Gawker’s Nick Denton out of the ‘news and gossip business’

NEW YORK – Gawker.com, a nearly 14-year-old blog being shut down following the sale of its parent company to Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, will mark its last post Monday. In a memo to its staff, Gawker founder Nick Denton, the acerbic, outspoken former financial journalist, said he’s also getting out of the news business. The blog’s parent, Gawker Media, was sold following a $140 million judgment against it in an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit filed by former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan over a sex tape. It was later revealed that Hogan’s lawsuit was backed by Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel. Excerpts of the memo, which was sent to The Associated Press, are below.

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Sadly, neither I nor Gawker.com, the buccaneering flagship of the group I built with my colleagues, are coming along for this next stage. Desirable though the other properties are, we have not been able to find a single media company or investor willing also to take on Gawker.com. The campaign being mounted against its editorial ethos and former writers has made it too risky. I can understand the caution.

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Even if the appeals court overturns this spring’s Florida jury verdict, Peter Thiel has already achieved many of his objectives.

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I will move on to other projects, working to make the web a forum for the open exchange of ideas and information, but out of the news and gossip business.

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Gawker.com may, like Spy Magazine in its day, have a second act. For the moment, however, it will be mothballed, until the smoke clears and a new owner can be found. The archives will remain, but Monday’s posts will be the last of this iteration.

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Our bloggers — and the alumni now dispersed through the media from the New Yorker to The New York Times — have introduced a new style of journalism, sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes snarky, but always authentic. We connect with a skeptical and media-savvy generation by giving them the real story, the version that journalists used to keep to themselves.

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As for Gawker.com, founded in 2003 and mothballed in 2016, it will live on in legend. As the short-lived killer android is told in Blade Runner: “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly.”