Slashdot Mirror
Gawker.com Sold To Bleacher Report Co-Founder Bryan Goldberg In Bankruptcy Auction (cnn.com)
The now-dormant news and gossip website Gawker.com was sold on Thursday to Bryan Goldberg, the founder of Bustle and co-founder of Bleacher Report. According to CNN, the site sold for less than $1.5 million. From the report: Goldberg founded the sports website Bleacher Report along with three other people in 2005; in 2012, they sold it to Turner, which like CNN is owned by AT&T. He launched Bustle, a website focused on women's issues, in 2013. Goldberg addressed the Gawker sale in a Bustle internal email on Thursday, saying the site will be acquired "under a new holding company, separate from Bustle."
"You are probably wondering what happens next," he said in the email, which was obtained by CNN. "The short is this -- not much. We have no immediate plans to re-launch Gawker. For now, things will stay as they are. I'm very excited about the possibilities for the future of Gawker. I will share more in the months ahead." The sale includes an archive of hundreds of thousands of Gawker stories and social media accounts affiliated with the site. Gawker Media was sold to Univision in 2016 for $135 million and renamed Gizmodo Media Group after the company declared bankruptcy, "the result of a legal assault waged by the former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan that was secretly subsidized by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, a longtime Gawker adversary," reports CNN.
"You are probably wondering what happens next," he said in the email, which was obtained by CNN. "The short is this -- not much. We have no immediate plans to re-launch Gawker. For now, things will stay as they are. I'm very excited about the possibilities for the future of Gawker. I will share more in the months ahead." The sale includes an archive of hundreds of thousands of Gawker stories and social media accounts affiliated with the site. Gawker Media was sold to Univision in 2016 for $135 million and renamed Gizmodo Media Group after the company declared bankruptcy, "the result of a legal assault waged by the former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan that was secretly subsidized by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, a longtime Gawker adversary," reports CNN.
No, it was the result of Gawker publishing Hogan's sex tape against his will, then ignoring a judge who ordered them to take it down, then publishing an article gloating about how they were ignoring the judge, then - when it went to trial again - telling the court that they'd happily publish a sex tape featuring a five year old. These guys were scum and they committed legal suicide - it was not inflicted upon them by Thiel even though every single story Slashdot publishes on this subject tries to spin it this way.
Occasionally doing some good in the world doesn't justify all of the terrible things some one has done as well. I don't suspect you'd let off someone who mugged a bunch of people at knife point just because they used some of the ill gotten gains to feed some of the area homeless. The only tragedy in all of this is that a person apparently needs a wealthy person to bankroll their court case in order to have a chance of getting justice.
Gawker was a shitty place for shitty people. The muck was to make click bait money and anything approaching actual journalism was likely an accident. It's almost certain they only went after Thiel due to his political leanings, not because they care about shady business. The number of their former staffers that showed up on the Shitty Media Men list says a lot about them. You might have decided to give them a pass because they appeared to espouse your beliefs, but they were horrible people who realized that they could get away with being horrible people as long as they told people like you what you wanted to hear.
Comparing Gawker to Sinclair says a lot more about you than it does Gawker. Gain some perspective and I think you'll see that nothing was lost.