Gawker Media said Monday that two of its top editors are resigning after a dispute with its owner regarding a controversial story that was removed from the site last week.
Tommy Craggs, executive editor of Gawker Media, and Max Read, editor-in-chief of Gawker.com, informed the staff of the decision in a letter. They edited and approved a story last week reporting that David Geithner, CFO of magazine company Condé Nast, had solicited sex from a gay porn actor, according to USA Today. Geithner, who is married to a woman and a father of three, is also the brother of Timothy Geithner, who served as Secretary of the Treasury from 2009 to 2013.
Craggs and Read both expressed frustration with Gawker Media's managing partners, who voted last week 4-2 to remove the story from the site. In their resignation letters, they called the decision to pull the post an unacceptable violation of the divide between Gawker's business and editorial operations.
"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, WIRED reports. Condé Nast is the parent company of WIRED.
Gawker founder and CEO Nick Denton voted to remove the post in response to the outrage that the article sparked across the internet, according to The New York Times.
"For the first time that I can remember, I cannot stand by a story, or just agree to disagree, or keep silent," Denton wrote to his staff on Monday.
"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.
Gawker is no stranger when it comes to controversy. The company faces a $100 million lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan, claiming that the site violated his privacy by posting excerpts from a videotape of him having sex with a woman who was then the wife of a friend of Hogan's, a shock jock called Bubba The Love Sponge.
