Gawker.com, a almost 14-year-old blog being shut down following the sale of its parent company to Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, will mark its last post Monday.
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Gawker.com, the flagship site of Gawker Media, will cease publication next week, according to a statement by Gawker Media founder Nick Denton delivered to staff on Thursday and reported by the site.
Earlier this year, Hulk Hogan sued Gawker Media into bankruptcy for releasing clips from a sex tape in which he could be seen in bed with the wife of his friend, radio host Bubba the Love Sponge.
As you may have heard-and as we here at The A.V. Club know very well, considering we were one of them-Latin American media company Univision has been on a mission to increase its English-language presence by buying up various English-language media outlets. “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.
The cost of the lawsuit was partly funded by Peter Thiel whom Gawker had outed back in 2007. UCI will not be operating the Gawker.com site.
Hulk Hogan took to Twitter after finding out about the news.
Federal bankruptcy judge Stuart Bernstein said on Thursday he’ll approve the sale, under which 95 per cent of Gawker Media employees will get job offers at Univision.
However, Gawker’s coverage also included some major scoops, including its reporting on Rob Ford’s crack cocaine use, Hillary Clinton’s private email servers and its scoop on the iPhone 4, which Gawker site Gizmodo acquired from a source two months before Apple was ready to unveil the device. “The campaign being mounted against its editorial ethos and former writers has made it too risky”.
Thiel then reportedly financed Hogan’s invasion of privacy lawsuit against Gawker, which Hogan won in court.
Other Gawker Media blogs may live on.
Univision hopes to integrate Gawker Media’s other sites with Fusion, its millennial-focused pop culture and news site as well as its other Internet holdings such as The Root and The Onion, for which it holds a minority stake.
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The case gained additional notoriety when it was revealed that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel had secretly bankrolled Hogan’s lawsuit.
