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..."
People who know what serious journalism is would never write a sentence like "Serious journalism does not need to be associated with muckraking excrement"; you can reword it as "Serious journalism does not need to be associated with investigative shit" and it'll literally mean the exact same thing.
Gawker's specialty was muckraking - investigating the powerful and revealing the stuff they didn't want you to know. On rare occasions, that was abusive, such as the infamous Hogan tape. In most cases, it was relatively neutral. In some key cases, they exposed important stories nobody else did because they weren't afraid to piss off the wrong people.
And yeah, the New York Times, Washington Post, and others, sat on important stories for years because they didn't want to piss off the wrong people.
It's a testament to the power of those they pissed off that people still believe they didn't publish anything important.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.