For nearly 14 years, Nick Denton and Gawker.com have defined Gawker Media.
However, over the past several months, a split of some kind between the company, its founder and its flagship site became inevitable: Gawker Media, under financial pressure from a US$140 million legal judgement in an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit brought by former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, also encountered a seemingly unbeatable adversary in the form of Peter Thiel, a billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was financing legal efforts against the company.
Left with few options, Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy and put itself up for sale in June.
On Thursday, less than 48 hours after Univision Holdings Inc’s US$135 million bid won an auction for Gawker Media, the bond finally broke. Gawker.com is to shut down next week, and Denton, whose sites pioneered a wry, conversational and brash form of Web journalism that would influence publications across the Internet, is to leave the company.
“Sadly, neither I nor Gawker.com, the buccaneering flagship of the group I built with my colleagues, are coming along for this next stage,” Denton wrote in a note to the staff on Thursday afternoon shortly after a bankruptcy judge approved the company’s sale to Univision.
The fate of Gawker.com had been the subject of much speculation since the Hogan verdict. Still, it was an abrupt outcome after what had been a long period of uncertainty.
“It was a culmination of a year of dread,” Gawker Media executive editor John Cook said. “Through a year of just utter constant trauma and assault, it was the thing that I was trying to prevent — it was the thing that we were all trying to keep from happening.”
Gawker Media’s portfolio of sites also includes the technology site Gizmodo; the sports site Deadspin; and Jezebel, a site aimed at women.
Gawker.com’s archives will remain online, but after Monday it will not publish new material, Denton wrote in his note.
As for Denton, he said he would “move on to other projects,” but provided few clues as to what those were, except to say they would be “out of the news and gossip business.”
Before the bankruptcy hearing, Denton gathered the staff of Gawker.com in a windowless conference room at Gawker’s offices to tell them the site would stop publishing.
“I’m not going to say we lost, but Peter Thiel achieved his objective,” Denton said, according to a person at the meeting.
No layoffs were planned in connection with the shutdown, and journalists had been assured they would be offered jobs elsewhere at the company.
Nevertheless, the shuttering of Gawker.com represents a victory for Thiel, whose fight with the company began in 2007, when Valleywag, one of Gawker Media’s now-defunct blogs, published an article saying he was a homosexual.
In his note, Denton said the company had been unable to find a buyer for the site.
While his words were somewhat wistful, he also provided a hint of optimism.
“Gawker.com may, like Spy Magazine in its day, have a second act,” he wrote.
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