But a close examination of what, exactly, happened at the new almost-Gawker reveals a great deal about a man who appears to know what he wants but isn’t exactly sure how to get it.
The master plan of Bryan Goldberg, potential media mogul, was becoming increasingly difficult to decipher.
Or, to be more precise, decided not to get it going again in the first place. A year after he bought it, hired a pricey staff of media veterans, and announced big plans, Goldberg and Bustle Digital Group abruptly shut it down. Then he went on a buying spree: Elite Daily, Mic, Nylon.Īnd there was the Gawker thing. When Bustle succeeded-his second from-scratch business-it was harder to dismiss it as a fluke. Goldberg and his partners sold the fluke to Turner for a reported $175-200 million. When Bleacher Report, his first site, succeeded in the mid-2000s, it was a surprise-a fan-driven site that paid next to nothing and was largely unedited and yet had 10 million monthly readers. And yet he has somehow made himself impossible to ignore. He has been ridiculed as a clueless, alpha-male dilettante. Into the small club of media moguls comes Bryan Goldberg, Libertarian, liberal-arts educated, unpredictable in his taste for media properties (The Outline? Inverse?).
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With owning media outlets-whether a small-town newspaper or a TV empire and everything in between-comes the power to direct the flow of information, and the money that can be made from people’s desire for information. The media business has always drawn a particular breed of ego. Goldberg bought the Gawker domain at a bankruptcy auction last year. It was just the three of us.’ And I said, ‘You gotta remember it comes with a lot of baggage.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but it’s still Gawker.’”īryan Goldberg attending Bustle’s Rule Breakers Festival on Septemin Brooklyn, New York. Lee continues: “ said, ‘I’m actually surprised nobody else is here-BuzzFeed isn’t here, Vox isn’t here, Complex Media isn’t here. And yet there he was, buying it-or what was left of it two years after a weird, public, and spectacular downfall involving a sex tape. So his wide-eyed reverence for Gawker-not to mention his willingness to pay seven figures for it-was maybe a little curious. Gawker had once run a story about Goldberg under the headline “Who Gave This Asshole $6.5 Million To Launch a Bro-Tastic Lady Site?” back when Bustle was first starting, one of several fiercely unflattering stories about him. And he said, ‘I haven’t exactly decided yet-but it is Gawker, so that makes it special.’” “I asked him what he was going to do with it. “I waited for Bryan after the auction to congratulate him,” says Lee, who had wanted to relaunch the brand as Gawker for Good, with positive stories about celebrities. On his way out of the Ropes & Gray offices, Goldberg encountered Lee, who had been waiting for him. Goldberg arrived with BDG’s senior director of legal affairs as well as his chief financial officer, and won the auction for $1.35 million, a relatively tiny sum that would have been considered the steal of the century during Gawker’s heyday but now seemed-well, put it this way: Plenty of people were wondering why Gawker was worth anything at all. Only three potential buyers showed up: Kevin Lee, the executive chairman of Didit, an online marketing firm someone from a company called Online Logo Maker and Bryan Goldberg, 36, founder and CEO of Bustle Digital Group, a collection of content-creating websites led by Bustle, a site written by and for women. The site hadn’t published a story in two years. Up for sale: the domain name and online archives of Gawker, the once-mighty website whose know-it-all attitude and everyone’s-a-target modus operandi helped define the New York media landscape in the 2000s. On July 12, 2018, at the law offices of Ropes & Gray in a midtown Manhattan high-rise near Rockefeller Center, attorneys and bidders gathered for a bankruptcy auction.
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