![]() And bloated tech giants including Google, Meta and Amazon have unveiled thousands of layoffs. The Washington Post recently discontinued its Sunday magazine and laid off its staff. Discovery (including CNN and HBO), NBCUniversal, Vox Media and BuzzFeed. There have been layoffs at Paramount Global, Warner Bros. The deep contraction has wrought a wave of layoffs as digital-native, legacy brands, tech giants and major media companies are all cutting staff, reducing spending or both. In part, this is a function of a social-media fueled content deluge that has left so much digital media straining for relevance. But it also proved to be less of a must-read. The new Gawker was more thoughtful, while retaining its sense of irreverence, and it was certainly less mean. But social media has rendered all but the most entrenched gossip rags obsolete.īy the time Finnegan was named editor of the new Gawker, she had shed the scorched-earth brand of journalism that had defined her previous tenure. ![]() In its heyday Gawker pioneered a brand of web reporting that combined disdain for authority and cultural sacred cows with shoe-leather reporting that produced scoops that were fun - and titillating. She famously clashed with Denton when she was writing for the site in 2015, mere months before the devastating legal judgment against Gawker for posting a sex tape of Hogan with a friend’s wife. Finnegan had previously worked at The Huffington Post and The New York Times and was the executive editor of BDG’s The Outline. In the intervening years, he apparently labored to find people who would work at the new Gawker. Goldberg in turn fired the remaining staff and scuttled the relaunch. (Denton’s Gawker Media was forced to sell its assets and file for bankruptcy after a $140 million judgment in an invasion of privacy suit filed by Hulk Hogan and financed by tech billionaire Peter Thiel.) Goldberg’s plan to relaunch in 2019 hit a snag when multiple writers and editors quit after their complaints about Goldberg’s choice for editorial director went unaddressed. Goldberg, known for buying distressed digital media assets at fire sale prices, purchased Gawker out of bankruptcy in 2016 for $1.35 million. The road to Gawker 2.0 was not a smooth one. This year, it has acquired Inverse, The Outline, and Nylon, after buying up Mic, Gawker, Elite Daily, Flavorpill, and The Zoe Report, adding them to its original brands Bustle and Romper.Jessica Schaefer's Bevel Acquired by Jeffrey Herzog's Avenue Z ![]() Founded in 2013, BDG has made eight acquisitions to date. Goldberg’s purchase of the assets was part of his larger roll-up strategy to build a large-scale digital media company by combining smaller and/or distressed properties into Bustle Digital Group. The Thiel-backed litigation included wrestler Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Gawker over a video the website posted showing the wrestler having sex with his ex-friend’s wife a jury awarded Hogan $140 million in damages in the case. ( Univision sold those sites, known as Gizmodo Media Group, along with The Onion to a private-equity backed G/O Media in April.) Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, had been angry about an old Gawker story that reported he was gay. ![]() In 2016, Nick Denton’s Gawker Media was driven to file for bankruptcy and sell six of its websites to Univision Communications for $135 million - excluding - after it was targeted by lawsuits funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. The deal included an archive of nearly 200,000 articles from Gawker, whose tagline was “Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news.” In a memo to BDG staff last fall, Goldberg said, “We won’t recreate Gawker exactly as it was, but we will build upon Gawker’s legacy and triumphs - and learn from its missteps.” Goldberg was the winning bidder for a year ago, paying $1.35 million for the site, which has been inactive since August 2016. ![]()
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