Did I Kill Gawker?

Of course, it wasn’t a Gawker story. We’d rushed the article to publication in part because Nick was having a party at his apartment that evening and I felt like it would be nice to have a scoop to show off. Instead, what I brought was a nuclear reactor. The article, which named the executive, was so quickly and thoroughly despised, and I was so ready to fight with its objectors, that Tommy forcibly took my phone out of my hands and deleted Twitter for me. I woke up the next morning to a full-fledged internal crisis. Within 24 hours of the story’s publication, it was clear that I was not long for Gawker. The following Monday, Tommy and I submitted our resignations. {…}

I could construct (and, during the past year, often have, over sheepish drinks with disappointed or angry colleagues) an elaborate house of rationalization, wings upon wings of explanation about the value of transparency, the democratic significance of holding nothing back. But ultimately we’d put to work a tactic best used to shame homophobic politicians against a guy whose only real crime was being a member of our abstract notion of the enemy class. We hadn’t exposed any great hypocrisy; instead, we’d taken a bit of gossip and brought the full bludgeoning of moral urgency and ideological commitments to bear on it.

Whatever we’d hoped to accomplish with that story, we instead reaffirmed the world’s understanding of what we were: needlessly cruel. Within a week of publication, Nick was promising in interviews a “20 percent nicer” version of Gawker. In November, he announced in a memo that Gawker would shift from general gossip and tabloid news to “political news, commentary and satire.”* The tide of public opinion had changed, and Gawker’s mischievous gossip was no longer a guilty pleasure. It was a problem.

From: Did I Kill Gawker?