Twitter is abuzz with reactions to a tell-all posted anonymously today by a man claiming to have had a one-night stand with Christine O'Donnell three years ago. 
 
 In one of the most-retweeted reactions, journalist Dave Weigel called the account the "sleaziest... story in memory." 
 
 Blogger Meghan McCain took particular umbrage in a series of posts: 
 
 Wow gawker, just wow. This is the exact reason why women don't want to run for office in this country. Posting that is vile and disgusting. 
 
 I am no fan of O'Donnell but what gawker has done is disgusting and vile and once again not showcasing the real issues in this election. 
 
 anybody that says there isn't a double standard for how the media treats women versus men running for office isn't living in reality. 
 
 Over at The Upshot, Michael Calderone spoke with Gawker editor Remy Stern, who defended the piece as "a great story" that had "nothing to do with her being a woman." 
 
 Check below for more Twitter reactions! ||||| Gawker was convicted Thursday in the court of Twitter opinion. The charges: misogyny and reckless link-baiting. 
 
 "Today, we are all Christine O'Donnell," wrote Salon's Justin Elliott. 
 
 He was one of several journalists and bloggers to criticize Gawker for posting an anonymous account by a Philadelphia man claiming to have gone home with Delaware Senate candidate on Halloween night three years ago, following a night of drinking. 
 
 But editor Remy Stern told The Upshot that Gawker ran the item because it's "a great story" and pushed back against the misogyny charge, arguing that the alleged incident was worth noting because O'Donnell's private actions -- according to the anonymous writer -- run counter to her public persona as an advocate of Christian conservative values. 
 
 "If it was any politician whose private life diverged from his public life in such an interesting way, we'd be interested in that," Stern said. "It had nothing to do with her being a woman." 
 
 Despite the sensational headline -- "I Had a One-Night Stand With Christine O'Donnell" -- the two never actually had sex. However, the anonymous writer describes O'Donnell's anatomy in detail, which led to some of the backlash. 
 
 "Hey Gawker, I hope a one-day SEO term victory is worth the sleaziest piece of s--- story in memory," wrote Slate's Dave Weigel. "Regardless, that vile anonymous dudebro is an awful person and an awful writer to boot," wrote Mediagazer's Megan McCarthy. "Why protect his identity? (Oh, yeah, pageviews.)" And Mother Jones magazine simply responded with a new tag: #GawkerFail. 
 
 Gawker Media sites have been known to pay to get exclusives, such as Gizmodo's scoop on Apple's new iPhone and Deadspin getting a hold of NFL star Brett Favre's voice mail messages to a sideline reporter and (alleged) photographs of his genitalia. Stern said Gawker paid in the "low four figures" for the O'Donnell story, but also did its due diligence in checking the accuracy of the man's claims. 
 
 Stern said that the man approached Gawker about 10 days ago. He had shopped it elsewhere but wanted it to be told correctly, and Gawker allowed him to do it first-person. 
 
 "From an editorial standpoint, it was compelling to hear it from his own words," Stern said, adding that "it's a good story and that's why we did it." 
 
 Gawker Media chief Nick Denton, in a staff memo, described the O'Donnell post as "an example of brilliant packaging," with a good composite image on the front and compelling writing. 
 
 "And this points to a general rule on the Web," Denton said. "Writers are successful to the extent that they can sublimate their egotism and get out of the way of the story." ||||| University of Maine professor Michael J. Socolow has written a piece for The Washington Post today, titled “Gawker has been gone for a year. We’ve never needed it more than now.” Here’s a sample of his case for Gawker as a martyred savior of internet journalism: 
 
 Gawker is mostly defined as a guilty pleasure, an exercise in prurience by bored Web surfers and their millennial progeny. Yet its impact on American media remains undeniable. It launched the careers of an excellent set of young journalists, and it demonstrated a rare independence from corporate pressure, celebrity handlers and political operatives… But to place Gawker only in the context of the Web era is to miss its historical significance. Like PM (New York’s experimental newspaper in the 1940s), or the Berkeley Barb and other alternative press outlets in the 1960s, Gawker began as a crusade to save journalism. Like its alternative predecessors, Gawker challenged the processed wire copy and objective norms of standardized news content with pieces that could be opinionated, sensationalistic, and occasionally bizarre. 
 
 Socolow would perhaps have a different opinion of Gawker had he ever been a target of its writing, as so many were during its run. Gawker was a vile website dedicated to the destruction of human beings, especially those its founder, Nick Denton, disliked. It was particularly vile because of the randomness of its targets. Rather than focus on the rich and famous, it would routinely target and embarrass random people for no particular reason. 
 
 Do you remember when they doxed and outed a random executive, siding with his blackmailer, just for the clicks? Do you remember when they posted a video of a drunk college girl having sex in a bathroom, then dismissed her father’s heartfelt pleas to take it down? Do you remember when they interviewed Christine O’Donnell’s exes about how the sex was? Do you remember when their editor flippantly testified in open court that his threshold for not posting a sex tape was 4 years old? 
 
 Gawker was a site built to destroy lives. Its mission was to discover the worst moment in a person’s life, and then publicize it for profit. It was run by people who sought out life-destroying gossip about random citizens. It had no noble purpose – it was undone ultimately by a video of consensual sex with a former wrestling star, Hulk Hogan, that (whatever its moral questionability) was not some newsworthy event. (Shout-out to Peter Thiel for an excellent long game.) Gawker thrived on embarrassment and shame, seeking to demolish not just celebrities or politicians but average random people whose sins it would expose for traffic and commenters who gloried in its actions. 
 
 There’s something else to this WaPo oped defending Gawker after its well-earned legal demise: if you truly believe that Gawker’s approach was the salvation of journalism, a fulfillment of “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, then you accept a version of media that is ultimately heartless and cruel, hated by most of its readers even as it is beloved by the internet denizen who thrives on the destructive power of the mob. One of the reasons media is so despised today is that consumers do not trust the motives behind the stories they run. They believe media has become corrupted by its power and cannot be trusted to tell the truth, that they sensationalize and seek to destroy and attack random people who engage in wrongthink or wrong behavior. In this sense, Gawker wasn’t a monster – they were just ahead of the curve.
– Gawker has stirred up a furor by posting an anonymous guy's claim of a having a "one-night stand" (which involved the same bed, but no sex) with a drunk Christine O'Donnell a few years ago. On Twitter and all over blog land, the story about the story has now eclipsed the actual story (as evidenced by this summary). The Huffington Post's roundup of reaction includes Meghan McCain tweeting, "Wow gawker, just wow. This is the exact reason why women don't want to run for office in this country. Posting that is vile and disgusting." At Yahoo's Upshot blog, Michael Calderone talks to Gawker editor Remy Stern, who defends it as a "great story" and rejects the various charges of misogyny being leveled. "If it was any politician whose private life diverged from his public life in such an interesting way, we'd be interested in that. It had nothing to do with her being a woman." Calderone also quotes a tweet from Slate's Dave Weigel: "Hey Gawker, I hope a one-day SEO term victory is worth the sleaziest piece of s--- story in memory." Michelle Malkin, meanwhile, is calling out Gawker's advertisers over the "smear."