Bryan had zero involvement in the editorial operations of Gawker,” a BDG spokesperson emailed Confider. “Around the time of launch, Bryan provided to Josh Topolsky a list of notable people with whom he or the company had significant financial ties in case it needed to be disclosed. The unionized staffers all posted the same message into the BDG general channel only for management to delete all their messages and disable their chat permissions. Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Confider newsletter here and have The Daily Beast media team’s stellar reporting sent straight to your inbox every Monday night.Įven after Gawker’s demise, Goldberg has faces more issues, including with Bustle Digital Group’s union, which for two years has been bargaining its first contract and on Monday changed its members’ Slack avatars to the union logo and set their names to “No Layoffs, Fair Contract Now.” Gawker’s freelance budget was subsequently slashed, effectively kneecapping the site, according to sources, and the priority turned to creating content that would attract advertisers. Insiders said that things started going south at Gawker 2.0 following the May 2022 exit of chief content officer Joshua Topolsky, who had acted as a firewall between the edit and business sides of the site. It may again be up to Gawker to find out where the lines are currently drawn.Furthermore, our sources said, Goldberg gave edicts for the site to steer clear of politics and avoid appearing “woke.” The verdict was widely interpreted as a perceptible shift in how the public and juries view privacy rights.įive years on, freedom of speech is, if anything, more contentious. And jurors sided with Hogan, who shed tears in the courtroom when the verdict came down. Gawker’s original travails began when it refused to take down a 2006 sex tape of Hogan, real name Terry Bollea, with the wife of his best friend, Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. Bustle has already attempted a Gawker reboot, only to see it collapse before launching after problematic tweets by its editorial director were dug up. Gawker Medias new owner, US Spanish-language TV network Univision, made the decision to shut down the site after bidding 135 million for the web publishers seven-site portfolio in a bankruptcy. The problems independent journalism sites face under ownership of venture capitalists are well-known. But he knows how to build traffic using content that we all hate.” “Goldberg is an opportunist who thought he could buy an asset on the cheap, plus the archives, and get all the sparkle, branding and name-recognition to build a large-traffic site to go with his group – and all of which is antithetical to what Gawker stood for. “There’s no way to capture the old anarchic spirit under the control of venture capitalists. “Anyone who cares about Gawker thinks it’s a terrible idea,” said one. While praising Finnegan as a journalistic talent, a former Gawker staffer said many from the old era are unconvinced by its relaunch. “Some great advice I once got was ‘Be less yourself.’ I was 27, and going through a righteous phase that unfortunately coincided with having a national platform on which to write. Finnegan subsequently edited the Outline before it too was sold to Bustle.Īmong her best-known columns, under the heading ‘Unconventional Wisdom: challenging those faux-profound bits of knowledge so often taken for granted’, she reflected on an earlier post in which she had described her boss hitting his head on a lamp during a meeting. Thiel’s crusade against Gawker started after the Gawker-owned tech blog Valleywag, published a post that had outed him as gay.īustle has said the new editor of Gawker will be Leah Finnegan, who had worked at Gawker for a year as a writer and features editor before she took a buyout in July 2015. Sources close to Gawker told the Guardian that Peter Thiel, the German American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist, who had funded Hogan’s libel suit over a sex tape Gawker had posted online, had also looked to buy the company, with a view to preventing the site and its archive from ever returning to the public domain. The company behind the rebirth is Bustle Digital Group, a company known as a clearing house for a dozen publishing sites, among them Bustle itself, Romper, Nylon and W, which purchased Gawker for $1.35m at a bankruptcy auction in 2018.īustle is the brainchild of Bryan Goldberg, described by the New York Post as “a scruffy, 35-year-old media mogul”. ![]() But Gawker’s original purpose as an independent publishing meteor could be tough to replicate.
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