kontextmaschine:

Splinter, the Gawker-alike the former Gawker Media portfolio whipped up to replace Gawker, is shutting down, because apparently the new private equity owners have more compelling uses for their resources than Hamilton Nolan’s project to agitate content workers against private equity

This leaves Deadspin’s “The Concourse” imprint for non-sports content as the clearest surviving heir to Gawker

And now the threatened boom is coming down, and G/O ownership is purging the non-sports stuff.

All the staffs are in rebellion, and they were first and biggest about digging themselves in with union contracts, so who knows how that goes, but I can’t picture their endgame. They drive value of ownership down to literally zero, reminding this generation of media and private equity enterprises that unions are fatal infections?

And then buy it for $1 and run it as a worker-owned co-op? They say they can make a real but non-astounding profit. But that’s with the Kinja publishing platform, with the brand names and URLs and back catalogs. With whatever physical or institutional infrastructure they built up (and the debt obligations that funded it). And that’d all be stripped off and sold as scrap.

They could restart from square one, but then they always could. They could’ve quit en masse and founded Square One Blog Network on any given day, using their own resources, or those of anyone willing to put resources in the hands of the “any resources put in our hands are ours forever to do anything we want with” people, but they haven’t yet.