How Deadspin profits off an army of idiot sports posts
A preface to this: I’ve never worked for SB Nation. I’ve written a single piece for one of their blogs for no money. I think their content in general is cool. Now then, onto this monstrosity. As much as I’d love ripping it to bits word-by-word, this fucker has over 7,000 of them, so you know it’s well thought-out and researched, full of facts and findings to make a deliberate poin- hahahahahahahahaha.
Okay, well, I was going to begin voicing disagreement at the lede until I discovered it was about 1,500 words long. Jesus Christ. Most of it was a rambling laundry list of complaints about Vox’s practices, so I really can’t tell you what specifically this story is attacking. We’ll just skip to the actual story and go forward, but to help confused readers out about what we’re delving into: SB NATION BAD.
While business at SB Nation and Vox Media is — by their own account — booming, the requirements for site managers to produce are getting more demanding, at least in some areas. SB Nation NBA league manager Seth Pollack, for instance, sent a memo to his team-site managers earlier this year, that, among other requirements, mandated that all “writer contributors will be asked to sign new contracts specifying that they will only get paid if they reach their target number of posts.” (Read the full memo here.)
I reached out to Pollack for his perspective on the seemingly drastic changes — among other things, 25 percent of the monthly stipends would be held ransom unless sites and writers met their “targets” — but he declined to comment on the record.
Seemingly drastic… to whom? Lots of sites have minimum post requirements, this is online sports blogging in 2017, you can’t expect the money fairy to drop out of the sky and pay you for that breakdown of Dion Waiters’ best mean-mugs of the season. Notice how nothing was done behind anyone’s back, a memo was sent out saying new contracts, not existing ones, required this clause. If you don’t like it, don’t sign the contract.
“I would get feedback if a NFL player complained to them about me. That irritated me because it seemed to be counter to what Jim and I would talk about. I asked Jim, ‘What is it we’re supposed to be here? Buddying up with NFL? Getting access? Or do we want to be on the outside and scrappy?’ Jim was very frank and very clear and said, ‘I don’t think it’s necessary to have access, we can be just as effective with what we do and not have access.’ That was not the message from the managers and the SB Nation people.”
Eventually, Wells said, SB Nation’s insistence on the sort of team-friendly coverage you’d get at a typical outlet and emphasis on quantity over quality became too much.
Online sports blog thing gets popular. Online sports blog thing wants to make more money, asks writers to not piss off those they are writing about. So nothing illegal or exploitative, then? Cool, cool.
This year alone, a rambling and homophobic blog post about Gordon Hayward was published and then deleted without explanation (the blogger was removed from the site’s masthead; Pollack ignored our questions about his firing); a post about Ezekiel Elliott implying that women accuse men of violence for money, was published and then deleted on a Cowboys site (the blogger is still at the site); and a nearly wholly plagiarized post went up on the Broncos team site and was later deleted (the blogger was “let go”).
The SB Nation team site model is the perfect primordial soup within which to spawn posts like this. The entire point of these sites is ostensibly to provide a platform to passionate fans with minimal oversight; they are unprofessional by design, and in fact that’s what’s best about them. Put such sites under pressure to simply get content on the internet, though, and offensive takes, half-baked ideas, and plagiarism will repeatedly crop up — as would be expected in the absence of the professional infrastructure meant to prevent such things from being published, and has been true at many sites covering many fields in this manner. The flaws in the system are inherent to its design, all just part of doing business. And that’s exactly how SB Nation views it.
Yes, shitty editorial oversight is a flaw in this system. This system isn’t new, this flaw isn’t either. It’s happened to Bleacher Report before SB Nation and Fansided afterwards. I thought this article was about exploitation.
These disastrous posts make up an insignificant amount of everything SB Nation posts, most of which is fine, and some of which is excellent, but the pattern is clear: SB Nation profits from everything — from the best and most professional posts to the lowest-grade shit — knowing they can just delete the latter without explanation when people get mad about it.
I for one am appalled that SB Nation isn’t adhering to the journalistic standards of the New York Times. If people were truly mad about it and wanted change they would stop reading SB Nation until these posts stopped popping up. As a consumer, you stop giving them your money, that’s how you make a company do something else. Not even sure why firing those crappy writers and deleting their crappy posts isn’t enough. As written, it’s an insignificant portion of SB Nation’s words… much like it is of this article’s.
If too much were explicitly required of site managers, they could then qualify as employees and have the right to fair pay. (The Fair Labor Standards Act covers employees; it does not cover independent contractors and other exempt workers.) So as long as SB Nation can convince their workers, at least, that they’re legally in the clear in classifying them as independent contractors, they have more cover under wage and hour laws. Most of the site managers I spoke to don’t dwell on the legal implications of their employment status, but do think about the low pay, especially those who are students or aspiring sports journalists or otherwise see their work as a way to advance their career.
