Two days after Univision acquired Gawker Media for $135 million, the company’s flagship site, Gawker.com, announced it would be shutting down next week.
“After nearly fourteen years of operation, Gawker.com will be shutting down next week,” the website said Thursday. “The decision to close Gawker comes days after Univision successfully bid $135 million for Gawker Media’s six other websites, and four months after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal campaign against the company.”
Outgoing CEO Nick Denton told the site’s current staff of the shutdown Thursday afternoon as a bankruptcy court in Manhattan approved Univision’s bid for Gawker Media’s other assets.
Under the settlement approved by federal bankruptcy judge Stuart Bernstein, Univision will offer jobs to 95 percent of Gawker Media employees. But Mr. Denton said in a staff memo that he would not be among them.
Univision confirmed Thursday that it “will not be operating the Gawker.com site.”
Gawker Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and put its assets up for sale in June, after a jury ordered it to pay $140 million in a sex-tape lawsuit by former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea.
The company was sold to Univision at auction on Tuesday, with assets including websites Jezebel, Deadspin, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku and Jalopnik.
Mr. Denton, the Gawker Media founder who was found personally liable for $10 million in the Hogan judgment, confirmed to employees Wednesday morning that he would be leaving 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,” Mr. Denton wrote in a message to staff obtained by Politico. “Desirable though the other properties are, we have not been able to find a single media company or investor willing also to take on Gawker.com. The campaign being mounted against its editorial ethos and former writers has made it too risky. I can understand the caution.”
He was referring to Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who bankrolled Mr. Bollea’s lawsuit in retaliation for Gawker outing him as gay on its now-defunct site Valleywag.
“Even if the appeals court overturns this spring’s Florida jury verdict, Peter Thiel has already achieved many of his objectives,” Mr. Denton wrote. “I will move on to other projects, working to make the web a forum for the open exchange of ideas and information, but out of the news and gossip business. Gawker.com may, like Spy Magazine in its day, have a second act. For the moment, however, it will be mothballed, until the smoke clears and a new owner can be found. The archives will remain, but Monday’s posts will be the last of this iteration.”
Univision confirmed Thursday that it “will not be operating the Gawker.com site.”
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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