Rieder: Life after Ailes, Arianna, Nick Denton

I first met Arianna Huffington about seven years ago, when The Huffington Post was sounding me out about a job. Rather than talk at the HuffPo offices, I was to meet her in the lobby of the hip Hotel Mercer in New York's SoHo neighborhood, where she was holding court.

As I sat down, Huffington promptly informed me that I was way overqualified for the job, but she had enjoyed my columns in American Journalism Review and wanted to meet me anyway.

We had a delightful conversation, interrupted frequently by supplicants who stopped by our table to pay their respects to Arianna. One of the people she introduced me to was Nick Denton, founder of the Gawker Media empire.

I found myself thinking of that morning with the news last Thursday that Huffington, after 11 years running the groundbreaking  website that she founded and which carries her name, was moving on. The news came just before Gawker Media, bankrupted by Hulk Hogan, was to be auctioned off to new owners.

Arianna Huffington to leave Huffington Post for wellness startup

Those are major milestones for two very different and very distinctive digital news operations so strongly shaped by the personalities of their founders. The developments come not long after Roger Ailes, the founder and CEO of Fox News, ingloriously left the company he had built in the wake of a sexual harassment lawsuit.

Earlier this year, the co-founder of another significant media voice, Jim VandeHei, left Politico to set up a new, very hush-hush media venture.

That's a lot of changing of the guard.

The Huffington Post, launched in 2005, is one of the more important digital news outlets. At the outset, it stressed curation (read: other people's stories) and the free contributions of many bloggers. It also was conceived as a liberal counterweight to the Drudge Report, the influential right-tilting site that preceded it by a decade.

But over the years the site, to its credit, invested in original reporting, winning a Pulitzer in 2012 for veteran military correspondent David Wood's 10-part series on the lives of wounded veterans and their families.

Huffington proved to be, among other things, an effective and tireless evangelist for her baby. She stayed on after HuffPo was sold to AOL in 2011 and when AOL was acquired by Verizon last year. But when Verizon acquired Yahoo News and other Yahoo digital properties earlier this year, greatly expanding the size of its news operation, it was time for Huffington to move on. She will devote her substantial energy to her latest pet project, Thrive Global, whose ambitious goal is to reduce stress and burnout.

Denton's digital realm, which includes the main Gawker.com gossip site and other sites focusing on everything from sports to cars, is a very different animal. I confess to never having been a fan. While Gawker often raised snark to a high. art, it too often was vicious and cruel. At the same time, it certainly launched the careers of many talented young journalists.

Twelve years after the blog's launch, Denton seemed to at last get religion last year when he repudiated and took down a story that never should have been published, about a little-known media company executive soliciting sex from a male porn actor.

In explaining his action, Denton wrote, "the media environment has changed, our readers have changed, and I have changed," adding, ""I believe this public mood reflects a growing recognition that we all have secrets, and they are not all equally worthy of exposure." True that.

Rieder: Gawker chief unlikely champion of media ethics

Denton was brought down by a sex tape, specifically one of former wrestler and reality TV figure Hulk Hogan having sex with a friend's wife. A Florida jury's $140.1 million damage award against Gawker for airing the tape was more than the company and Denton could handle, and both filed for bankruptcy protection. Denton had no choice but to unload his properties.

Gawker files bankruptcy after Hogan lawsuit as Ziff Davis shows interest

An unsettling part of the saga was the disclosure that Hogan's legal battle was financed by Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and an early Facebook investor, who was livid that Gawker's Valleywag blog had published an article in 2007 called,  “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.”

There's no doubt the notion that a deep-pocketed person with a grudge, no matter how understandable, being able to put a publisher out of business, even one less than admirable, is alarming. At the same time, the game Denton and Gawker played was a dangerous one -- also one with little redeeming social value -- and dangerous games have consequences. It will be interesting to see what the Gawker properties look like under new leadership.

Wolff: Choosing sides in Thiel v. Gawker

Speaking of new leadership, one of the biggest stories in the media world is what happens next at Fox News. Just as The Huffington Post and Gawker Media reflected their founders, Fox News was entirely a creature of Roger Ailes, an absolute monarch who built the network into a stunning ratings success, profit center and political force.

Rieder: Fox should come clean about Ailes scandal

Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson's sexual harassment lawsuit not only brought down the boss in record time, it has brought forth a torrent of new allegations against Ailes of both harassment and black ops, suggesting a culture at the conservative-oriented network desperately in need of reform.

While Rupert Murdoch's sons James and Lachlan had much ballyhooed issues with Ailes, I never thought it likely there'd be much enthusiasm for tinkering a great deal with a formula that brings in so much money (although it would be great to see a Fox with less enthusiasm for nasty nonsense like the birther business). But a fresh start culture-wise seems like a really smart idea.

Last Friday's announcement that Ailes lieutenants were moving into top leadership roles doesn't seem like a hopeful sign.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rem Rieder on Twitter @remrieder

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