How Silicon Valley brought down Gawker

This week, the salacious and often-maligned Gawker.com permanently went dark. Bankrupted by a huge civil judgment against it, the journalism blog disappeared into the ether, its content relegated to history… and no longer current events. Now, you can debate all day long whether Gawker was actually journalism. It did provide news. But some of that news violated copyright laws, or was gotten in a suspect manner. Whatever you think of Gawker though, the formula for its demise raises questions about whether wealth and power trumps first amendment rights.