Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting
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A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart. They know what they know, and they don’t need to know anything else.
Why don't the journalists who know how to run the business pool their resources up and start a business then? What's stopping them? What do they need those venture capital vultures for?
Maybe they've got families to feed? Not everyone can just quit and start a business that indefinitely burns cash.
Seems like it’s either easy and so they should get on with it (and it’s undeniably cheap to get started) or it’s much harder than it looks and they don’t really know what they’re talking about.
> Why don't the journalists who know how to run the business pool their resources up and start a business then? What's stopping them? What do they need those venture capital vultures for?
The answer is super simple - because they would starve to death before they managed to start making a profit. Most people don’t have that much savings for a runway.
Someone said ‘move to a lower cost of living area’ but there is no zero cost of living area to move to until you become profitable.
That’s why they need VC.
They’re paid a pittance. They can’t build up any savings.
Is this journalism in 2019? Pump out content to make a buck and fuck journalistic integrity because they have kids to feed? Real journalism takes too long and doesn't generate enough revenue?
One could say the same about Russian troll farms, they too have kids at home to feed.
What a sad world we live in.
There are other compromises that can be made such as pay, working conditions, working on dross stories to make up for the expense of the really good ones, etc.
“Stick to sports” doesn’t mean “report only about sports.” It means, “do not follow that story any further because it makes me uncomfortable.” This could be for various reasons but ultimately means sticking to one side of an issue, omitting details that would anger the Powers That Be, or even fabricating details to put a positive spin on an otherwise damning report.
“Stick to sports” means, “screw journalistic integrity”
For a lot of people, sports are an oasis of tranquility carved out of the incessant rage and cultural bickering that blares 24/7 everywhere else. There's a lot of old duffers that would rather hear about David Price's fastball rather than his political positions, or Kyrie Irving's crossover dribble rather than his speculations on the geometry of the Earth.
It's still a weird pivot for Deadspin to take, because that was never what they were about or where their audience was. My suspicion is that it was a reaction to the ratings baths that ESPN has taken as they embraced the culture war, rather than Top 10, box scores and replays - and alienated a big chunk of their audience. In both cases it's a warning about knowing your brand and your audience...
I have been a Deadspin reader since at least 2006. It might have gotten more political over recent years (hasn't everything?), but I think you fundamentally didn't understand Deadspin's purpose if you think it was the place to go to read about David Price's fastball. There are countless places on the internet that cover stories like that better. The thing the separated Deadspin from the crowd was that they didn't stick to what happened on the field in sports and that was a key factor in them building their audience.
The clear intent of the sentence is to state that journalists do understand the need for their publisher to function as a business, i. e. to rebut the other stereotype of journalists that they often get to hear, namely that they are unrealistic idealists.
Sad world, indeed.
Is your premise that the journalists have no right to be mad at what they perceive as an unjust wielding of economic power?
If so, that's only more reason to leave. If they all leave, they can start a competing business managing it the way they want, while the rich people are left with worthless husk.
I'd also like to note that it was not destroyed by "vindictive billionaire", but by a result of jury trial, which punished them for keeping a private sex tape up despite the court order telling them to take it down. Allow me to opine that it doesn't really give me a feeling that they know how to run a successful business.
It was their own strategy used against them in a legal battle, over tabloid news instead of some hard-hitting report. They aren't a victim in any sense.
Whoever at that organization gave the greenlight on publishing and publicizing sexually explicit videos without the express consent of the people appearing in them are lucky to not be in prison.
The reason they don't do this is because running a content-based business is much harder than they claim it to be, and it's easy to claim things when you don't have skin in the game: when the venture-capital owned company goes under, they'll just get another job, while if they start their own business, pool up some initial capital and work for free for a few months until they make enough revenue to pay themselves reasonable salaries, they're risking much more.
And there is the problem I was referencing. It is a pretty big ask for everyone to just work for free for months and it is something only a privileged few can do. Plus a site like Deadspin isn't a small site. I'm not sure of the exact headcount, but it looks like roughly 10 writers have left recently. That isn't counting any tech people, any sales folks, or any other operational people. The idea that "content is cheap" is basically the exact problem that caused this whole debacle in the first place.
Your first paragraph says that content-based websites are easy even for poor people; your second says it's hard and that you have to work for free for months. I'm confused. How are poor people supposed to work for free for a few months and then have enough to pay themselves reasonable salaries with health care/insurance and retirement and PTO?
Many community newspapers start with low resources and grow over time to become the voice of their community. They’re not going to become rich in most cases.
What does it sound to you that a site not purely dedicated to sports—like say, I dunno, Deadspin—should do?
Things are spinning out of control over at Deadspin.
Several staffers at the news site announced their resignations on Wednesday — amid a struggle with their G/O Media bosses who recently issued a memo telling writers to file only sports stories.
