These 10 Stories Are Exactly Why We Need Gawker
Today, Gawker Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and subsequently announced a purchase agreement with Ziff Davis. It's a sad day after 13 years of fiercely independent journalism, with a murky outlook for the future. So to recognize the achievements of the various sites under the Gawker umbrella, we rounded up 10 of the network's best stories. If this truly is the end of Gawker (and they're maintaining that it's not), this is the kind of excellent writing—from high-profile investigations to thoughtful essays—that will no longer have a home.
Uncovering The iPhone 4
In April 2010, an Apple employee left a prototype of the iPhone 4 at a bar in Redwood City; a good samaritan attempted to return the phone, only to get caught in a neverending purgatory of call transfers. Enter Gizmodo, who bought the prototype for $5,000—then took it apart and reported everything they could figure out about it. Apple was furious; phone fans, not so much. And that, friends, is how you piss off a multi-billion-dollar company.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesCrowdsourcing Funds For the Rob Ford Crack Video
Rob Ford, the late former mayor of Toronto, was already a public embarrassment by early 2013. Then Gawker decided to crowd-fund $200,000 on Kickstarter in order to purchase a video of the mayor smoking crack cocaine. A little Sid Hudgens in L.A. Confidential? Sure. Successful? Absolutely.
Richard Lautens/Toronto Star/Getty Images
Revealing Manti Te'o's Girlfriend as a Hoax
The apex of Catfishing came courtesy of this Deadspin story, which revealed that the deceased girlfriend of Notre Dame linebacker and Heisman Trophy runner-up Manti Te'o did not exist. No Nev Schulman, no problem.
J. Meric/Getty ImagesSpeaking Out On Videogame Blackballing
Videogame journalism often depends on access to developers and publishers; those same developers and publishers, though, don't often take kindly to losing control of the narrative. So when Bethesda, the video game studio that publishes Fallout and Elder Scrolls, stonewalled Kotaku in order to prevent them from publishing unfavorable articles, site editor Stephen Totilo took them to task—and rightfully so.
Bethesda
Doxing The Internet's Most Infamous Troll
Michael Brutsch, known on Reddit as Violentacrez, was the most infamous troll on the internet. Adrian Chen tracked down Brutsch for this profile, and started a contentious conversation about anonymity online that continues to this day.
Getty ImagesObtaining The Greg Hardy Documents
Deadspin's Diana Moskovitz obtained previously unreleased court documents that showed disturbing evidence of pro football player Greg Hardy assaulting his ex-girlfriend. It was a powerful investigation into why the NFL seems to care about punishing violent criminals only when irrefutable visual evidence goes public.
Jeff Siner/Charlotte Observer/TNS/Getty Images
Introducing Readers To Silk Road
In 2011, Gawker published the first big expose of online drug marketplace Silk Road, which came crashing down two years later. A follow-up the next year on offshoot weapons store The Armory was equally enthralling.
Dwight Eschliman/Getty ImagesFinding Lena Dunham's Unretouched Vogue Photos
As part of a much larger campaign to highlight digitally altered images of women, Jezebel offered $10,000 for unretouched Annie Leibovitz photos of Lena Dunham from Vogue. They got them within two hours.
Alo Ceballos/GC Images/Getty Images
Exposing BuzzFeed's "Advertiser-Friendly" Approach
The most inside-baseball part of Gawker is its coverage of other publications, which can at times feel navel-gazy to anyone outside the industry. But the TKTK blog (seriously, that's its name) has done vital work examining the Fourth Estate, as evidenced by its coverage of BuzzFeed removing articles that were critical of advertisers like Dove.
BuzzFeedDefending Smarm
Tom Scocca's response to BuzzFeed Books Editor Isaac Fitzgerald's mission statement that his new section wouldn't publish negative reviews is a glorious reminder of why constant positive reinforcement actually does more harm than good.
Jorg Greuel/Getty Images
