Top Gawker Editors Resign After Controversial Story Pulled

Gawker Media executive editor Tommy Craggs and Gawker site editor-in-chief Max Read called the decision to pull the post an unacceptable violation of the divide between Gawker's business and editorial operations.
Top Gawker Editors Resign After Controversial Story Pulled
Gawker

Two top Gawker editors have resigned today in the latest fallout from a controversial post the site pulled on Friday.

In their resignation letters, Gawker Media executive editor Tommy Craggs and Gawker site editor-in-chief Max Read called the decision to pull the post an unacceptable violation of the divide between Gawker's business and editorial operations.

Craggs and Read both expressed frustration with Gawker Media’s managing partners, who voted last week 4-2 to remove a post from the site that purportedly outed a top Condé Nast executive. (Condé Nast is WIRED's parent company.)

“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,” Read wrote. The editorial staff expressed similar concerns in a public statement Friday.

Gawker founder and CEO Nick Denton, who voted to remove the post, responded to the uproar from his editorial staff in a lengthy post today. "For the first time that I can remember, I cannot stand by a story, or just agree to disagree, or keep silent," Denton wrote.

"It was my responsibility to step in to save Gawker from itself, supported by the majority of the Managing Partners," he said. "This is a one-time intervention, I trust, which will prompt a debate about the editorial mission, and a restoration of editorial independence within more clearly defined bounds."