The court-ordered bankruptcy auction of Gawker Media approached its final conclusion on Thursday, with most of company’s assets set to be acquired by Univision for $135 million. But one thing that isn’t part of the deal is Gawker.com—the website that launched an alternative blogging empire almost 14 years ago.
In other words, while some of Gawker will continue to live on, as Univision absorbs existing verticals like Gizmodo and Jezebel, what many saw as the heart and soul of the company (to the extent it had either one of those things) will no longer exist. Staff were notified by founder Nick Denton on Thursday afternoon.
In the original offer from Ziff-Davis that Gawker announced when it filed for bankruptcy, it looked as though a window had been left open that might have allowed Denton take over ownership of the main site, but that window appears to have closed. The Univision offer reportedly includes a clause that prevents him from competing with the new owner of his former company.
Univision hasn’t disclosed why it didn’t want to acquire Gawker.com, but it’s likely the reputation of the site (not to mention a conspicuous lack of advertising on that particular vertical) convinced the company not to include it in the deal.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
For many, the name Gawker is now indelibly associated with a massive legal judgment for privacy invasion and a host of equally unseemly stories, including one that the site eventually took down that outed a married Conde Nast executive who was cruising for gay strippers.
The site also outed PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, of course, a slight that the Silicon Valley billionaire later said helped convince him to finance Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit in an ultimately successful attempt to drive the company into bankruptcy.
While those kinds of stories are the ones many people will think of when they hear the name, however, Gawker also used its take-no-prisoners attitude to break some truly significant news stories, stories that in many cases were ultimately picked up by the mainstream media. It “spoke truth to power,” something that true crusading journalism theoretically always strives to do.
In many ways, Gawker is one of the premier examples of a media outlet that no one could ever truly love, because of all the ways they humiliated people for no reason, and their penchant for cheap titillation. And yet, it accomplished too much serious journalism to truly hate.
Denton, a refugee from the Financial Times who got rich selling one of the very first truly digital news entities (known as Moreover), often seemed cavalier about his approach to journalism, but he was committed to the cause of transparency, and the belief that the world would be a better place if everyone could divulge all the secrets they knew about themselves or anyone else.
In typical Denton-like fashion, of course, that commitment didn’t always extend to the details of his own business affairs, which as Fortune‘s Jeff Roberts has reported involved numerous foreign entities and offshore holding companies designed to avoid tax.
As inscrutable and often infuriating as Denton could be, however, what he built with Gawker Media was arguably unique. As he never tired of pointing out to anyone who would listen, until the Hulk Hogan verdict the company was one of the largest self-funded media entities in North America, with more than 100 million monthly unique visitors and annual revenues of $50 million.
Along the way, Denton spent more money than almost any other media company large or small on trying to reinvent reader interaction through a proprietary platform he called Kinja, which he hoped would level the playing field between journalist and audience.
Perhaps, as many critics have argued, it was Denton’s own fault that his company was driven into the ground. Stories like the Hogan one had too much in them that was disturbing, and too little that justified their publication, something I think even Denton would admit.
And yet, there is such a shortage of independent, truth-telling media outlets at the moment that celebrating the death of another one seems hugely inappropriate.
Now, the empire that Denton built—which at least theoretically was once worth as much as $250 million—has been sold for a little over half that amount. And while most of the assets, human and otherwise, will survive, the core of what the company was is gone.
All of this because Gawker irritated a vindictive billionaire, and crossed the vague line between private and public information involving a celebrity—and, perhaps, because Denton was guilty of an excess of hubris.
Even though some of its stories made us deeply uncomfortable, however, and made it hard to defend the site to its critics, something important has been lost with the death of Gawker. And the fact that one man was able to drive it out of business because of a personal vendetta should keep everyone in the media awake at night, regardless of what they think of the company or its legacy.