Univision won an auction earlier this week for Gawker Media and will retain the digital media conglomerate’s other assets while shutting down operations for the namesake website.
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USA internet publisher Gawker Media Group said it will shut down Gawker.com next week, ending the online news and gossip website’s 14-year run. Univision essentially rescued the company from the gutter, giving other websites under the Gawker Media banner a second chance.
Denton filed for bankruptcy earlier this month after a prolonged legal battle against former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, whose case was funded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel. “I can understand the caution”, he continued.
Gawker.com’s archives will still be available, Denton said in a memo to employees.
When the two bidders for Gawker’s assets, Ziff Davis and Univision presented their offers to purchase the company, both said they would likely cease Gawker.com because it was “toxic”.
The sale to Univision, if approved, would give the company websites that “are aimed at millennial readers”, NPR’s Nate Rott notes.
The sale became necessary after a $140-million judgment against the publication and Denton for posting a sex tape of WWE legend Hulk Hogan. “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. (UCI) today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire digital media assets as part of the bankruptcy proceedings of Gawker Media Group, Inc. and related companies that produce content under a series of original brands that reach almost 50 million readers per month, according to comScore.
Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel bankrolled Hogan’s lawsuit; now-defunct Gawker site Valleywag outed Thiel in 2007.
In a New York Times opinion column published this week, Thiel said, “I am proud to have contributed financial support to his case”, adding that it’s “ridiculous to claim that journalism requires indiscriminate access to private people’s sex lives”.
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Next week Gawker officially comes to an end. German-born Thiel was a founder of the online payments firm PayPal, and served as its chief executive before it was sold to eBay.
