Hamilton, a recovering addict, was claiming to be sober but had gotten drunk at a bar during spring training that year – news that Deadspin broke, replete with embarrassing photos. “If I’m being candid, for a long time, I wasn’t super fond of it,” former Deadspin editor Tim Marchman said of the Hamilton story, which was published before he worked at the site. Josh Hamilton during the Home Run Derby in 2008. In retrospect, some of Deadspin’s biggest early stories – on baseball player Josh Hamilton’s alcohol relapse and quarterback Brett Favre’s sexual harassment – are remembered by editors as missteps. “The fun of Deadspin’s evolution was figuring out all the ways we could not be ESPN.” That meant the site took chances others weren’t willing to take, for better and for worse. “We were consciously fashioning an alternative to ESPN,” said Craggs. “I liked the idea of doing a site that really tried to connect the people who worked in the world of sports – whether they were a player, the media, whatever – and the people who pay for all of this,” Leitch said.Īs Leitch passed the torch to Daulerio in 2008 and Tommy Craggs came on board in 2009, an anti-establishment ethos reigned. In turn, that created a dynamic almost unfathomable today: users who would go online and actually type in the site’s URL, sometimes multiple times a day, to see what had been posted. In a modern society where every aspect of life is branded as a “community” – your apartment complex, your exercise bike, your workplace – that give-and-take allowed Deadspin to create an actual, organic community of fierce and loyal readers and commenters. “There were a bunch of journalists who wanted to write things and couldn’t, so they would send them to me.” “That’s how I got a bunch of scoops early on,” he said. As for the programming, Leitch was fortunate to have two big and growing sources at his disposal: a growing commenter community and peers in other newsrooms who had stories their bosses wouldn’t let them print. His editorial vision mirrored that of TV, with time slots allocated each day for different types of content. Leitch took the reins in the late summer of 2005 – a time before Twitter but when a new wave of prestige television was rising on HBO and other cable networks. “‘Just kind of do whatever you want, it’s all yours.’” “Finally, they came to me and said, ‘Fine, you’re cheap,’” Leitch said. Gawker was interested, but because Leitch was a no-name at the time, Gawker offered the gig to several other candidates. While Leitch declined, he also wrote up a proposal for a sports site based on the Hollywood site Defamer. That landed Leitch an offer from Gawker head Nick Denton to run a gambling-oriented site. Gawker founder Nick Denton said in a statement that Ziff Davis' e-commerce, licensing and video assets would be a good fit with Gawker's websites, which include tech site Gizmodo, sports site Deadpsin, video-game site Kotaku, celebrity and women-focused site Jezebel, news and gossip site Gawker, car-site Jalopnik and self-help site Lifehacker.Leitch was covering the financial services industry (“poorly”, he says) in New York when he started a site called The Black Table with Eric Gillin (now the chief budget officer at Condé Nast), Aileen Gallagher (now a journalism professor at Syracuse University) and AJ Daulerio. In the filing, Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, was listed as Gawker's biggest creditor. Another Gawker site, Valleywag, ran a number of stories skewering Facebook, which provided a big chunk of Thiel's estimated $2.7 billion fortune.Ī spokesman for Thiel said he had no comment on Friday. Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, has been a frequent target of Gawker writers, who have written unflattering pieces about Thiel's political beliefs and utopian goals. It was later revealed that billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel had been secretly funding Hogan's lawsuit. Hogan was awarded $115 million in compensatory damages plus an added $25.1 million in punitive damages. Hogan sued Gawker after it posted a video of him having sex with a friend's wife. The New York company said in the filing that it has as much as $500 million in debt and up to $100 million in assets. The sale will be conducted through bankruptcy court so other bidders could emerge. Gawker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, about three months after Hogan won a lawsuit against the online gossip and news publisher. The company says it plans to sell itself to publishing company Ziff Davis. NEW YORK - Gawker is filing for bankruptcy protection and will sell itself rather than pay $140 million to pro wrestler Hulk Hogan.
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