Kotaku in trouble? Update: Gawker files for bankruptcy, looking to sell the company

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bear
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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million
by bear » Mon Mar 21, 2016 1:55 pm

Did they ever actually deft a court order to take the tape down? It seems to be something that's been bandied about a bit but I'm not sure if that actually happened.


On the subject of Kotaku potentially going under I'm a bit conflicted about the whole thing.
I don't bother with Gawker and the few times I've encountered it has typically been someone on social media pointing out a story or article where they have acted like a shower of gooseberry fools while Gizmodo is one of a handful of sites I actively avoid due to the subpar quality of their output.
As for Kotaku I don't read it much but I wouldn't like to see it go under as I think games media has lost more than enough established sites and magazines and for all the flaws these outlets have (driv3rgate, doritosgate etc.) there does need to be a platform outside of Youtube where people can get paid for discussing or criticising games. Kotaku isn't that platform, and I don't think it will ever be, but if it goes I think that's another place where people could have gotten a start gone.

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million
by Delusibeta » Mon Mar 21, 2016 10:08 pm

Trelliz wrote:Bunch of scummy internet clickbait shitlords defy courts, peddle bullshit, get caught. I agree with irene, at least kotaku was a sort of holding pen. If it goes then they'll spread out.

Actually, I'd give good odds that most would wind up in the other games journalism holding pen, Polygon.

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million
by TheTurnipKing » Tue Mar 22, 2016 12:49 am

bear wrote:Did they ever actually deft a court order to take the tape down? It seems to be something that's been bandied about a bit but I'm not sure if that actually happened.

If you can't trust Gawker, who can you trust? 8-)

http://gawker.com/a-judge-told-us-to-ta ... -481328088

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million
by bear » Tue Mar 22, 2016 1:28 am

So they removed the video then.

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Irene Demova
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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million
by Irene Demova » Tue Mar 22, 2016 2:52 am

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-35868127

$25m more trouble, wow
Can't see them making it out of appeals without paying some money now

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million
by Garth » Tue Mar 22, 2016 2:55 am

The $115 million awarded to Hogan "exceeds the value of the entire company by $30 million"


The jury awarded another $25 million today for the lolz:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/21/media/h ... index.html

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Cal
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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million
by Cal » Tue Mar 22, 2016 7:05 am

Delusibeta wrote:
Trelliz wrote:Bunch of scummy internet clickbait shitlords defy courts, peddle bullshit, get caught. I agree with irene, at least kotaku was a sort of holding pen. If it goes then they'll spread out.

Actually, I'd give good odds that most would wind up in the other games journalism holding pen, Polygon.


Polygon...where, as a writer, you're only as 'distinct' as the opinions you are allowed to express. Polygon is the flip-side to sites like Gawker. Where Gawker specialised in sensationalist crap, Polygon excels in politically-correct, self-regarding navel gazing for the millennial generation.

Frankly I don't like either. There has to be a middle ground - where the redundancy of mind numbing clickbait is kept to a minimum whilst encouraging a wealth of voices from across the social and (importantly not the case with Polygon at the moment) the political spectrum. Listening to the Polygon podcast (which I do - I have it on iTunes subscription) is too often like getting a lesson in political correctness from a bunch of narrow-minded west coast Bay-dwelling liberals. We need more varied voices, differences of opinions that reflect the wider cultural and political world in which video games operate. And Polygon's relentless - often tedious - focus on small indie games most of us have never heard about (but games with what Polygon deems 'worthy' aims, or messages) is now getting beyond parody. Listening to the Polygon crew struggle to navigate the fraught (distinctly off message) themes of the latest Clancy game, The Division, was mildly entertaining for all the wrong reasons. I really don't know why I put up with Arthur Gies any more, tbh.

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million
by TheTurnipKing » Tue Mar 22, 2016 7:09 am

Garth wrote:
The $115 million awarded to Hogan "exceeds the value of the entire company by $30 million"


The jury awarded another $25 million today for the lolz:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/21/media/h ... index.html

Actually, for punitive damages. This isn't a surprise, it was mentioned during the 115 verdict, I think.

bear wrote:So they removed the video then.