Woo! Finally to something of importance! Or at least clarity! Boom! SB Nation is screwing its writers by not labeling them as employees! Which is completely contradicted by all the site managers saying they don’t give a shit! Well done.
The site manager who makes less than $600 per month said she hopes to use the job as a springboard to a full-time job. She says she writes between two and three posts a week and tries to bring in more writers as well. At one point, she said, her site had dozens of writers, photographers and copy editors.
“That has dropped significantly because they’re not paid and life happens and they have work or school,” she said. “I wish I could pay them, because they go to games and we can’t even give them gas money.”
Such victims, volunteering to express their sports fandom through a medium they enjoy and not being able to once real life happens. However will they go on.
Scott Wheeler, who, until recently, ran Pension Plan Puppets, SB Nation’s Toronto Maple Leafs team site and one of its biggest NHL sites, said he got a monthly stipend — he declined to say how big it was — and that of his 15 to 20 writers, all but two received some monthly payment between $20 and $100. Wheeler said that it wasn’t like that in the beginning, but that as the site grew its numbers and increased its traffic, it had access to more resources.
“I have nothing bad to say about SB Nation,” he said. “They’ve been pretty good to me and they’re the reason I have a job right now. I was 19 when I started, so not many other sites would give that responsibility to someone that young.”
The. Sheer. Amount. Of. Reporting. In. This. Piece. That. Directly. Contradict. The. Point.
For Wheeler, who compared the job to an unpaid internship without the commute — ”I don’t see it as them stealing from us or taking advantage of us. I was the only person on our staff who was ever going to wind up in journalism” — the system worked. He made it from the minors to the big leagues, or as another site manager put it to me, from the NCAA to the pros. The similarities between the SB Nation blogger system and the NCAA’s faux amateurism came up several times in my reporting.
“It really annoys me when SB Nation.com writers will talk about how they hate the NCAA ripping off athletes by not paying them, because that’s the same thing that’s happening here,” the site manager said. “The NCAA says, ‘Oh, the athletes just love to play,’ and SB Nation says ‘Oh these are fan sites, they’re doing this for fun.’ It’s bullshit, it’s the same power-serving argument.”
This is a sports blogger, who blogs about sports, comparing himself to college kids that have to balance education and DI collegiate fucking sports that leave them with brain damage in the long run. It also has nothing to do with anything. It’s pandering to people who think college athletes should be paid. What does this have to do with anything.
“There’s a huge pool [of bloggers], some of whom will become the top one percent, the Grant Brisbees of the world, or the pro players, and the way to develop them is exploiting this massive pool of promising people. But the vast majority is just going to wash out and the organization at the top gets to skim off the top without investing in the others.”
It’s almost as if sports media isn’t a big market and the amount of suckers trying to break into a full-time job have saturated the talent pool. Nah, must be evil capitalists.
Despite feeling like the system is unfair, this site manager said, “I like doing it and I would not continue to do it if I didn’t. I think there is a freedom and a flexibility that we gain by the decentralized relationship. Is it enough to offset the terrible payments? But I say that and I’m still doing it. I could absolutely stop, but it’s still a positive experience.” He paused. “It’s almost like Stockholm syndrome, I’m saying it’s good even though it’s bullshit.”
This dude basically summed up this story. It’s bullshit! Even though it’s not, and I can quit, and I’m enjoying it, but it’s bullshit! I’m a damn victim in this!
Seth Rosenthal, who managed the Knicks team site, Posting and Toasting, for 10 years, starting when he was still in high school, used his SB Nation site manager position to do just that. […] Rosenthal made it to to the promised land, but still struggles to make sense of the unpaid-blogger system, though he thinks the NCAA comparison is off.
“I see that parallel, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard an SB Nation employee or executive say or even insinuate we have a huge group of bloggers who do it for the love of it. Maybe that’s an assumption underlying it, but that’s something that’s never said. I have no idea how much money SB Nation is making off the team blogs, but an NCAA basketball player is losing out on millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars by not getting paid on his likeness and performance and for his work. I suspect that it’s not as much money being left on the table in this case. The NCAA would not be my comparison — I see it more as the basic unpaid internship.”
I love Seth. I have always loved Seth. Thank you Seth.
Though the comparison comes up a fair amount, site-manager jobs aren’t really like unpaid internships. The positions are largely unsupervised — there’s little formal training or close mentoring — and, even more basically, site managers and bloggers aren’t there to learn; they are expected to produce an at least vaguely professional product that Vox Media can then sell to advertisers. This is a genuine distinction.
