3/23/2023 0 Comments Gawker trump hairIt’s a business decision, and one that, reluctantly, must be made.” But in this new reality, we have to prioritize our better monetized sites. He praised Finnegan and the Gawker staff for publishing “a lot of brilliant pieces in these nearly two years. He cited a “surprisingly difficult” first quarter this year and the need to “better position the company for the direction we see the industry moving.” Goldberg sent an internal memo Wednesday confirming companywide layoffs that would amount to 8 percent of personnel. Last year, BMG shuttered tech site Input and also laid off employees at pop culture site Mic. In 2020, the company shut down The Outline, the well-regarded culture site founded by tech journalist Josh Topolsky in 2015. Goldberg’s BDG has been shuttering titles and trimming staff since early in the pandemic. 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.
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