United States based Gawker Media Group is going to close down next week, after almost 14 years of operations.
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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. Gawker.com’s current staff will be reassigned to other roles within those six sites or elsewhere within Univision.
A bankruptcy judge approved Gawker Media LLC ‘s $135 million asset sale to a unit of Univision Communications Inc. under a deal that will allow most employees to keep their jobs while cutting loose the online media company’s founder, Nick Denton.
Gawker.com is going to shut down as its parent company is sold to Univision, in the wake of a US$140 million (NZ$192 million) judgment against it in the Hulk Hogan invasion-of-privacy case, after the site published a sex tape of the wrestler.
Gawker Media declared bankruptcy following a jury verdict in the lawsuit brought by Terry Gene Bollea, otherwise known as Hulk Hogan.
Those assets include the sports-oriented Deadspin; the women’s-interest site Jezebel; the technology hub Gizmodo; the videogame forum Kotaku; the automobile news site Jalopnik and the general tips site Lifehacker. Denton, who’s also CEO and principal shareholder of Gawker Media, also subsequently filed for bankruptcy protection.
A United States bankruptcy court later approved Univision’s purchase of Gawker Media, which owns seven websites in total. The site has been in operation for 14 years. It was later discovered that Peter Thiel was secretly financing the lawsuit. As it rose in prominence, Gawker began writing on broader issues, popularizing a snarky tone that came to define a certain style of blogging.
“The real shame is that Gawker gave Hogan a sledgehammer with which (to) pulverize it in state court”, New York University journalism professor Adam Penenberg tweeted.
Following the lawsuit, it was revealed Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel helped bankroll the wrestler’s lawsuit against Gawker, along with several others against the company. Gawker.com, perhaps more than any other site, reflected an attempt to change that.
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“Since cruelty and recklessness were intrinsic parts of Gawker’s business model, it seemed only a matter of time before they would try to pretend that journalism justified the very worst”, Thiel wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times published this week.
