Gawker Media resignations highlight struggle between journalism and PR
The organization’s executive editor and editor-in-chief left after a disagreement over a story. How will this affect reporting and native advertising in the future?
The two resigned following a meeting of Gawker Media’s managing partners to remove a story about a Condé Nast executive’s attempt to pay a gay porn star for sex. The partners voted to remove the story from the website in a 4-2 vote.
On Friday, Gawker Media’s editorial staff posted the following announcement:
Our union drive has expressed at every stage of the process that one of our core goals is to protect the editorial independence of Gawker Media sites from the influence of business-side concerns. Today’s unprecedented breach of the firewall, in which business executives deleted an editorial post over the objections of the entire executive editorial staff, demonstrated exactly why we seek greater protection. Our opinions on the post are not unanimous but we are united in objecting to editorial decisions being made by a majority of non-editorial managers. Disagreements about editorial judgment are matters to be resolved by editorial employees. We condemn the takedown in the strongest possible terms.
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