"Good riddance.
In the history of giving a hostage to fortune, John Cook, a former editor of the former online poison party known as Gawker, merits a special place.
He has this to say about his professional aims: “I wanted to write true things about bad people . . . being bad or obnoxious or cruel or unkind.”
When enemies had been so identified, he says, “We could give ’em ‘what fer.’”
Unkind!Gawker saying its mission is to make war with the unkind is like the Queen of England decrying nepotism.
Gawker’s very escutcheon was cruelty, obnoxiousness, unkindness.
It published stories too nasty and sleazy for tabloids, and wrote them up with sophomoric zeal for vulgarism and profanity.
I happily worked at tabloids for many years, but I felt ashamed of myself every time I read Gawker.
...The flame merchants set fire to themselves when Gawker published, without the permission of either participant, a surreptitiously recorded sex tape that depicted the wrestler Hulk Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) and the wife of his friend in flagrante.
With his legal team secretly funded by the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and billionaire Peter Thiel — whom Gawker had “outed” in 2007, and who rightly considered killing Gawker to be a public service or perhaps an act of hygiene — Hogan sued Gawker and its founder Nick Denton into bankruptcy. Now Gawker is no more..."
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