Peter Thiel submits bid for Gawker

Re:Peter Thiel submits bid for Gawker by gkoberger on Thursday January 11, 2018 @04:47PM (#16128244)

Something really scary that's silently happening is activists taking over well-known/"famous" publications and changing the narrative without changing the name:

  - WaPo was bought by Bezos
  - Local news stations (Tribune) bought by Sinclair
  - WSJ was bought by Murdoch
  - Newsweek bought by IAC
  - GigaOM was sold off and has new writers
  - Gawker now potentially being owned by a guy with a grudge

We trust many of these news organizations because they've been around for years or decades or even centuries. And many times, we don't realize that their priorities have silently shifted.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Peter Thiel submits bid for Gawker by shortformblog on Thursday January 11, 2018 @05:02PM (#16128436)

Let's be clear, here: WaPo is not in the same category as most of your other examples.

It just has a different owner, and the prior owner (the Graham family), while not as rich as Bezos, was still plenty rich. Don Graham famously tried to invest in Facebook as early as 2005: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/02/02/facebo...

Bezos, while involved, has not changed the basic tenor of its journalism beyond maybe souping up some of its technology. Also, WaPo publishes pieces critical of Amazon and its subsidiaries all the time:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/07...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/is-amazon-getting-to...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/whole-foods-...

(Also, but on a different note, GigaOM was sold off because it had previously shut down and laid off all its writers.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Peter Thiel submits bid for Gawker by gkoberger on Thursday January 11, 2018 @05:09PM (#16128493)

I agree with you. They're all done for different reasons.

I'm 100% pro-Bezos buying WaPo, especially since it seems he hasn't touched the editorial side of things. BUT it has been used to discredit legitimate WaPo journalism by Trump ("Amazon's Washington Post" / "Bezos Washington Post" / etc)

I included GigaOM because it's probably closest to Gawker (relatively small blog, shut down due to external forces, and brought back with a new name).

I didn't mean to imply all of these were nefarious changes. Rather, they're examples of people hijacking well-trusted (or well-known) brand names, which in the world of blogs/twitter/rumors are hard to come by.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Peter Thiel submits bid for Gawker by emodendroket on Friday January 12, 2018 @09:47AM (#16133160)

Remember that story with the company management stepping in because a feud between Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann was starting to get into unsavory business of the networks' parent companies? The idea that Jeff Bezos could influence the Post's coverage isn't outlandish, even if Trump rather cynically invoked the concept.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Peter Thiel submits bid for Gawker by sytelus on Thursday January 11, 2018 @05:00PM (#16128415)

People are realising media is dirt cheap for the power it exerts. For a fraction of your net worth, you can buy big stack or even entire Fox News or Breitbart or Times and change it the way you want. You can not only transmit your ideology on large portion of the population but even propel your commercial agenda. I think sooner or later people will realize that instead of spending big marketing $$, buying up media outright might be more cost effective.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Peter Thiel submits bid for Gawker by knownothing on Thursday January 11, 2018 @05:02PM (#16128431)

It's a concerning trend. Another strange example: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-la-weekly-20171129-sto...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Peter Thiel submits bid for Gawker by AnimalMuppet on Thursday January 11, 2018 @05:47PM (#16128802)

And, on the other side, Fox just got bought by Disney.

[ Parent | on HN ]