This Blog Is Over.
The smarmers’ favorite weapon was always just the site’s tagline. A blog would go up about something other than sports—Roth teasing open the Big Wet President, or Drew vaporizing Bret Stephens, or me on, like, how to make sausage gravy—and here it would come, in the comments or in the tips inbox: “I thought Deadspin was ‘sports news without access, favor, or discretion?’ How is this sports?”
Sometimes it would even show up on sports-related stuff. In an earlier era this was always Craggs rage-puking four perfect, deadly, bilious paragraphs onto some stupid or dishonest act of sportswriting, a core Deadspin beat never served half as well by anyone else. And there it would be, in the comments: “Sports news?” (That was a tell. Because if Deadspin often was not about sports, the complaints that Deadspin had strayed from sports were never about sports. Jim Spanfeller may care about sports—many herbs do!—but he does not care about Deadspin caring about sports.)
A fun variation went: “I have been reading Deadspin since [some mid-aughts year and/or a direct invocation of Leitch], but now that the site has abandoned ‘sports news without access, favor, or discretion’ for [this was always ‘liberal propaganda’ pre-Trump, and switched to ‘leftist virtue-signaling’ after], I won’t be returning.” We got at least one of these a week, as recently as this week. A funny thing about this was the pretense that the site had only lately begun to traffic in commie shit. C’mon, man.
But the funnier thing about it was how seriously it took the tagline. The tagline was a joke. The idiots and lunatics who worked there took many things far too seriously, but never, so far as I know, cared one collective whit about the stupid tagline. What even was its origin story? I feel like I remember reading once that Leitch just made it up on the fly so the site could have a tagline. Is that true? No idea. Will I double-check with him? No. Because nobody ever cared.
Somebody could have changed it at some point! But nobody did, owing to the particular natural affinity for self-sabotage and absurdity that made it such a great and stupid place to work. Deadspin was the place that solicited creative photoshops from readers, received thousands of entries, and then collectively forgot to do anything with any of them, forever. Deadspin was the place that marked anniversaries a day too late and at a certain point just simply wandered away from maintaining its own annual Hall of Fame, not out of cleverness but out of institutional ADHD. Deadspin never had its shit together. An accurate, descriptive tagline, one that served literally anyone other than the smoothest-brained bad-faith critics, would have been a misrepresentation, a factual inaccuracy, a failure of journalism.
However it came to be, its role in the life of the site was like a small, cheap, badly inked bicep tattoo leftover as the permanent residue of a blackout drunk. One does not anchor a conscience to that tattoo, even if it is a tattoo of an anchor. Imagine putting on your surest triumphal smirk and being like “Oh, I thought you were about shooting arrows through hearts” at a stranger when you spot him failing to shoot an arrow through a heart. Imagine believing you were catching him doing a hypocrisy this way. Invoking his sense of honor or accountability. My god, he’s right. I’ve abandoned shooting arrows through hearts, the locus of my identity.
The site’s smuggest and dumbest critics had this particular dumb idea in common with the men who spent many millions of (probably borrowed, lol) dollars to purchase it, and then destroyed it. Another thing they had in common: None of them ever actually read the site.
(It’s too late for this to do either group much good, but: Deadspin was a site animated not by sports, but by a particular attitude and set of commitments toward looking at, and doing journalism and writing about, the things its writers and editors cared about. Its non-sports stuff worked—so much so that the site probably could have made more money as a politics, pop culture, and lifestyle blog with a sports vertical attached—because lots and lots of readers, to their eternal discredit, wanted Deadspin’s take on things, even if those things were not sports. We tried to explain this to its last editorial director several times. It was like trying to explain basic multiplication to a boot.)
It would have been very easy for Deadspin’s owners to just get rid of the tagline. Instead they kept the tagline and got rid of everything else. That’s just smart business.