While its sister sites shuffled through owners and staff revolts over the past half-decade, Gawker was viewed as a poisoned asset — the result of both its late-in-life legal problems and its reputation in more staid quarters as a violator of journalistic norms. (I always liked Hamilton Nolan’s take: “Most journalism jobs exist on a continuum between audience and freedom. If you want a lot of people to pay attention to you, you work at a place where the individual writer’s voice is completely subsumed into the institutional voice. If you want complete freedom to write whatever the hell you want, you write on your personal Tumblr, where the whole world will ignore you. Gawker was one of the few places ever to exist that offered both a large, steady audience and almost complete freedom.”)2