Gawker’s shake-up, as we would hope, was much more Gawker-like, and we have to wonder whether that Gawker era-separate the print from the chaff, and publish both-is indeed coming to an end. Those were the pieces that got the most clicks." "As for the health of long-form journalism, well, the pieces that often did the best online were the deeply reported, carefully edited and fact-checked, and beautifully written. Don't believe them," wrote Julia Ioffe, one of the resigning senior editors, in a Facebook post. "The narrative you're going to see Chris and Guy put out there is that I and the rest of my colleagues who quit today were dinosaurs, who think that the Internet is scary and that Buzzfeed is a slur. They noted the arriviste they saw in owner Chris Hughes, a Facebook-made multimillionaire, and took their leave, defending their work but refraining from a full-frontal jugular assault. Remember when much of The New Republic’s editorial staff walked out on their newish owner, last year? They were pissed, but so relatively genteel about it. Those are words we don’t often hear in America. "That this post was deleted at all is an absolute surrender of Gawker’s claim to 'radical transparency' that non-editorial business executives were given a vote in the decision to remove it is an unacceptable and unprecedented breach of the editorial firewall, and turns Gawker’s claim to be the world’s largest independent media company into, essentially, a joke," Gawker editor-in-chief Max Read, who also left after the post was pulled, wrote in his own note. He castigated Gawker owner Nick Denton’s removal of the controversial (and misguided) story about a media executive and a male escort, writing in a memo to his staff, "The message was immediately broadcast to the company and to its readers that the responsibility Nick had vested in the executive editor is in fact meaningless, that true power over editorial resides in the whims of the four cringing members of the managing partnership’s Fear and Money Caucus.” (Capital: “ Gawker editors Tommy Craggs and Max Read resign”). On Monday, Gawker executive editor Tommy Craggs channeled the full fury of a journalist scorned as he quit. In so doing, the almost anachronistic site both exposes a raw nerve of journalist-publisher relationships, and renews old questions about who in the press can really be trusted. Dodging for now the death threat that comes from Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit, Gawker freakishly made new serial news in midsummer. It’s the awful story that keeps on giving.
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