And that's surely in the spirit of the transparency Gawker was founded to promote.
If there is a lasting legacy from this experience, it should be a new awareness of the danger of dark money in litigation finance.
#GAWKER DEALS TRIAL#
"It's a shame the Hogan trial took place without the motives of the plaintiff's backer being known. Perhaps that is the lasting legacy of this whole sad debacle. Cook, according to two people briefed on the email, was surprised to learn that his company was making a show about Gawker, which had humiliated the company at various times and famously outed. It costs too much."įor Thiel, an investor in Facebook and Palantir, the Hogan case probably cost him less than 1% of his net worth to fund, Denton estimated. As he told the National Press Club: "If you're middle-class, if you're upper-middle class, if you're a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system. Thus Thiel hit them where he could, in the pocketbook, bankrolling court cases from the shadows because, in his esteem, Hogan was too poor to prevail in the court system alone. The billionaire appointed himself a First Amendment gatekeeper: At a National Press Club Q&A on Monday, Thiel told reporters that Gawker's employees were not journalists and didn't deserve Constitutionally-bound right of freedom of the press.Įxcept, they do, because the law of the land says so. But the specter of Thiel's then-secret machinations to bring down a media company that crossed him remain. All the writers involved, including him, can move on. So the saga is over, as Denton wrote in his post. Shed of the Gawker site and name, the newly-branded Gizmodo network (including Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku, Lifehacker and Deadspin) can forge ahead under ownership by Univision. Daulerio, who was also named a defendant in the case, will be able to proceed. Instead of extending the litigation, Hogan will retire comfortably and the article's writer A.J. Denton was convinced that Thiel would continue dragging the fight out and even likely fund other cases if the media company won its appeal, as the billionaire said he would do in a New York Times op ed.īut the other big reason to settle the four-year case: Everyone needs to move on. The tech billionaire had bankrolled Harder to take on Hogan's case, spending his own money to avenge Gawker's outing him as gay in 2007. Ostensibly comic capers billed as 'cozy crime,' these books flatter the worst sort of person. Thats how Elizabeth Spiers, a former New York magazine reporter and founding editor of infamous celebrity-gossip blog Gawker, describes her new, satirical. They didn't pursue the appeals process due to the large financial elephant in the room: Peter Thiel. The ‘Thursday Murder Club' Books Are Criminally Bad. In addition to the financial payouts, the settlement requires Gawker to take down all three posts, which Denton called "the most unpalatable part of the deal."
#GAWKER DEALS UPDATE#
Update your settings here, then reload the page to see it. While her organization wasn’t involved in the Gawker deal, Horowitz was nonetheless encouraged to find protections for freelancers built into the contract.This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. “I think Gawker and places that have been unionized by the Writers Guild are forging important and new ground showing that you can unionize these new types of media outlets,” says Sara Horowitz, executive director of the Freelancers Union. Increasingly, the result of this tension is litigation. Often, startups come up with innovative new ways to distribute tasks and serve customers more quickly than these labor-related questions can be answered.
#GAWKER DEALS HOW TO#
“It’s not just whatever you can get away with, which is unfortunately what a fair amount of the freelance economy looks like.”Īs more and more of the workforce goes freelance, questions about how to fairly compensate workers continue to loom. “We recognize that the post-World War II employment relationship isn’t what everybody expects anymore, but there have to be some basic standards,” says Lowell Peterson, executive director of the Writers Guild of America, East.
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