Gawker, the gossipy, sarcastic pop culture site rebooted in mid-2021, is shutting down — for the second time.
In July 2021, Gawker relaunched under the ownership of Bustle Digital Group, whose founder and CEO Bryan Goldberg purchased the website’s assets for $1.35 million in a bankruptcy auction in 2018. The Gawker original went dormant in 2016, after Gawker’s parent company went bankrupt. after losing a legal battle with wrestler Hulk Hogan.
BDG had hired Leah Finnegan, who worked at the old Gawker, as editor of the new Gawker. On Wednesday, Finnegan said in a tweet that Gawker was folding.
“Well, after an amazing year and a half, BDG has decided it’s over with Gawker 2.0,” she tweeted. “I can’t say enough how proud I am of the site and all the brilliant people who worked to create it, and what an amazing shame it is. I had an absolute blast and I love you.
A BDG spokesperson confirmed the company was suspending Gawker operations, but declined to provide further information, including the number of employees who would lose their jobs due to the move.
Among the latest stories published on Gawker were “Andrea Riseborough guilty of being a good actor with friends who appreciate her”; “Robert Zemeckis: I love using the computer to drive Tom Hanks crazy”; “Why does Taylor Swift always show her feet? » ; “The Best and Worst TikTok Media Accounts”; and “Surprising No One, George Santos is a Disney adult”.
BDG had intended to relaunch Gawker.com in 2019, but Goldberg put those plans on hold and fired staff it had hired after reports of employee clashes.
On its own site, BDG describes Gawker thus: “We are irreverent, iconoclastic, new and strange, and we seek to raise questions about the structure of the world around us. We train our gaze on valid targets with skepticism and anger. Gawker abhors the moralizers, the outraged, the self-righteous, and the unnecessarily cruel. We try to have fun. »
BDG, founded in 2013, has made a series of cumulative acquisitions of small digital media. The New York-based company’s portfolio includes a range of lifestyle brands, including Bustle, Nylon, The Zoe Report, Elite Daily, Mic, Inverse, Fatherly and Scary Mommy.
In 2016, Nick Denton’s Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy and sold six of its websites to Univision Communications for $135 million – excluding Gawker.com – after losing lawsuits funded by the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. (Univision sold those sites, known as Gizmodo Media Group, along with The Onion to a private equity-backed G/O Media.) PayPal co-founder Thiel was angry at an old story of Gawker indicating that he was gay. Litigation supported by Thiel included Hulk Hogan’s invasion of privacy lawsuit against Gawker over a video posted by the site showing the wrestler having sex with his ex-friend’s wife; a jury awarded Hogan $140 million in damages in the case.
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