The problem is that any media outlet, if they've been around long enough, has probably published something you could convince a jury was slanderous or libelous or defamatory or whatever. So the precedent I think OP is concerned about is: if you're a rich person and you don't like something a media outlet writes about you or your startup or your pet issue of the week or whatever, it's now been proven effective for you to troll through that publisher's history in search of something juicy to pay someone to sue over, and use it to take that entire company out of the water, forever, even if the thing you're suing over has nothing to do with the thing you found objectionable in the first place, which may be perfectly journalistically legitimate and legal.
Or, concretely: who's going to want to write anything nasty about Peter Thiel or his interests now, since he's proven a willingness to go to great lengths to find dirt to kill companies?
gawker played themselves.
> who's going to want to write anything nasty about Peter Thiel
you can write nasty things about Thiel but remember rule #1: don't play yourself.
[1] http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people
That's not happening here.
Not advocating anything here really. Just pointing out that the "first amendment only applies to government actions" argument isn't valid in this case.
that if you say something, you stand by the consequences, financial and all?
that people take responsibility for what they say is not a new development.
new journals are free to start up and take the place of gawker. nothing here stops them from doing so.