“I am pleased that our employees are protected and will continue their work under new ownership – disentangled from the legal campaign against the company”, he said in a statement. Founded in 2002 by Nick Denton, a former journalist for The Financial Times, the site attracted young journalists who took on articles that traditional media organizations were sometimes reluctant to pursue.
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Denton earlier this month filed for personal bankruptcy protection in a bid to stop his assets from being seized because of the judgment.
But the blogs’ days as independent operations – answerable only to Denton and a few editors – will be over once the sale is finalized after the bankruptcy court approves it this week.
“Univision is bigger, richer, and more powerful than Gawker”, the BBC notes.
Univision will acquire all seven web sites run by Gawker, including its main site, sports site Deadspin, Jezebel, aimed at female readers, and Gizmodo for techies, according to Recode. Today, Gawker’s assets are worth $50 million to $100 million, with its liabilities possibly reaching $500 million, based on the company’s bankruptcy filing.
The purchase of Gawker Media is the latest acquisition in what has been a busy year for Univision, with 2016 seeing something of a spending spree for the company.
A year ago the company bought out Disney’s shares in Fusion, a television network aimed at a millennial, digitally engaged audience.
What a welcome testament to good taste that there were just two bids for the unwanted little tribe of peeping toms at Gawker Media – and not the 40 potential suitors that the company’s lawyer originally suggested could be interested in the disgraced digital publisher. They already owns Fusion Media group, which operates humor sites The Onion and The A.V. Club, as well as African-American news site The Root, and Hispanic-American entertainment site Flama.
It was later discovered that the lawsuit, and several others against Gawker, were funded by Peter Thiel, a powerful Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Thiel provided the support because he believed Gawker invaded his privacy when it revealed in a 2007 blog post that he is gay.
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Lastly, even if Univision wasn’t a good fit for Gawker, they’d sure as hell be a better fit than other bidder Ziff Davis, which owns PC Magazine, gaming website IGN, AskMen.com, and a whole bunch of other odds and ends, like speedtest.net.