If you think unpaid internships are highly supervised with lots of formal training and close mentoring and don’t benefit the company you have never ever ever held an unpaid internship in your life.
Rosenthal’s a sharp writer, with a tuned, witty voice, and he deserves his success. But he’s open about why the SB Nation team site system worked for him.
“I am a very fortunate and privileged individual and throughout college and even after I graduated college I could afford to work basically for free. And if you look around, the people who run the best team sites and furthermore have graduated and taken the opportunity to move on from the team site to the mainpage are people like me who could afford to do it,” he said. “I fully believe in the power of an SB Nation team blog to give you a platform to jumpstart your career with SB Nation or just as sports or media person in general, but to even get to that spot, you need to be willing to able to work for free. And that inherently thins the pool of people getting that initial opportunity.”
SBNation.com hires many of its full-time employees from team sites. Those staffers — Rosenthal, NFL league manager Joel Thorman, Grant Brisbee, NBA league manager Seth Pollack, MLB league manager Justin Bopp, NHL league manager Travis Hughes and others — have tended to be white men.
Once again, you can agree with this worldview, but what in absolute anything does this have to do with SB Nation exploiting people? This is not even close to a Vox-only dilemma and is mentioned here and sort of later, in no connection to a singular train of thought. Remember kids: SB NATION BAD.
When spoken out loud, the contradictions in how SB Nation describes itself are as clear as they are absurd: We don’t do the wrong thing you’re asking us about, and if it does happen it’s wrong. We give site managers autonomy, but also can kick them off the site if they do something that gets us too much negative attention. The idea, in general, seems to be that the team sites are essentially grassroots operations and that the people who run them as glorified hobbyists being given shining opportunities that they should be grateful for.
I’m realizing now I forgot to look up this idiot article’s writer’s name. So Writer here talks to some SB Nation executives or whatever and they explain that their policy is that everybody should get paid, something, at least, but it’s on the site managers to distribute whatever they earn. And yes, genius, companies that hire people can give them autonomy and fire them when they fuck up. The last sentence was written with a hint of snide, clearly, but it’s about right. They are grassroots operations as site managers are given complete control within certain parameters. Nothing in this article suggests editorial overreach by the corporate heads. And, yes, these sports bloggers are glorified hobbyists. You have to be insane to suggest that there is a salary somewhere for every game recapper (robots can do this), hot-take disher (high school kids can do this) and Twitter GM (none of you know more than actual GM’s, just shut the fuck up) out there. It is a shining opportunity to be grateful for, because plenty of these folks, who are fans and not journalism majors at the end of the day, get to cover games and talk to their heroes. If you were promised no money, got to experience these fun things and are now bitching about getting no money, maybe you didn’t like doing it in the first place. 95% of the people doing this are not expecting, planning for, or pursuing a full-time job in it. If you believe they are, you’re a moron. If they are, they are morons.
Secondly, if each site gets around $600 per month, that amounts to $2.3 million a year — pennies for a company worth more than $1 billion, especially given that the work done by the people earning those pennies accounts for a significant portion of SB Nation’s overall traffic, according to ComScore. (SB Nation lumps all of its team-site traffic, as well as traffic from the Eater sites, Racked, and Curbed, under the total network traffic for SB Nation.
Writer person is now officially a moron. If you think a $1 billion valuation means Vox has $1 billion stashed in some bank account, you are someone that has never owned a business, talked to a business owner or worked for a company in any significant capacity. Also you have no common sense. A $1 billion value means if SB Natio- excuse me, Vox as a god damn whole (BUT SURE USE THIS NUMBER FOR YOUR ARGUMENT) liquidated literally their entire company — you know: payroll, assets, licensing agreements, domain names, broom closets — it would be worth around $1 billion. This person has no idea what they are talking about. This person is so infatuated with victim culture or so bent on taking down some mythical evil corporate giant they are now calling (their words: white male) internet sports bloggers that are mostly content with the consensual engagement they are participating in victims.
SB Nation is not paying everyone who contributes to Vox Media, which is in violation of company policy, but even the workers that SB Nation does pay could have legally valid complaints.
YES. FINALLY. HERE WE GO.
There is an argument to be made that they are employees, not independent contractors, which would mean they are protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which mandates minimum wage and other protections.
ALRIGHT LET’S GO.
Hope Pordy of Spivak Lipton LLP said the issue of classifying independent contractors is complicated and frequently arises in gig-economy work.
“Are they truly independent contractors? That can be challenged, and the big question is who really has the right to control the means and methods of performing the work,” she said. “Do they set the hours, or require they work from a certain location? Are they saying you need to work this many hours per week? Imposing deadlines? Other things that are important is looking at how that work is being evaluated. Is there training? Who’s overseeing the work? Are they subject to the same workplace rules as staffers? What’s the longevity of work? Can they be terminated?”
