Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 11 Dec. "Former Gawker employees are crowdfunding to relaunch a that’s owned by a nonprofit and funded by readers." Nieman Journalism Lab. If foundations are wary to support it, then we hope the readers will be able to support it themselves.” While additional foundation support would certainly be welcome, “the whole purpose of this is to create a Gawker that is beholden to no one except the readers. “The nonprofit model serves two purposes…one, it forces us to use every dollar raised to fund the preservation and operation of the site, and two, it provides an advantageous legal structure in which no person ‘owns’ the site (and therefore no single person can be easily targeted by parties looking to ‘destroy’ the site),” he wrote. Would other potential nonprofit and foundation supporters feel uncomfortable something styled like the old Gawker?
I asked Del about the proposed nonprofit ownership structure.
Gawker relaunch free#
Whoever becomes the owner of would be free to delete stories. Thiel, of course, is the guy who secretly bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s invasion of privacy lawsuit that ultimately led to Gawker Media’s bankruptcy, and who personally objected to specific stories. The work on had been ongoing months before Peter Thiel’s lawyers caused some alarm last month by filing a motion in court that challenged Thiel’s exclusion from the bidding process for. If the Kickstarter fails or if the SaveGawker bid fails, a new site will still launch, under a different name. We don’t know what kind of bids the estate will be getting so the more money we raise, the more competitive we can be at auction.” “I’ve been in digital publishing for 10 years and have a good understanding of the costs needed to run a lean site. The current goal to raise $500,000 by January 8, 2018, will give the effort behind the effort the “minimum amount needed to start a new publication and preserve the archives effectively,” Del told me via Twitter DMs. If relaunched, the new site won’t run advertising or have a paywall. The other people all have day jobs they can't quit until they know whether it's funded.Īccording to the Kickstarter, the newly formed Gawker Foundation aims to keep the entirety of the archives public, and restart the site with some of the old staff and some new writers, under a member-funded model. Some news: Today, after months of work from a handful of former employees/friends (incl we're proud launch, a effort to preserve the archives and make a bid to buy back the site. Many of the former Gawker staffers involved in the effort are still employed elsewhere, so their names aren’t currently disclosed with this crowdfunding drive, but Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers has committed to being on its board of directors.
Discussions about the effort to somehow relaunch “started back in August and continued through the fall with over a dozen former employees and editors,” according to James Del, currently the chief revenue officer at Futurism and the former VP of programming at Gawker Media. The Foundation was formed on November 21 of this year. The flagship became an orphan site after Univision bought all Gawker Media properties last summer - but didn’t include - and reunited the newly acquired group of sites under the name Gizmodo Media Group (which now also includes sites like The Root and The Onion.)įormer employees launched a Kickstarter campaign on Monday to buy and revive as a membership-funded site owned by the nonprofit The Gawker Foundation. launched Monday in an effort to…well, save, and relaunch it as a member-supported news site.
0 kommentar(er)
