Gawker.com will be shut down next week

Gawker.com, one of the oldest and highest-profile media and culture blogs, is shutting down next week. The closure of Gawker Media’s flagship blog follows Univision’s acquisition of the company for $135 million at a bankruptcy auction earlier this week.

Nick Denton, Gawker Media’s outgoing CEO, informed staffers of the news Thursday afternoon in New York according to a public post on Gawker’s website. A bankruptcy court signed off on the Univision acquisition later on Thursday.

Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy early this year after a Florida jury hit the company with a $140 million judgement after it published excerpts from a video of Hulk Hogan having sex. Hogan’s lawsuit was backed by billionaire hedge funder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel, who has previously called Gawker Media’s now-defunct Valleywag blog “the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda.” In 2007, Valleywag published an article outing Thiel as gay.

The post on Gawker noted that near-term plans for Gawker.com, as well as the site’s archives, have not been finalized.

“I will move on to other projects, working to make the web a forum for the open exchange of ideas and information, but out of the news and gossip business,” said Denton in a statement sent to Recode‘s Peter Kafka. “Gawker.com may, like Spy Magazine in its day, have a second act. For the moment, however, it will be mothballed, until the smoke clears and a new owner can be found. The archives will remain, but Monday’s posts will be the last of this iteration.”