Sploid is closed. A short message on the tabloid news site says:
Sploid is closed, and its domain and content archive are for sale.Serious buyers should contact [email protected].
Sploid came upon the scene being described as a serious challenger to The You Know Who Report (that pioneering site that has lots of up-to-the-minute news links but if you link to one of its original reports you could find that it’s inaccurate later…but there is seldom a retraction or clarification…since the off-the-mark post just vanishes).
It evolved into a site with its own playful, delightful tabloid style. It was NOT a copy of any other site — it was a delicious original.
The full details of what happened — done in by some key changes within the corporation and a redesign — were carried in THIS POST. Read all of it. Here’s part of it:
Suddenly bored of the whole operation, the editors demanded that Gawker sell the site to the lowest bidder. Various suitors came a-courtin’ — including one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world (not the one that bought MySpace) — and at one point the entire staff had been “hired” by a giant corporation while lawyers “worked out the details,” “dotted the i’s” and ran or knocked various things up flagpoles and around ballparks.
Needless to say, they pussed out at the last minute.
Thank you for reading Sploid, sending tips, blogging about us, and linking our stories on Fark or Metafilter or Digg or wherever. And thanks to Gawker, the archives will remain here for your enjoyment until somebody really buys the site just to get all this trash off the Google search results.
As Serge Gainsbourg said, “Je suis venu te dir’que je m’en vais.”
TMV doesn’t care if he’s in the minority or not. He LOVED Sploid. And he’ll miss it.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.