Online publishing company Gawker Media Group announced Thursday that its flagship digital property, Gawker.com, would shut down next week and end its almost 14-year run of broadcasting news and gossip.
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An announcement posted on the website said that Nick Denton, Gawker Media’s founder and outgoing CEO, told the company about the decision in a staff meeting Thursday.
Gawker.com, the brash NY website that broke new ground with its gossipy, no-holds-barred coverage of media, culture and politics, is shutting down after 14 years, brought low by an unhappy, but deep-pocketed, subject.
The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in June after a judge ordered it to pay $140 million for violating Hulk Hogan’s privacy by publishing a sex video.
Gawker, the best known part of Gawker Media, but apparently the least salvageable, will not be welcomed aboard the lifeboat that Univision has sent to the sinking company in the form of a $135 million bid for its assets.
Univision’s winning bid for Gawker Media was approved by a USA bankruptcy judge earlier on Thursday. “And despite his quest to shut down Gawker, he has donated a million dollars to the Committee to Protect Journalists”.
The New York Post reported earlier this week that the flagship site likely would cease operations because neither of the two bidders, including Ziff Davis, wanted to take possession of the “toxic” asset. The company now publishes seven sites in addition to Gawker.com, including the feminist-focused Jezebel, the tech site Gizmodo and the sports site Deadspin.
Technically, Univision has until September to decide if it wants the Gawker namesake website, but as it was at the center of the lawsuits it would have been seen as damaged goods. “The campaign being mounted against its editorial ethos and former writers has made it too risky”.
No word yet on what the future holds for other Gawker Media run sites, like Jezebel, Deadspin, Gizmodo and Kotaku.
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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. Univision essentially rescued the company from the gutter, giving other websites under the Gawker Media banner a second chance. The verdict was the result of a lawsuit over Gawker’s publication of a sex tape featuring Hogan, but was funded by controversial Silicon Valley businessman Peter Thiel in retaliation to Gawker outing him as gay years earlier.