OHHH YEAAA- wait this is it? A lawyer saying “meh, maybe” is the argument here?
“There are a couple of different types of FLSA cases,” he said. “One is a misclassification case, when an employer claims their workers are independent contractors or otherwise exempt. Hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 20 years have been paid out in settlements and judgements against companies that have misclassified their employees.”
Without more information, neither lawyer could determine whether team-site managers — who, again, are responsible for producing and editing all manner of content that populates the SB Nation’s team sites so that Vox Media can sell ads against it — are independent contractors or not.
This piece is utter bullshit.
The SB Nation team-site institution is a relic from a past internet age, in which having a blog was something special and business strategies didn’t hinge directly on advertising dollars. When anyone can make a blog on WordPress or Tumblr or post something on Medium or any other of the near-infinite options for putting your ideas online, though, having a platform like an SB Nation blog site becomes more appealing. SB Nation knows this, plays up that advantage in recruiting contributors, and uses it to wring labor from people. It is not alone in having done this; many companies including Gawker Media Group, the former parent company of Deadspin, have attempted to carry out similar strategies.
Yeaaah, bingo. It sounds like you’re mad at SB Nation for doing what any sports media company that wants to survive in this market does. There’s a reason this system is a relic.
What makes this one unique is its persistence, scope, and professionalization, and the extent to which it has become integral to a billion-dollar enterprise; the issue isn’t the choices SB Nation has made so much as the ones it’s making. SB Nation (and by extension Vox Media) needs these blog sites because they are 319 online advertising canvasses. It doesn’t appear to really care what goes on them — so long as it’s drawing traffic and isn’t too fucked-up — or about the people who put it there.
Alright at least we’re trying to argue what’s unique about SB Nation’s heathenous transgressions. Persistence! Well, B/R and Fansided haven’t folded their 300+ blogs (or team sites, whatever) since blowing up either. Scope! Er, huh? Professionalization! The Knicks site currently has a tribute article to Marshall Plumlee and a brief history of Knicks fans getting tattoos of Knicks players. I thought Writer was arguing earlier that this whole thing had no editorial supervision which allowed for shitty writing? BILLION-DOLLAR ENTERPRISE! Do read that in a Bernie Sanders voice. Again, that’s Vox as a whole, you dolt. I don’t know what Bleacher Report’s current value is but it can’t be far off from SB Nation’s, but this is a unique problem, or something.
Vox Media is doing better than ever, but the network on which their fortunes were built is still a product of the work of people paid little or no money. Whether that’s company policy or not, that’s what’s happening. SB Nation seems to be in no rush to fix it.
Fixing something usually implies there’s a problem. There is obviously no problem for Vox, especially on legal grounds. If any of these bloggers really thought they had a case in court, I don’t think there’s a shortage of bloodthirsty anti-corporation lawyers in the United freakin’ States to take this up. There is no ethical argument when you can’t prove that SB Nation is purposely siphoning extra money that could be going to these bloggers or tricking them in any way.
The only problem here is Writer thinks bloggers are getting screwed because they aren’t making money. Notice I say Writer and not the actual bloggers, because there were like two quotes complaining about low pay with any actual disdain or regret behind them and they were from two managers that left their sit- HMM. WAIT A MINUTE. Is it possible, in a free market economy, that if you don’t like the consensually agreed-upon relationship you have with an employer, you can leave and find somewhere else to get paid what you’re actually worth to the market?
Apparently not to folks who agree with this malarky. You know why bloggers aren’t leaving SB Nation in droves? Because they don’t make money for anybody. They can’t make money for a company to pay them a decent salary. Because they blog about which right tight end on the Edmonton Oilers is converting more free throws during the solar eclipse. The reason Writer doesn’t propose a viable alternative is because none exists.
If you dislike that reality, find some market solutions that better make money off sports words instead of blaming a single company that actually provides good content for us and experience and a platform for their writers. Is it hard, maybe impossible? Sure. But you don’t see the bloggers going off on solo ventures using Patreon or getting hired by The Athletic complaining about low pay anymore. They found solutions. To a problem, I’ll remind people, that most SB Nation employees don’t see as a problem. There were many voices that came out in opposition of this idiot story, not the least of which from former SB Nation writers. This is beyond dumb, beyond petty, beyond reaching. If you’re going to bitch about unfair labor practices, maybe the topic should be the X amount of dollars you got paid for this that should’ve gone to the guy who wrote the Marshall Plumlee tribute. 7,000 words. I need a drink.
