Bleeding edge in every way

"Gawker eventually became like Lennie from Of Mice and Men, where it didn't understand its own power," [Cord] Jefferson says. "It started out as this little blog published out of Nick Denton's living room. Everything he was doing was punching up because nobody had ever heard of it or him. By the time I got there, it was a powerful entity that could rattle and affect lives. But people continued to write as if they were still in a living room when they should have started thinking, 'The story's true, but is it a story we should be sharing?'"

The Hollywood Reporter on Gawker's legacy. I was an avid reader at the time but the site left a trail of bodies, most of them staff. Ben Smith's Traffic locates the site in the zeitgeist; Ryan Holiday's Conspiracy reconstructs it from the wreckage.