This could get awkward — even by Gawker’s standards.
Fragments of the former Gawker empire may soon be reunited — by a scruffy, 35-year-old media mogul who has gotten blasted by some of its snarky sites as a “frat boy,” a “ f- -k boss” and a “self-satisfied s- -tlord.”
Bryan Goldberg — a hard-bargaining web entrepreneur who scooped the Gawker site out of bankruptcy for $1.35 million last summer — is closing in on Gizmodo Media Group with a sweetened takeover bid, The Post has learned.
In addition to its namesake tech blog, Gizmodo owns Deadspin and Jezebel — all of which had been controlled by Gawker founder Nick Denton before the group got forced under in 2016 by a $140 million judgement against it for publishing a Hulk Hogan sex tape.
Now, sources say Goldberg has corralled a fresh crew of investors to reunite the sites with a bid for Gizmodo that’s valued between $30 million and $40 million. While that’s higher than his previous bid, which remains unknown, it’s less than a third of the $135 million Gizmodo’s owner Univision paid to buy the sites in 2016, sources said.
Goldberg’s firm Bustle Digital Group — which lately has been branded a “last-resort” buyer of web assets, most recently scooping up the news blog Mic for less than $5 million — sent his offer to Univision’s banker, Morgan Stanley, last week, a source said.
A meeting to discuss Goldberg’s offer was cancelled abruptly Thursday — raising questions about Univision’s interest in it.
Univision declined to comment.
The Onion, a profitable satirical site in which Univision owns a controlling stake, isn’t part of the auction, sources said.
Nevertheless, a Gawker reunion could rile scribes at Gizmodo sites, who have relentlessly skewered Goldberg. In late November on the day before he bought Mic, the company’s 70-person unionized editorial staff got laid off. Writers at Gizmodo’s Splinter site, also part of a union, wrote a sharp-tongued piece that branded Goldberg a “f- -k boss” and encouraged Bustle Media employees via Twitter to unionize.
Things got worse two weeks ago, when Splinter published a takedown of four new hires to run the revamped Gawker site, calling them “media chuds” and uncovering a host of “bigoted” tweets from its editorial director, Carson Griffith.
Days later, Gawker’s two new reporters quit, telling the Daily Beast that Goldberg “refuses to listen to the women who work for him when it’s inconvenient.”
A rep from Gawker said it is looking into the claims, but the public implosion has delayed the site’s relaunch.
Univision boss Vince Sadusky is reportedly eager to unload Gizmodo to refocus on the company’s core Spanish-language TV and web-broadcasting businesses.
“I think Univision just wants to get rid of Gizmodo,” a well-placed source said. “They’ll take the hit.”
When it put Gizmodo up for sale over the summer, sources said that the company wanted $100 to $120 million for the sites. By December, it is believed that Univision would have settled for $80 million, which insiders said was around the amount of revenue the collection of sites brought in annually.
But at the time, the only suitors for Gizmodo were Goldberg, who wasn’t willing to pay that sum, a private equity firm, and Gannett, which became the surprise takeover target for hedge-fund-backed media group MNG Enterprises.
In addition to buying Gawker out of bankruptcy, Goldberg co-founded the sports site Bleacher Report and sold it in 2012 to Turner Broadcasting for more than $200 million. That sale helped fund the launch of Bustle Digital, which includes the women’s site Bustle, Elite Daily and Rachel Zoe’s Zoe Report.