Gawker Names Dan Peres as Editor in Chief, Hoping to Breathe Life Back Into Site

Visits: 42

Gawker’s parent company, Bustle Digital Group, has named the journalist Dan Peres as the editor in chief of Gawker.com, the latest move in its bid to revive the dormant website brought down by a high-profile legal battle.

Bustle and its chief executive, Bryan Goldberg, acquired the Gawker.com domain in July after an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit brought by the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan and bankrolled by the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel left Gawker Media bankrupt in 2016.

Gawker.com, the boundary-pushing news and commentary website, shut down that year, and the website appears to have been preserved in amber since then, with its farewell article still at the top of the page.

Mr. Peres, who was editor in chief of the Condé Nast’s men’s fashion magazine Details for 15 years, will lead the effort to revive the website. It is expected to relaunch later this year.

In a phone interview, Mr. Peres, 47, emphasized that the site would not be “Gawker 2.0,” touching on the old website’s reputation for a brash writing style and a willingness to publish information that more traditional news organizations shied away from.

“In the later years they probably took things too far,” Mr. Peres said. “There was a lot of gratuitous meanness and sort of misguided decision-making.”

He added, “There’s an opportunity to draw on the great things that they did and dismiss some of the not-great things that they did.”

The Gawker reboot has faced trouble from its start. In January, its only two full-time writers, Anna Breslaw and Maya Kosoff, left the company within three weeks of joining because they objected to the behavior of Gawker’s newly appointed editorial director, Carson Griffith.

They said at the time that Ms. Griffith had “disregarded the need for diversity on staff” and that they had gone to the human resources department about her troubling behavior. The writers told The Daily Beast that Ms. Griffith had made a series of inappropriate comments, including remarks involving black writers and the gender identity of a potential hire.

Mr. Goldberg said in an interview that the company had hired a law firm to investigate the claims and that its review had “cleared” Ms. Griffith. Mr. Goldberg confirmed that Ms. Griffith would stay on under Mr. Peres.

“I am deeply saddened about the allegations that were brought forth by two former staff members,” Ms. Griffith said Thursday. “With the conclusion of a rigorous and in-depth third-party investigation, I look forward to rolling up my sleeves and getting down to work with our new editor in chief, Dan Peres, who I very much admire.”

In 2004, a satirical article in Details titled “Gay or Asian” drew outrage. Mr. Peres apologized at the time, admitting that the story had crossed a line, and stayed on as editor until 2015.

“I regretted it at the time and I regret it still,” Mr. Peres said Thursday. “I remain deeply apologetic. It was tone deaf, juvenile, and offensive.”

Mr. Goldberg said he believed that Mr. Peres, who has a memoir coming out about his career in media and overcoming an addiction to opiates, was a talented editor who would not be daunted by the spotlight that Gawker’s relaunch would inevitably bring.

Founded in the early 2000s as one of Gawker Media’s first two blogs, Gawker.com initially covered news and gossip about New York City media and society.

But Gawker Media’s legal battle against Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, starved the company of cash and resulted in its selling itself to Univision. Gawker eventually settled for $31 million.

Bustle, a publisher that caters primarily to millennial women, also acquired the website Mic last year, which laid off almost all of its employees before the sale.

Tom Scocca, an editor who was with Gawker Media for over six years and now runs the blog Hmm Daily, said in an interview that the many journalists who had left Gawker.com did not expect the relaunch to feel like the old site with its “tabloid sensibility.”

“I don’t know of anyone who’s counting on it resembling Gawker in any meaningful way,” he said.

Source