Huh. I guess they did. I stand corrected. One assumes the jury would have been better informed than me.

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million
by Venom » Tue Mar 22, 2016 10:00 am

Cal wrote: Listening to the Polygon podcast (which I do - I have it on iTunes subscription) is too often like getting a lesson in political correctness from a bunch of narrow-minded west coast Bay-dwelling liberals. We need more varied voices, differences of opinions that reflect the wider cultural and political world in which video games operate. And Polygon's relentless - often tedious - focus on small indie games most of us have never heard about (but games with what Polygon deems 'worthy' aims, or messages) is now getting beyond parody. Listening to the Polygon crew struggle to navigate the fraught (distinctly off message) themes of the latest Clancy game, The Division, was mildly entertaining for all the wrong reasons. I really don't know why I put up with Arthur Gies any more, tbh.


A spot-on summation. Occasionally they have a long-form article which shares something new and is enjoyable to read. However I am an adult and I can't stand being preached to by people who think their opinion is the 'right' opinion (not recognising that different opinions can also be valid). It's this politicising of gaming that permeates everything that they produce. For God's sake their writers are almost exclusively white male yet they were previewing a game (i forget now... but I will come back if i remember...) and criticising it for featuring the stereotypical white male as the protagonist!

If Gawker goes down it may be that rights to their websites get sold off, possibly bought by staff. But I wouldn't be surprised to see Totilo move to Polygon - his gaming bias and politics would make him the perfect fit.

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million - Update: now $140 million
by TheTurnipKing » Tue Mar 22, 2016 1:54 pm


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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million - Update: now $140 million
by Preezy » Wed Mar 23, 2016 11:17 am

I wish someone would leak a sex vid of me so I could sue them for $140m, lucky bastard.

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million - Update: now $140 million
by Garth » Fri Jun 10, 2016 7:29 pm

Gawker files for bankruptcy and says it will sell the company to Ziff Davis or someone else
Gawker and Nick Denton say they won’t pay Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel $140 million.

Peter Thiel is getting closer to his goal: Gawker Media has filed for bankruptcy protection and says it eventually plans to find a new owner for the company.

Gawker and owner Nick Denton are making the Chapter 11 filing today, in order to avoid paying Thiel and Hulk Hogan the $140 million judgment they won in Hogan’s privacy trial earlier this year.

Gawker has told it employees it still plans to fight the Thiel/Hogan case and to operate its publishing business while it does so. But it is also now formally entertaining offers to buy the company and says it has a firm bid from publisher Ziff Davis to buy the entire operation for less than $100 million.

(Update: Gawker has now formally announced the Chapter 11 filing. You can read that press release at the bottom of of this post. And in a memo to employees, Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah says his company has an "asset purchase agreement" to buy seven Gawker titles, and says there is a "tremendous fit between the two organizations." It is worth noting that while Shah's memo says he intends to buy Gawker.com, he doesn't list the site when describing Ziff Davis' plans to integrate Gawker Media's other sites.)

Gawker and its banker Mark Patricof assume that the company will eventually see higher bids while it is in bankruptcy protection. Last year, in advance of the Hogan trial, Denton figured his company was worth something in the $250 million to $300 million range.

But in any case the company won’t trade hands until Gawker either beats back Thiel and Hogan or it finishes a court-approved restructuring. Because no one wants to buy an ongoing lawsuit from Peter Thiel.

Ziff Davis itself is a company that has gone through the Chapter 11 process. The company was once a dominant force in the trade and hobbyist magazine business, but its fortunes declined along with the print industry, and it filed for bankruptcy protection in 2008.

Ziff Davis now operates a tech-centric stable of digital titles, including IGN, AskMen and PCMag, that it says reaches more than 100 million readers a month; CEO Shah is a former Time Inc. exec.

