Slashdot Mirror
'The Gawker Foundation' is Crowdfunding a Bid To Re-Launch Gawker.com (savegawker.com)
"Gawker may soon return from the dead," reports TechCrunch.
While Univision acquired most of Gawker Media's sites last year (and renamed them as the Gizmodo Media Group), the deal didn't include Gawker itself. In fact, BuzzFeed reported last month that a bankruptcy administrator has not been able to find a buyer for the Gawker site, and that lawyers for Peter Thiel (the billionaire venture capitalist who helped fund the lawsuit that led to Gawker's bankruptcy) were arguing that he'd been unfairly excluded from the process. Now a group of former Gawker employees calling themselves the Gawker Foundation has launched a Kickstarter campaign to buy the old domain and relaunch with a nonprofit, membership-funded model.
"The truth is often inconvenient, and Gawker's work isn't done," explains a mirror of their campaign site at SaveGawker.com. "We want to dig deeper." $10 pledges get you a laptop sticker, $250 pledges earn you an invite to their glorious re-launch party, and to solicit $10,000 pledges they're even asking wealthy backers to "Give us half of one bitcoin."
"By setting ourselves up as an ownerless, advertiser-less, non-profit media organization, the editorial team will be able to do what they do best. More than a dozen Gawker Media alumni are involved in this project..."
"The truth is often inconvenient, and Gawker's work isn't done," explains a mirror of their campaign site at SaveGawker.com. "We want to dig deeper." $10 pledges get you a laptop sticker, $250 pledges earn you an invite to their glorious re-launch party, and to solicit $10,000 pledges they're even asking wealthy backers to "Give us half of one bitcoin."
"By setting ourselves up as an ownerless, advertiser-less, non-profit media organization, the editorial team will be able to do what they do best. More than a dozen Gawker Media alumni are involved in this project..."
around here, but believe it or not Gawker did a lot of real journalism. What got them in trouble wasn't the sex tape or outing Thiel, it was Exposés on Thiel's various shady business deals. They were a muck raker, so yeah, lots and lots of mean spirited tabloid journalism. But that paid the bills on the other side of muck raking: exposing the wrong doings of wealthy and powerful people.
That said, people _hate_ Gawker. I can't see this working out. Funny though that a site that popular and profitable was that well hated. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if that's not on purpose. Given that they were taken down by a very real conspiracy that's not too far fetched. What's that old Gore Vidal quote, "I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.".
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/