But Univision will instead shut down, a site whose brand is too toxic to touch. Univision wanted the company, including, to round out its suite of digital offerings for English-speaking millennials, which include The Root, The Onion and Fusion. Univision had first explored buying Gawker last year, according to a person knowledgeable about those discussions, while Bollea's suit was in the courts but well before the jury verdict in June. The Spanish-language broadcasting giant Univision bought Gawker Media this week for $135 million. Thiel acknowledged he had subsidized other lawsuits against Gawker and would do so indefinitely. Denton has said Thiel promised revenge for disclosing his sexual orientation. The Florida jury's verdict totaling $140 million against Gawker Media and Denton forced both to go into bankruptcy and the company to be put up for sale at a court-overseen auction.īollea's case was underwritten by the Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel, whom Gawker had outed as gay in 2007 very much against his will. Denton, the genetic parent, publicly promised a Gawker that would be 20 percent nicer. The tweet betrayed a nihilistic impulse that had been part of the site's DNA. Not everyone has to feel good about the truth. A young writer for Gawker's sister site, Jezebel, tweeted, "Stories don't need an upside. Writers fought back, some over the process and others on the merits. Gawker's corporate leadership had the posting pulled after widespread outcry. The story read very much the product of the escort's inability to extort money from the executive. The site's judgment reached another low point last summer when it published the saga of a male New York media executive who, despite being married to his wife for years, was said to have arranged for a weekend in Chicago with a male escort. Daulerio, Deadspin's editor, to take the video down: "I am the girl in it and it was stolen from me and put up without my permission." His initial response: "Blah, blah, blah." He later conceded that what the video showed could be "possibly rape." In 2010, Deadspin, Gawker's sports blog, posted video of a college student having sex in the bathroom of a bar. At its best, Gawker felt like a corrective to the airbrushed reality fed to readers in glossy magazines or highly curated social media accounts. It meant they had no fear of offending the subjects of their stories or their layers of publicists intent on steering entertainment writers for established publications to safer topics, with the threat of withholding their presence when the next wave of interviews hit to promote the next big project. Gawker was built on a cadre of young and often poorly paid writers made to work long hours with little or no access to the people they were writing about or the glamorous worlds they inhabited. It proved to be an instance in which a celebrity's private acts proved newsworthy. Gawker was rarely in better form than when, say, writer John Cook showed how Fox News' Bill O'Reilly used his influence with senior police officials and organizations on Long Island, N.Y., to start an investigation of his estranged (and now ex-) wife's boyfriend, who was on the force. The site also bird-dogged the powerful who bullied other people with less stature or fewer resources.
#DEADSPIN GAWKER CRACK#
Gawker's reports that its reporter had viewed video of Toronto's then-Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack rightly made his rampant substance abuse a topic fit for wider media scrutiny. Its offerings were often brutally satiric and unsparing in their conclusions. It was, as former Gawker editor Max Read recently wrote, "an endlessly scrolling, eternally accessible record of prattle and wit and venom." He set out to correct that in 2003, with a publication that knit together news analysis and gossip in the same stories. Gawker itself was born of the insight of founder Nick Denton, who quite rightly concluded that what journalists told one another over drinks was invariably more interesting than what actually appeared in print, online or on the air. There's no reason not to do that here, other than the extent to which that impulse might appall some of Gawker's own writers were it a piece about the demise of another publication. It will be shut down next week by its new owner, a victim of its own poisoned legacy.Īny obituary should start by acknowledging the good the subject rendered to the world. For Gawker Media's websites to live,, the actual namesake website, has to die.
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