In theory, Gawker and Denton are in this position because Gawker published excerpts of a 2012 sex tape featuring Hogan and the wife of one of his friends.

But Thiel, a billionaire who made his fortune by running PayPal, then making an early investment in Facebook, has made it clear that he funded Hogan’s lawsuit to punish Gawker and Denton for a series of posts the publisher made over the years.

"It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence," Thiel said last month in an interview with the New York Times. "I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest."

Funding Hogan’s case, Thiel said, was "one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done."

Denton has refused to apologize for the Hogan post and has argued that Thiel’s campaign against him and his company will set a dangerous precedent.

http://www.recode.net/2016/6/10/1190376 ... ziff-davis

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Update: Gawker files for bankruptcy, looking to sell the company
by Alvin Flummux » Fri Jun 10, 2016 11:49 pm

Hogan's lawsuit was secretly funded by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, because Gawker outed him as gay a decade ago. :lol: So much for freedom of the press!

The billionaire co-founder of Paypal Peter Thiel has admitted that he funded the wrestler Hulk Hogan's successful lawsuit against the online news site Gawker.

The wrestler sued Gawker after it published a private video of the star on its website.

David Folkenflik, a media correspondent for US National Public Radio, told the BBC's Today programme how a long-standing animosity might have motivated Mr Thiel.

The lawsuit, he said, appeared designed to take the company down. "This is an existential threat for Gawker," he told Sarah Montague.


http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36396398

I wonder if Thiel's a Trump supporter, given Trump's intense desire allow the press to be sued for every strawberry floating thing?

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Update: Gawker files for bankruptcy, looking to sell the company
by Harry Bizzle » Sat Jun 11, 2016 12:49 am

Invading someone's privacy and publishing details of their personal life is not integral to a free press. The whole point is that this is what Gawker does and then tries to pretend it's in the public interest to do so.


Hopefully the whole thing crashes and burns (i.e. Ziff don't buy it).

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Update: Gawker files for bankruptcy, looking to sell the company
by Dig Dug » Sat Jun 11, 2016 1:36 am

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TheTurnipKing
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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Update: Gawker files for bankruptcy, looking to sell the company
by TheTurnipKing » Sat Jun 11, 2016 10:25 am

Alvin Flummux wrote:Hogan's lawsuit was secretly funded by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, because Gawker outed him as gay a decade ago. :lol: So much for freedom of the press!

The real victim here is the poor schlub who can't afford to stump up the megabucks it takes to have you taken seriously in the american legal system.

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Hogan wins case against Gawker, awarded $115 million - Update: now $140 million
by Moggy » Sat Jun 11, 2016 12:12 pm

Preezy wrote:I wish someone would leak a sex vid of me so I could sue them for $140m, lucky bastard.


Sorry mate, I'm keeping that for my private collection. :datass:

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Update: Gawker files for bankruptcy, looking to sell the company
by Meep » Sat Jun 11, 2016 12:15 pm

Isn't Thiel a confessed anti-democrat (as in being against democracy, not as in against Democrats but I'm sure he hates them too)? I don't think any candidate would want him near their campaign.

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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Update: Gawker files for bankruptcy, looking to sell the company
by Moggy » Sat Jun 11, 2016 12:22 pm

Meep wrote:Isn't Thiel a confessed anti-democrat (as in being against democracy, not as in against Democrats but I'm sure he hates them too)? I don't think any candidate would want him near their campaign.


Peter Thiel wrote, on April 13, 2009, in the Libertarian 'Cato Unbound' blog, “Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In the same article, he also wrote, "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.


Bloody poor people and women ruining democracy with their damned desire to vote. :x

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TheTurnipKing
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PostRe: Kotaku in trouble? Update: Gawker files for bankruptcy, looking to sell the company
by TheTurnipKing » Sat Jun 11, 2016 3:49 pm

It is I think, fairly unarguable that democracy has a few bugs we've never quite worked out. I've just never seen a better system actually suggested.


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