The internal revolt began Tuesday with rebellious staffers continuing to write non-sports stories — and the deputy director saying he’d been fired for not following the directive.
“Hi! I’ve just been fired from Deadspin for not sticking to sports,” tweeted Barry Petchesky.
On Wednesday, sports writer Lauren Theisen posted an image she said was of “the meeting where management tried to get us to move past Barry’s firing.” She then announced that she was leaving the site over how her colleagues were treated.
Features writer Kelsey McKinney and media reporter Laura Wagner were also among the many staffers to announce they quit Wednesday.
A G/O spokesperson said in a statement: “They resigned and we’re sorry that they couldn’t work within this incredibly broad coverage mandate. We’re excited about Deadspin’s future and we’ll have some important updates in the coming days.”
Compare and contrast:
https://twitter.com/gmgunion/status/1189287651146383361
I think that says it all really
"Deadspin is a sports news and blog website, originally founded by Gawker Media. Deadspin posts commentaries, recaps and previews of major sports stories of the day, as well as sports-related anecdotes, rumors and video"
I'm not a reader of deadspin, but if their content no longer aligned to this, and was primarily focussed on politics. Its little wonder the owners said knock it off.
Coincidentally, ESPN, has done the same thing, putting the focus back on sports[1]
[1] https://ftw.usatoday.com/2019/07/espn-dan-le-batard-no-polit...
See, if you had been a reader for a while, you would have known that they frequently covered non-sports topics, and that's a big part of what their readers liked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G/O_Media&oldid=9...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/hostilities-rise-inside-g-o-med...
Autoplay is evil everywhere unless I enable it explicitly.
In fact, here's a person whose job it was to sell ads for Deadspin explaining that you are incorrect: https://twitter.com/jillian_schulz/status/118967386127042969...
Regardless if Deadspin did so well then it would continue doing so in the years since the lawsuit.
This is wrong.
Gawker media were confident they could operate freely in legal grey areas and fall back on their “freedom of speech” defense when they published Hulk Hogan’s sex tape without his knowledge.
The fact they decided to go to court and challenge Hogan over his claims of defamation was their own poor choice. The only thing Thiel did was bankroll Hogan’s legal team.
A.J. Daulerio’s deposition and subsequent cavalier appearance and court testimony was probably the last nail in their coffin.
In short, Gawker had been playing with fire before and escaped. The fact they thought this would be another easy escape proved to be their undoing.
Nobody but Gawker and their editors who thought they could publish anything, about any celeb is what cost them their publication and their jobs - not just one guy who financially supported Hogan in his civil case.
A billionaire can afford security or not go in person.
Does not going in person harm his ability to make deals? Maybe, maybe not. But that doesn't even resemble "life in danger".
Regardless nobody should have such personal details revealed as news without their own doing, no matter how rich or famous they are.
But when it comes to "I need to visit this country for business", money easily solves that.
> Regardless nobody should have such personal details revealed as news without their own doing, no matter how rich or famous they are.
Yeah, sure. Though I'd say that the existence of billionaires is a significantly larger problem...
Anyone who has ever had an unreliable car begs to differ. Among a million other examples. Not being able to just solve unexpected problems is the worst part of being poor.
> Envy of other people’s wealth and taking it away by force is at the forefront of every catastrophic economic outcome.
I didn't say 'taking it away', it's more a comment on how taxes should be more progressive.
But if you did knock every billionaire down to 100M... nothing bad would happen. It's less than one percent of one percent of people going from "filthy rich" down to "still filthy rich".
Bill Simmons' grand Grantland experiment showed, for a brief shining moment, what the best possible version of this kind of thing was, but he lost his cover in Bristol, and the plug got pulled.
Here's Deadspin sticking to sports in 2017 https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/a-full-transcript-of-donal...
Here's Deadspin sticking to sports in 2016 https://adequateman.deadspin.com/the-2016-hater-s-guide-to-t...
Here's Deadspin sticking to sports in 2013 http://deadsp.in/cgmoid5
2012 https://deadspin.com/what-happens-when-a-35-year-old-man-ret...
I'm done diving into the archives but that's a pretty hot take you're throwing out there.
>Contrast this with barstool sports which is doing well.
There is a high level of irony in these two comments considering Barstool doesn't "stick to sports" either. They just approach a lot of the same issues from the opposite direction as Deadspin.
Contrast that with another G/O Media site, Jalopnik, which continues to be one of my favorite sites on the Internet. The Verge also seems to have moved on mostly from trying to straddle “culture” and tech and is better for it.
In this media environment, with profitability seemingly tied to the whims of Facebook's recommendation algorithm and major sites like Mic and ThinkProgress dropping left and right, I don't know if anyone can survive without a deep-pocketed owner who can fund years of losses.