a certain type of ethically bereft and ferally untalented "digital native".  There were plenty of moments where Gawker's editors could have learned some important lessons and decided to grow up a bit, and they have refused again and again and again.

While it is a bit disturbing in looking at it on from above, the wildcard still is the fact that the lawsuit could have been decided the opposite way. You can bankroll it, but that does not necessarily mean you will win in court. Sure you have more resources, but if bribes are not involved, it will still come down to the decision of the court.

On the one side, Gawker could have avoided all this by reporting about the sex tape and just not air it.  If they had done that then Hogan would have had no case.

On the other side Thiel's lawyers were crafting the lawsuit specifically to make Gawker shut down, going so far as withdrawing parts of the complain that would have triggered some of the payment coming from Gawker's journalistic insurance.

He only had the power to do it because Gawker was in the wrong.

A win in court can still be a loss, if defending yourself bankrupts you.  A billionaire can fund enough suits to simply destroy you, because you run out of money before he does.

Per reports, if this suit didn't work, Thiel was prepared to fund other suits.  For a personal vendetta.

Better hope his next target isn't something you like.

I'll repeat this one more time since people in this forum (is this politics now?) seem incapable of understanding: Gawker has only gotten away with their shit for as long as they have because THEY have money.

THEY destroy people, and people can't sue them because their army of lawyers makes it too costly.

They are an asshole fish who ran into a bigger fish. This is the system working.

Trying to paint Gawker as victims of the monied is inane - Gawker has been abusing their own financial resources for years. If they didn't have an army of lawyers they would have been sued and lost multiple times already.

Gawker dug their own grave and jumped in it. Nothing else to see here.

If Hogan, who is a millionaire, needed financial help to go after Gawker.  That should tell you something right there.  You think the smaller people had a chance?  


Edit:  Also apparently Ziff Davis is buying Gawker.

Ziff Davis is setting the 'ground floor' for bids--it's not clear if they're actually strongly interested or just trying to help out by getting the bidding in motion.

There are lots of shitty journals but its maybe too far to suggest that they should be destroyed because someone more wealthy than them wanted them gone.

Kind of like how guilty people going free is the price of having fewer innocent in prison shitty journalism is probably the price we have to pay for good journalism.

Not necessarily true. Its probably better to say that Gawker lost because it did not understand how to work a jury.

The actual law of the case, prior to the verdict is pretty solidly on their side. Maybe we don't actually want it to be on their side(and i do think they should have lost this), but prior to this verdict its been exceedingly hard to sue news organizations as a public person. If gawkers new owners put up the cash to appeal they will probably win, if not on the facts of the case, on the reasonableness of the damages [No, Hogan did not suffer $115 million in actual damages as a result of the non-newsworthy portions of the tapes being released.].

And the law of the case is more likely to be won on appeal; both on grounds that the damages are unreasonable and on the law of the case.

Anyone want to start a fundraiser to buy Gawker and shut it down permanently?

Do you have $250m? Because that is the going rate.

I love the idea that punishing people for crimes is going too far.

1) Not a crime. This is a civil matter and not a criminal matter. Though there can be overlap between the two (criminal actions can result in civil suits) there has been no allegations of criminal wrongdoing in this matter(well, not at Gawker at least). There were no criminal proceedings.

2) If it were then 8th amendment protections would apply and the damages would have been more reasonable and not bankrupted the company

3) Its hardly an unreasonable position to think maybe the 8th amendment might have some sort of application to civil suits [and while technically it doesn't the structure is essentially enshrined in the common law of torts]

I think the Chapter 11 trick is interesting. Some may say "Gawker's done". But none of the people who did what Gawker has become known for will be personally affected.

Whether they emerge from some restructuring that merely ended any chance for Hogan to collect, or they get bought by ZD or someone else, chances are all of the people will keep doing exactly what they were doing, possibly behind the wall of an even bigger team of lawyers.

As many here have said, there's no "good side" here.

I get the idea that a billionaire can pick such a battle and what if his personal eye of sauron turns elsewhere oh noes! But the reality is that could happen at any point by any run of the mill billionaire, of which there are many. And the reality is this kind of lawsuit by proxy probably happens all the time and even against media companies and it just so happens we hear about the Gawker case.

And on the other side, Gawker picked one fight too many, and this is what them as going concern caused. But again, not the individual people. That may come someday (suing the individuals).

As an aside, this probably is a candidate thread for Politics.

The revelation that billionaires get to do whatever they want, including ruin the lives of many, many other people if they so choose, is not remotely shocking. The only takeaway here is fuck Gawker, and may their particular brand of festering rot consume and destroy whatever other media corporation thinks it can make a few bucks by bankrolling their continued existence.

