Peter Thiel Is Now Bidding on Gawker.com (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Its official. "Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has made an offer for Gawker," reports Reuters, adding that the potential acquisition "would let him take down stories regarding his personal life that are still available on the website, and remove the scope for further litigation between him and Gawker." It was Thiel's 2016 lawsuit which bankrupted the site, prompting a Washington Post blogger to write that Thiel "killed Gawker once. Now it looks like he may kill it again."

Elsewhere the Washington Post argues the whole episode "highlighted the immense legal risk borne by news outlets already facing a precarious financial reality in the digital age." The Post's blogger describes Thiel as "a billionaire leveraging his wealth to obliterate a media outlet...as part of a personal vendetta."
Last month former Gawker staffers attempted to crowdfund the purchase and relaunch of Gawker.com as a nonprofit media organization. But their 1,496 backers only pledged $89,844, far short of the campaign's $500,000 target.

Comments

Nope.

[aepervius]

"highlighted the immense legal risk borne by news outlets already facing a precarious financial reality in the digital age."
No it highlights that contrary to what shithead blogposter thimk (gawker people are not what I would call journalist or even news) privacy protection DOES exists even in the US and the web is not a free post-it-all-for-money, there are consequences. Gawker be damned they earned their happenstance.

Re:Spin spin spin

[ArchieBunker]

Gawker violated a court order. That was the cause of their downfall. Gawker outed Thiel as a homosexual and claimed the Hogan sex tape was public interest. Meanwhile they claimed viewing photos of Jennifer Lawrence nude was the equivalent of sexual assault. The head of Gawker told a jude he would publish nude photos of a four year old if it was in the public interest. Gawker deserved everything they brought upon themselves.

I've got Karma to burn

[rsilvergun]

so here I go again defending Gawker. Gawker did a lot of real journalism and used the muck raking to pay for it. A tradition that's as old as journalism itself. Thiel didn't shut them down because he was outed as gay, he shut them down because they kept reporting on his shady business deals. And their mistake wasn't ignoring the court order. That gets done all the time in their line of work. Their mistake was not realizing that Hogan was backed by Thiel for the express purpose of shutting them down.

What we have here is a pretty scary precedent. We have a billionaire using his money and the legal system to shut down somebody critical of him. If anyone honestly believes that'll end well for us working stiffs then they haven't been paying attention to the last 300 years of labor relations...