Gawker.com goes on indefinite hiatus today because Univision, which paid $135 million for Gawker Media, doesn’t want the company’s flagship site.
Gawker.com turns into a zombie site today
Time for one last send-off.
Asa Mathat
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
The site won’t go dark, and it’s possible that someone, at some point, will start it up again. But after today, for the foreseeable future, it will be in zombie mode.
The only fresh content up this morning is a data-dump post, which reminds us what state-of-the-art web publishing used to look like in 2008 (spoiler: It looked like a dozen posts per day, per writer).
But I’m assuming that Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton or his staff have a big finale post up their sleeve. (Or maybe not.)
Update: Yup, lots of posts from Gawker alumni are up there now. And one final one, from Denton. Last line: “Gawker’s demise turns out to be the ultimate Gawker story. It shows how things work.”
Meantime, if you’re reading this post, you’ve probably read or at least skimmed Max Read’s exhaustive Gawker autopsy and many other fine retrospectives.
I’ll add to the pyre here by calling out the New Yorker’s 2010 profile of Denton, published when his company was at the apex of its influence on the media business and culture.
And here’s my personal time capsule contribution: A highlight reel of an interview I did with Denton, a few days before the New Yorker piece came out. It’s a little (okay, a lot) industry focused, with attendant anachronisms (still miss you, Digg).
But most of what Denton says here still has resonance. I imagine he’ll lay low for the near future, but I hope he climbs back up on the soapbox eventually. I think he still has a lot to say.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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