UCI will not be operating the Gawker.com site but with the acquisition, FMG’s digital reach is expected rise to almost 75 million uniques, or 96 million uniques when including its extended network.
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Trotter said CEO and founder Nick Denton informed the staff Thursday and noted in the statement that a bankruptcy court still had to approve Univision’s purchase of Gawker Media.
Thiel went on to secretly finance a lawsuit brought byTerry Bollea, more commonly known as the wrestler Hulk Hogan, against the company after Gawker posted a sex tape of Bollea and the then-wife of one of his close friends.
Judge Stuart Bernstein in federal bankruptcy court in Manhattan approved the sale of Gawker, with certain conditions, according to Reorg Research, which tracks bankruptcies.
Naturally, no potential buyer wanted to keep Gawker.com site alive, since it’s the website that led to the disastrous litigation that damn near destroyed the company.
Univision plans to continue operating six other publications in the Gawker Media portfolio, including Jezebel, Gizmodo, io9, Kotaku, Deadspin, Jalopnik, and Lifehacker. Gawker Media had to declare itself in bankrupt after Hulk Hogan won the verdict of a suit for $140 million.
Denton earlier this month filed for personal bankruptcy protection in a bid to stop his assets from being seized because of the judgment. On Thursday, the site published a post that revealed, in no uncertain terms, that it would be ceasing operations next week with no new content forthcoming.
Hogan, whose legal name is Terry Bollea, sued Denton and Gawker four years ago after they published a portion of a private sex tape featuring him. Gawker.com’s archives will still be available, Denton said in a memo to employees.
Univision is most commonly known in the USA as the country’s biggest Spanish-language media company.
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Nevertheless, most people with a moral compass are celebrating the demise of Gawker.com. The site was controversial in part due to its aggressive reporting on celebrities, which at one point included the “Gawker stalker” – a crowd-sourced celebrity sighting effort that turned the site’s readers into paparazzi.
