AFTER A 14-YEAR run, Gawker.com is shutting down next week. Gawker Media’s new owner, US Spanish-language TV network Univision, made the decision to shut down the site after bidding $135 million for the web publisher’s seven-site portfolio in a bankruptcy auction earlier this week. (A bankruptcy judge is set to approve the final sale later today.) Gawker’s outgoing CEO Nick Denton broke the news to staffers in Gawker’s Manhattan office today.

The end of Gawker is also the end of an era in the web’s short history. As one of the original online journalism upstarts, Gawker pushed editorial boundaries beyond the niceties of traditional mainstream journalism in a way that has come to define the tone and style of news on the web. At its worst, Gawker published articles with seemingly little news value, like its purported outing of a Condé Nast executive (Condé Nast is WIRED’s parent company). At its best, Gawker punched up with a vengeance, holding powerful public figures and institutions accountable. In the process, Gawker often angered those same powerful people, including two fateful posts that led to its undoing: one that identified billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel as gay, and another that excerpted a Hulk Hogan sex tape. Thiel secretly bankrolled Hogan’s invasion of privacy lawsuit against Gawker, and Hogan won in court. The $140 million judgment against Gawker eventually bankrupted the company, forcing it to sell its editorial assets. Now Gawker.com is no more.

Gawker writers will reportedly keep their jobs at one of Gawker Media’s six other sites, or at other properties owned by Univision. (The TV network also owns the tech-centric Fusion, the black news and culture site The Root, as well as a minority stake in The Onion.)

Wherever those writers land, Gawker’s shuttering is a sobering reality check not just for its own employees but journalists in general. Whether or not you agreed with its approach, Gawker’s willingness to push limits and stir controversy underscores the whole point of the First Amendment. “The biggest [downside] is losing the financial independence that let us write whatever we want without any fear of corporate overlords trying to quash us,” one Gawker Media writer told WIRED when the company declared bankruptcy. Now, it seems, those outside forces—with the help of a powerful tech tycoon—accomplished just that.