Reddit CEO Yishan Wong Confirms They Will Not Ban Distasteful Content, Defends Freedom Of Speech

Earlier this month, we wrote about how Gawker.com revealed the identity of a Reddit user name Michael Brutsch (username: Violentacrez) that used the social bookmarking website to post extremely inappropriate content.  Mr. Brutsch (pictured below) defended himself and claimed freedom of speech.  Reddit CEO Yishan Wong said that the company will not be banning “distasteful” content and he condemned Reddit moderators for their widespread ban of Gawker links.

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Bain Wanted To Invest In Gawker Until Hearing About The Document Leak

Gawker.com published almost 1,000 pages of Bain Capital’s confidential financial records including audits that reveals that Bain employed a potentially illegal tax dodge that is currently under investigation by the New York attorney general.  Bain Capital e-mailed Gawker, but it turns out that it was not about the confidential financial records.  Bain actually had an interest in exploring an investment opportunity in Gawker Media.

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Gawker Paid $12,000 For Brett Favre’s Pictures Sent To Jenn Sterger

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton revealed how much that he paid for pictures that NFL Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre sent to Jenn Sterger: $12,000. “I love paying for information,” stated Denton at the Business Insider Ignition conference last week. Deadspin’s traffic increased by millions. The blog post with the pictures have close to 5 million hits so far. [BusinessInsider]

Gawker Pulls Down Excerpts Of Leaked Sarah Palin Book After Take-Down Notice

Gawker.com has taken down leaked excerpts from Sarah Palin’s unreleased and upcoming book “America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag” from their website after being hit by a lawsuit by HarperCollins. The injunction prohibits Gawker from “continuing to distribute, publish or otherwise transmit pages from the book.” There is a hearing expected on November 30th as well. The blog post that had the leaked excerpt now leads to a 404 error message. [AllThingsD]

AT&T Confirms iPad Security Breach, FBI Asks Gawker To Retain Documents

AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) admitted this past week that there was a security hole in their website which leaked customer email addresses. Goatse Security claimed that they were responsible for the intrusion. Goatse said that they exploited an opening in AT&T’s website for finding numbers that identify iPads that are connected to their service.
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Nick Denton Says Leaking New iPhone Details On Gizmodo Did Not Make Extra Profit

A story written by Gizmodo editors Jason Chen and Jesus Diaz about the new iPhone has hit about 8 million views, 9,000+ diggs, 35,000+ retweets, etc. You figure Gizmodo brought in a lot of extra money for parent company Gawker Media and the company founder Nick Denton. However Denton admitted that breaking the news about the new iPhone did not make him any extra money. To buy the iPhone from the thief, Gawker paid $5,000. On top of that there was $7,000 in extra bandwidth for the servers. Chen and Diaz will most likely be paid for traffic bonuses too. And lastly are “whatever legal bills we end up paying,” said Denton. [DailyFinance]

CBS Hires Richard Lawson From Gawker

Its not every day that you see a traditional media company poach from a new media company, but this is exactly what happened when CBS hired Richard Lawson from Gawker Media.

Lawson will be writing for TV.com in a role that is similar to what he already has been doing for Gawker: writing what is happening on famous TV shows.

Lawson will be writing fewer posts per day and do actual reviews.  Lawson has supposedly been generating 2.4 million pageviews per month for Gawker, more than any of Gawkers’ others writers.

[via BusinessInsider]