Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Why “Sorry, I don’t know” is sometimes the best answer: The Washington Post’s technology chief on its first AI chatbot
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Aug. 18, 2016, 1:28 p.m.
Business Models
LINK: gawker.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joseph Lichterman   |   August 18, 2016

After agreeing to purchase all of the Gawker Media properties earlier this week, Univision has decided to shut down Gawker.com, the site reported Thursday. Gawker said the site will go dark next week.

In a short post, Gawker’s J.K. Trotter said staffers learned Thursday afternoon that the site would close:

Nick Denton, the company’s outgoing CEO, informed current staffers of the site’s fate on Thursday afternoon, just hours before a bankruptcy court in Manhattan will decide whether to approve Univision’s bid for Gawker Media’s other assets. The near-term plans for Gawker.com’s coverage, as well as the site’s archives, have not yet been finalized.

The New York Times reported that the site will remain online but won’t publish any new content after Monday.

Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy in June after it said it couldn’t pay the $140.1 million judgment it owed the wrestler and actor Hulk Hogan in a case that was funded and supported by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.

On Tuesday, Univision agreed to purchase all of the company’s assets, beating out tech publisher Ziff Davis, which also submitted a bid.

CNN reported on Wednesday that Gawker founder Nick Denton was also leaving the company.

This also marks the end of Gawker’s flagship site, a blog founded by Denton in 2002. Gawker was deeply independent, publishing stories that more traditional outlets wouldn’t touch. The site greatly influenced the culture of online journalism, and it helped launch the careers of many of its former staffers who are now at publications such as Vox Media, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and others.

As news of the site’s closure broke on Thursday, users on Twitter mourned its loss and reminisced:

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Why “Sorry, I don’t know” is sometimes the best answer: The Washington Post’s technology chief on its first AI chatbot
“For Google, that might be failure mode…but for us, that is success,” says the Post’s Vineet Khosla
Browser cookies, as unkillable as cockroaches, won’t be leaving Google Chrome after all
Google — which planned to block third-party cookies in 2022, then 2023, then 2024, then 2025 — now says it won’t block them after all. A big win for adtech, but what about publishers?
Would you pay to be able to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised how many would
“The relationship he has uncovered is more like the co-dependence seen in a destructive relationship, or the way we relate to addictive products such as tobacco that we know are doing us harm.”