G/O Media Doesn’t Understand Deadspin … or the Digital Media

Tim Healey
Nov 3 · 9 min read

Deadspin, the popular and sometimes controversial blog that ostensibly focused on sports, is dead.

Not technically. As I write this, the site still exists, and the owners, G/O Media, have plans to keep it going. But the entire editorial staff has quit over the past week.

The staff quit after the interim managing editor/editor-in-chief, Barry Petchesky, was fired abruptly early in the week after pushing back against a “stick to sports” edict from upper management. Another issue — G/O had upset readers of all the company’s sites (including Gizmodo, which covers tech/environment; Kotaku, which covers video games; Jalopnik, which covers automotive (and full disclosure, is a competitor of the Web site I manage); Jezebel, a feminist site; The Root, a site focused on African-American readers; and the satirical site The Onion; among others) by striking an advertising deal with Farmer’s Insurance that included autoplay ads with sounds.

After readers complained in the comments’ sections of each site, every site responded with a post telling readers how to reach G/O’s offices to give feedback. Those posts were taken down over the editorial staffs’ objections, in what may be a violation of the contract collectively bargained by the employees’ union.

You might not think it odd that corporate management would ask a sports site to stick to sports, especially when its corporate siblings are covering politics and pop culture and other topics that Deadspin touched on. If you don’t think the edict was odd, you likely don’t know much about Deadspin, its corporate history, or a certain influential and popular part of the digital media industry that includes all the G/O sites.

Deadspin is/was popular in part because it DIDN’T stick to sports. There’s plenty of evidence that its non-sports posts actually trafficked better, by as much as two-to-one, than the site’s sports posts.

Moreover, as someone who has been a near-daily reader of the site for the better part of the past decade, I can say with some certainty that despite the traffic success of non-sports content, the majority of Deadspin’s content was still sports-related. Of course, “sports related” is a tricky term that can be interpreted either very generously or quite strictly, but by my very informal count, Deadspin’s post mix was always around 80–90 percent sports-related, even going by the tightest definition.

Another way to look at it was that sports was the site’s bread and butter, but writers and editors knew that readers would read about non-sports topics if they were interesting and the content was well-written.

Deadspin staff had a few objections to “sticking to sports.” The site was critical of other sites such as ESPN for doing so, since in their view the outside world, especially the political world, did intersect with sports almost all the time (think “black power” salutes in the 1970s or Colin Kapernick kneeling during the national anthem today, or the debate of public financing for stadiums, or the military’s use of sporting events for positive press, and on and on and on), and a lack of coverage/discussion from mainstream outlets like ESPN was seen as an abdication of journalistic responsibility.

It was also seen as cowardice — outlets cowing to a vocal minority of readers/viewers who objected to political coverage in sports media either because they wanted to escape politics (an impossibility, in Deadspin’s view) or were forced to confront the existence of politics they didn’t like/agree with.

Of course, the moral objection was just one. Deadspin’s top editors also knew the site was successful because it was willing to branch out.

Indeed, former boss Megan Greenwell said in her farewell post in August, a post in which she eviscerated the management of G/O Media under CEO Jim Spanfeller and Editorial Director Paul Maidment, that Deadspin’s top editorial workers would be willing to compromise their vision for the site if their forays into non-sports topics were hurting Deadspin. Greenwell made it clear that she quit not just out of a moral objection to “sticking to sports,” but because she believed it was bad for business.

Surely, six months of management should have taught Spanfeller and Maidment that Deadspin was successful (and it was, by all accounts, successful) because it didn’t stick to sports. Not to mention that the G/O sites often overlapped when it came to coverage, or simply cross-posted stories across sites when it made sense to do so.

Indeed, Deadspin isn’t the only successful sports site that branched out into pop culture and beyond. I find the tone of Barstool Sports vile and misogynistic, but I can’t say the site isn’t successful. ESPN’s late Page 2 and Grantland sites were successful for quite some time, and The Ringer, led by Bill Simmons (arguably that most popular writer at Page 2 during its heyday, and the man who helmed Grantland) seems to be doing quite well by covering sports and pop culture and whatever else.

So it’s not like Deadspin had to stick to sports. There’s no law or journalistic code saying that an outlet focusing primarily on one subject can’t branch out. As long as there’s a market for the content, and the writers and editors can satisfactorily cover it, there’s no reason for limitations. Even when a site has corporate siblings that are covering other subjects.

Spanfeller and G/O don’t seem to understand that. That, or they don’t care — G/O is part of private-equity firm Great Hill Partners, and PE firms have a reputation for not caring about the long-term success of their properties. Instead, they often focus on mining as many short-term profits out of their properties as they can while stripping them to the bones before flipping them (there are instances of PE firms actually turning around troubled companies, to be fair). Whether that’s the case here, or it’s simply a case of staggeringly stupid incompetence from management, it’s too early to tell.

Then again, this same G/O Media killed its left-leaning politics site, Splinter News, earlier in October. The cited reason was that the site was underperforming, traffic-wise, but even if that was true, it makes little sense to kill a political site that leans liberal when the current president, a Republican, is historically unpopular and facing impeachment, and also when the 2020 election year is beginning and the Democratic primary field is full of candidates vying from the nomination. Even if traffic was low now, it was likely to pick up over the next year.

Spanfeller himself hasn’t come across as particularly professional in all this. He apparently told Petchesky to “get the f — k out” when he let him go, and he apparently doesn’t even read the sites his company manages — he listed Drew Magary’s most recent weekly NFL preview as an example of a non-sports story the site shouldn’t run, simply because the headline (“You’re Goddamn Right It’s Layering Season”) didn’t make it obvious that the story was about the NFL.

