The post Gawker to shut down after almost 14 years appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
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“After almost fourteen years of operation, Gawker.com will be shutting down next week”.
Gawker founder Nick Denton broke the news to staff members on the same day that a bankruptcy court judge in Manhattan approved the Univision deal. It hasn’t finalized plans for what will happen to its archives, but its employees will be transferred to positions within Gawker Media or Univision’s other properties. “We have not been able to find a single media company or investor willing also to take on Gawker.com”, he wrote. “The campaign being mounted against its editorial ethos and former writers has made it too risky”.
After this incident, Peter Thiel spend millions on funding third party lawsuits against the company.
Gawker Media founder Nick Denton arrives in a courtroom in St. Petersburg, Fla., on March 16.
Gawker is going to shut down.
US Hispanic broadcaster Univision Communications (UC) is to acquire the digital media assets of Gawker Media for US$135m.
A bankruptcy court in NY, which has to approve any deals for Gawker’s assets, will consider Univision’s bid at a hearing scheduled for Thursday afternoon. It waded into stories no one else would touch and broke big news. “But Gawker proper was really the only one of the sites without a strong endemic ad proposition”.
Hogan sued Gawker after it posted a video of the entertainer having sex with the then-wife of his former friend, Bubba the Love Sponge Clem.
The cost of the lawsuit was partly funded by Peter Thiel whom Gawker had outed back in 2007.
Univision is mostly known in the U.S. as the nation’s largest Spanish-language media business.
“I think in a lot of ways Gawker has helped to define the voice of the internet”, said Josh Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, who said he’s been a daily reader “as long as there’s been a Gawker“.
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Univision’s asset purchase agreement for the deal, filed Wednesday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of NY in Manhattan, gave the acquirer the option to exclude Gawker.com up to three days before closing of the deal.
