Gawker.com, the flagship blog in the Gawker Media network, said it would be ending its operations next week, days after the New York City-based blog network was purchased by Univision for $135 million in a bankruptcy auction.
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A Gawker report said that Nick Denton, Gawker’s founder, told staffers Thursday that Gawker.com was shutting down next week.
J.K. Trotter, a Gawker reporter, wrote in a statement the company’s outgoing CEO, Nick Denton, had told staffers the news on Thursday. These also include gadget blog Gizmodo, women’s website Jezebel, video game blog Kotaku and others, in addition to Gawker.com.
Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, filed an invasion of privacy suit against Gawker Media after the namesake site published a portion of his sex tape in 2012.
Earlier this week, Denton expressed his content at the sale of Gawker Media to Univision, saying the site could not have found an “acquirer more devoted to vibrant journalism”.
Hogan won a $140 million judgment against Gawker and Denton earlier this year. He founded it 14 years ago and has been hands-on ever since.
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 clearly has already made that decision.
U.S. celebrity website Gawker.com will shut down next week months after it lost a high-profile lawsuit against former wrestler Hulk Hogan over a sex tape published online. Would-be buyers were interested in Gawker Media’s other properties, but viewed Gawker itself as a problem. Shortly after the judge signed off on the deal, Denton sent a memo to staff addressing both Univision’s acquisition and the plan to shutter Gawker.com.
Thiel branded Gawker a “bully” after they had written a piece in 2007 outing him as gay, which he claimed had “ruined multiple people’s lives for no reason”.
“It’s harder now for journalists to do stories about billionaires, like Peter Thiel, without having at the back of their minds the fear that maybe somebody deep-pocketed.is going to come after us and can my organization afford to defend me?”
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Gawker Media is no gawk when it comes to jaw-dropping gossips and controversial stories.