Also, kill all billionaires.

Zzzz. Don't you ever get board of reading wikipedia and pretending that lends you an expert opinion?

Having been targeted by a copyright troll lawyer and looked for a way out of paying a 9 million dollar default judgement to a porn company, it's been long and well decided that the 8th amendment does fuckall nothing for you. The only way out other than appeal was chapter 9.

That was my point. If it were criminal then an 8th amendment issue could be brought. There are reasonableness on civil suits regarding punitive damages(which is kind of like an 8th amendment structure, but comes from the common law of punitive damages and not from the 8th) and compensatory are limited by the actual damage.

Aren't Denton and Daulerio on the hook personally?

You seriously need to pick your battles better.  Gawker and everyone associated with them is human trash and they reaped what they fucking sowed.  End of story.

Did you somehow become a municipality when no one was looking?

I'm sure there are animal welfare activists who were upset when they destroyed the last remaining samples of smallpox and sent it into extinction.

Are they?  I had not heard that.  I don't see how they can be.  That's the whole point of incorporating, to shield yourself from this sort of problem.

Yes. I am actually the collective consciousness of Detroit given form. Or I wrote the wrong one digit number. The one I was looking for is 7. Probably.

I know, I just found it funny.

It's probably a bad precedent for freedom of press that a billionaire with an axe to grind can sink a whole Publisher with a single proxy lawsuit. It's also sad for all of the employees that will lose their jobs.

It's pretty hard to feel angry about it for me personally though because I'm glad that the shitstain that is Gawker and its two founders go under because of their self-righteous shit flinging.

Looked it up--Denton was hit for $10 million in personal damages, Daulerio for $100,000.

You're really downplaying the part where you're saying it "had merit." What they did to Hogan was ridiculous, and usually billionaires can get away with that shit because they can tie you up with cash in the legal departments. This time they got hammered by another billionaire. It doesn't happen if you're actually performing your job within journalistic lines in this country. We have a ton of leeway on that stuff.

You know, that is really not entirely true. Especially in the current economy--many newspapers or news organizations can't take a huge judgment and their legal staff would generally tell a reporter who had a valid story that might nevertheless inspire someone like Thiel to tie the organization up in court to either drop the story or modify it. There are already important stories that are underreported because of this kind of use of litigation as a tool of intimidation, and that's been true for a while. Small independent reporters who sometimes do really valuable work are even more litigation-averse, no matter how legitimate the work they're doing.

But for me this is just one more reason to resent Gawker: that precisely because they were playing at the edge, they owed *other journalists* more consideration and thought. That's ultimately the most obnoxious thing about them, that they didn't even recognize that they were taking risks and that the risks they were taking put other organizations and professionals at risk to boot.

We have literally hundreds of sources to get news from now though. The lines of what does and doesn't constitute a journalist have been completely obliterated by the internet.

There's almost no reason for reputable news sources to take chances. Stories get out now in a variety of ways, and all they have to do is avoid the major stupid pitfalls once they do. The reason they DO take chances is because they get lazy or greedy or both, and they stop worrying about reporting news and start reporting inflammatory bullshit for clickbait.

Just look at trumps non payments of contractors. This is pretty common for large businesses because they can afford to take a lawsuite and let it languish for a decade where a small family business either has to take whatever tiny settlement is offered or go out of business before they ever see a dime.

Honestly, this is why we have stuff like The First Amendment, which doesn't say, "If you're reasonable, you can say what you want". Or "A free press is like a bunch of X-Wings attacking the Death Star: one of them is bound to get through!"   Don't make arguments here that are bigger than they need to be. The only argument worth making that doesn't turn this into a free speech issue is that Gawker's people were such catastrophic assholes that they make it emotionally difficult to defend them in terms that they ought to be defended in.

Not all speech is protected and not all of it needs to be. This isn't governmental oppression or suppression, it was libel. They fucked up, they got beat-down.

There's a line between us and China, or even us and the UK that we could stand to be a bit closer to without devolving into madness.

Theil is going after Gawker about a story detailing Trump's hair. Getting a bit ridiculous if you ask me.

He's not bothering being in the shadows on this any longer. He's going to bankroll every nuisance suit he can find.

The accusation in the Hulk Hogan case wasn't libel, by the way. It was invasion of privacy. He would have lost if he'd brought libel--didn't meet the standard.

Turns out Thiel is a pledged delegate for Trump, so it wouldn't be too surprising if he had to react to a perceived attack on the hair.