Not included in the Univision deal is 14-year-old Gawker.com or Denton, who had hoped the bankruptcy auction would keep the website alive.
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Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, told the site’s staff that it will shut down next week, according to a post on its website.
Denton said Tuesday that the sale to Univision means “our employees are protected and will continue their work under new ownership – disentangled from the legal campaign against the company”.
Hulk Hogan took to Twitter after finding out about the news.
Gawker.com was best known for its coverage of celebrity scandals. “Gawker was a great place to be a journalist”, one former staffer wrote on The New Yorker’s site in June, when Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy.
Univision essentially rescued the company from the gutter, giving other websites under the Gawker Media banner a second chance.
“I expect the addition of these digital-first media assets will help FMG exceed the demands of the young, cross-cultural influencers we serve”, Univision Communications Inc. chief news, entertainment and digital officer Isaac Lee said in a release.
One can debate Gawker’s merits during its 13 years in operation, but it its heyday, it covered gossip with a vengeance.
After this incident, Peter Thiel spend millions on funding third party lawsuits against the company.
Gawker.com will cease its activities next week after Univision’s purchased Gawker Media for $135 million in a government ordered auction.
Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jezebel, Jalopnik, Kotaku and Lifehacker also are under the Gawker Media umbrella, as well as other specialty sites, like io9.
But the reorientation of the site came too late for the company which, by then, was preparing for a trial in which Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea was suing for invasion of privacy over Gawker.com’s publication of video footage that depicted him having sex.
Univision is mostly known in the U.S. as the nation’s largest Spanish-language media business.
It was subsequently revealed that Bollea launched the lawsuit with financial backing from Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who pursued a vendetta against Gawker for revealing he was gay back in 2007.
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This is a developing story and will be updated.
