Gawker Media Group is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and putting itself up for sale, strained by a jury’s verdict that it must pay US$140 million to pro wrestler Hulk Hogan in an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit.
The filing by the 14-year-old Web site follows the revelation last month that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel bankrolled Hogan’s lawsuit as what he called a “deterrent” to Gawker’s no-holds-barred and sometimes gonzo style of journalism.
Thiel’s secret role sparked anxiety over the possibility that more wealthy individuals might cow publications by covertly funding lawsuits against them.
Photo: AP
Gawker said it plans to sell itself to publishing company Ziff Davis, although other bidders could emerge during the bankruptcy court auction. The sale will help it fund its appeal against the Hogan judgement in a Florida state court.
Gawker founder Nick Denton said in a statement that Ziff Davis’ e-commerce, licensing and video assets would be a good fit with Gawker’s Web sites, which include tech site Gizmodo, sports site Deadpsin, video-game site Kotaku, celebrity and women-focused site Jezebel, news and gossip site Gawker, car-site Jalopnik and self-help site Lifehacker.
“We have been forced by this litigation to give up our long-standing independence,” Denton said in the statement. “With stronger backing and disentangled from litigation, [Gawker writers] can perform their vital work on more platforms and in different forms.”
The move also allows Gawker’s Web sites to keep operating normally, the company said.
Gawker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection about three months after Hogan won a lawsuit against the online gossip and news publisher.
The New York publisher said in the filing that it has as much as US$500 million in debt and up to US$100 million in assets.
Media analyst Dean Starkman, a fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University in Budapest, said the bankruptcy was an “ominous development” for journalism.
“You don’t want billionaires to be any final arbiter of press fairness — that’s just not democracy,” he said. “While many of us disagreed with Gawker’s news judgement in this case, and many are ambivalent about Gawker itself, the issue here was a billionaire’s use and potential abuse of the legal process to drain a journalism outlet’s resources.”
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS