#Alex chen gawker gamergate professional

Not quite funereal, but not at all celebratory: a wistful, sad, and sometimes angry wake. The feeling of last night’s party, held to mark the end of Gawker’s independence, was, unlike the product that Gawker and its sister blogs put out, understated. Next week, the company’s assets will go up for auction, and the famously independent blogging collective will end up with a corporate parent.

Gawker had to go request permission from its creditors to host the party on a meager $1,000 budget. That the gathering happened at all was a small triumph. The lawsuit was later revealed to have been funded by the Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel - the subject of a 2007 Gawker story titled “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” Gawker has appealed the verdict, but Florida law requires that a bond be posted during the appeals process in order to gather the money to post that bond, Gawker was forced to declare bankruptcy and sell its assets.

#Alex chen gawker gamergate professional

Gawker filed for bankruptcy last month, and Denton was recounting, to an audience that knew the story very well because most of them were characters in it, how the experimental, one-man tech blog he launched in 2002 had become Gawker Media: enormously influential, widely read, consistently profitable, and, now, brought to its knees by a professional wrestler, a Florida judge, and a Facebook billionaire.Įarlier this year, a Florida jury levied an enormous $140 million judgment against the company over a 2012 post that excerpted a video showing Hulk Hogan having sex with a friend’s wife. Gawker’s enormous new offices? The year 2016? A week away from sale at auction? You could be forgiven for not being quite sure where “here” was. “The fact that we’re here is a freakin’ miracle,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said last night, addressing a crowd from the base of an enormous set of stairs.