Now he and/or Maidment have been caught re-purposing older stories as new content (as if readers wouldn’t notice) and his assertion that non-sports stories don’t traffic as well as sports stories has been apparently disproved by the traffic counters that run on each story, visible to all. Also, by the LA Times.

Earlier today, the counters disappeared. At some point this week, the ability to comment on most Deadspin stories also vanished.

Spanfeller’s reaction to the ad-feedback posts was tellingly petty, too. Instead of working with editors to placate angry readers (perhaps with a post saying “we know this sucks, but it pays the bills”) or working with the advertiser to adjust the deal, he or his minions pulled the post asking for feedback, perhaps against contractual stipulations. He seems determined to alienate readers over short-term monetary gain, which seems no way to run any business, let alone a media business that relies on repeat readers to be successful.

If Spanfeller knew anything about the sites, he’d know the ads would piss off readers and there would be a backlash. He’d also know the editorial staff, in a bid to placate readers, would post about it. And if he knew anything about Deadspin, he’d know they’d react to the “stick to sports” edict by intentionally spending a day featuring non-sports content to make a point.

How someone like Spanfeller got to his position boggles the mind. Perhaps he knows the right people, and/or perhaps his bosses were so dazzled by his ability to bring in short-term profits that they didn’t care about the long-term success of the sites he and Maidment are in charge of. Given that his run at Forbes made money while also significantly harming that brand’s reputation (two things that aren’t mutually exclusive), I’m betting on both.

In a sane world, Spanfeller wouldn’t have his gig, but we live in an insane world, where an incompetent performer can climb the ladder based on who he knows and how much money he can make them NOW, health of the product be damned.

Deadspin was never perfect, and just because I read it most days, that doesn’t mean I approved of every editorial decision the site made, or agreed with every take (I actually like Skyline Chili), or always liked the tone. The site could be needlessly mean, and it was also sexist/misogynist itself in the not-too-distant past (although it was never as mean or sexist as Barstool, no matter how much Barstool staff tries to say it was in order to justify their own crap). It did grow — in recent years, the tone remained irreverent and puckish while being less needlessly cruel, and the sexism faded away, with key writers acknowledging their past mistakes.

I also didn’t always agree with the level of aggressive journalism Deadspin performed. One example — the site was terribly insensitive of Jenn Sterger’s victimization when reporting on Brett Favre’s inappropriate advances towards her. I’m not aware of any true, obvious ethical violations, but Deadspin occasionally was bruising in a way that didn’t sit well with me.

Still, it broke important stories, or gave deeper coverage to stories broken by mainstream media. Stories like the Manti T’eo debacle or the Larry Nassar saga. The T’eo story was important because it reminded the rest of the media that journalists need to be less credulous, and the Nassar stuff was an unflinching look at truly heinous actions.

Not to mention that most of the content, sports-related or not, was worth reading. The deep dive into the obscure actor who played Vigo in Ghostbusters Two, the rankings of each states’ staple food, every Funbag, David Roth’s political writing — all that was interesting. And the sports content was often great, too — from Petchesky’s hockey analysis the morning after each NHL playoff game, to Dom Consentino’s NFL writing, to Magary’s hot takes on whatever sports subject was driving conversation at the moment. I’m told even the soccer stuff was good (as a casual fan at best, I ignored most of it).

The site also held the rest of the sports media — and larger media world — to account, as necessary. Deadspin wasn’t anti-journalism, but it was there to police media outlets that strayed, whether into unethical territory, or into simple incompetence, or into the world of terrible and terribly reasoned opinion takes. It also worked to shame outlets that it saw, rightly or wrongly, as exploitative content mills (disclosure: I freelance for a company that Deadspin targeted).

I’ll let others talk about how private-equity management is bad for quality journalism — that story was already under discussion before this happened. I do know that Deadspin’s staff did appear open to following the orders from above, until it became unclear to them just what stories would be “sticking to sports” and which wouldn’t be.

Deadspin is, effectively, dead. Killed not for poor performance, or because they pissed off a vindictive billionaire that was willing to misuse the court system to kill it. By the way, just so we’re clear: Gawker.com’s death by lawsuit is far more concerning for the free press than the mismanagement of Deadspin, its former sibling, but mismanagement by corporate overlords is still troubling for those who want quality journalism.

Deadspin didn’t go out in a blaze of stupid glory — it’s dead, or will possibly be dead soon, because the corporate side of the business was being run by someone who didn’t understand, or didn’t care to understand, what made the site successful. Someone who wasn’t willing to listen to those who knew better, simply because they were lower on the totem pole.

I know the bored office workers that read Deadspin will find other sites to browse during their lunch hours, and I know most if not all of the writers will find good jobs, even though the amount of good jobs in digital media is a smaller one than it should be. Hell, those readers might be reading the same writers, just elsewhere.

And sure, maybe there’s a remote (extremely remote) chance that G/O sees the error of its ways and resurrects the site. I won’t hold my breath, but it’s possible.

Either way, Deadspin didn’t have to die. It was killed by a level of incompetence I can’t fathom, performed by men who could buy me out five times over. That says something about the media industry, and the greater business world at large, and some of the people who could best articulate just what it means are now out of work.

That’s how things work.

Tim Healey

Written by

Writer, automotive journalist, sports fan

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