Deadspin changed sports journalism
globalsportmatters.com
globalsportmatters.com
A couple of years ago the Deadspin writers quit en masse and have since founded:
It's great! Costs a few bucks per month, which is awesome, because that lets them stay editorially independent and not rely on appeasing anybody but themselves.
Show us on the doll here where they hurt you.
Lately I’ve been thinking of Deadspin as a strange machine. For more than a decade, the people charged with the maintenance of that machine were allowed to tinker with it according to their whims and idiosyncratic tastes. The result of all that tinkering was a machine which, for all its apparent wonkiness, worked brilliantly.
The problem with a machine like that is that it’s difficult for anyone who didn’t build it, or doesn’t respect those who did, to understand exactly how or why it works. When Deadspin’s staffers and readers looked at the machine, they saw a wonderful and whirring contraption, but all Spanfeller and Great Hill saw was an odd collection of valves and pistons. They saw parts, but not the whole.
Spanfeller’s disdain for his own newsroom, the “stick to sports” memo, Petchesky being fired, and the cascade of oppressive ads—they were all signaling the same thing: Spanfeller and Great Hill weren’t really interested in preserving what we had spent the last decade building. Maybe a few components would remain to keep up appearances, but Deadspin’s demolition was coming, and we couldn’t stop it. What we could do was refuse to participate in its destruction.Deadspin went through various eras and changes of leadership.
I think it's inarguable, though, that the lineage definitively ended in 2019 when the staff walked out en masse.
The thing currently called "Deadspin" has no connection to any previous era of Deadspin other than the name.
This didn't mean they hated sports though - you could tell from most of their reporting, especially by the OGs(Will Leitch, Drew Magary, Tim Burke etc), that they LOVED sports and wanted the people and teams involved to just be better. They also broke a lot of bonkers stories like the Manti Te'o scandal (highly recommend reading their report on it)[1] that no one in traditional media did a good job of interrograting or digging into.
The site still exists, but if you read it now you won't see this kind of reporting. It all changed about two years when they were bought by private equity (G/O I wanna say) who attempted to exercise control over their editorial, resulting in a mass resignation. Many of the old writers started Defector (https://defector.com/), which writes in the same spirit.
[1] https://deadspin.com/manti-teos-dead-girlfriend-the-most-hea...
This really was one of the most fascinating journalism stories in recent years. There was this well respected and financially successful media company, in an industry in which most outlets are struggling. But management had no idea what made that company successful and was seemingly on a mission to kill what made it unique. Eventually management got so bad that the entire staff resigned over the course of a few days. Dozens of people quit their job in a shrinking industry in which any journalism job can be your last. Then after a year of many of the journalists bouncing between freelancing gigs, most of that staff is able to band together to create a new company. This time it is a workers collective in which the journalists are not just employees, but also owners. The new company is almost immediately a success, continues to grow in size, and build on the legacy of the original site. I have never seen anything like that before.
[1] https://deadspin.com/thankfully-the-internet-captured-klay-t...
Deadspin would instead gleefully post videos of the madness.
In print, the WSJ has some surprisingly good sports coverage, although not very much of it. And then they have Jason Gay, who seems to only glom onto meta-sports issues and niche sports like bike racing. But their other writers write about the actual games.
Just through their breakdown videos, you see how much more entertaining sports can be (even some harder to understand sports) without the pomp and circumstance of the "official" (boring) commentators and league-affiliated highlight reels.
I don't follow sports enough to care about their other ventures, but it seems having an outsider's view can lead to more honesty in reporting, and more interesting content.
That scumbag hypocrite Peter Thiel, for as loathsome and vampiric as he is, is only half guilty.
Few people read Deadspin. Few people read Defector. Few people watch SportCenter anymore because they try to emulate Deadspin. Professional sports broadly have lost significant viewership because they listened to the media noise around them.
It seems like these things are only successes if your goal of success is reclaiming sport as a pass-time of the idle-handed elite. Because commercially this turn has been a profound failure.
That’s a good business if it gets other online people to form parasocial relationships with your writers, but it’s bad if every piece starts and ends with “but what’s really important is this political issue I just saw a tweet about”.
This is the same Thiel who pals around with people who tell gay professors to "go die of AIDS".
This is the same Thiel who fights tooth and nail for free speech on social media platforms, but bankrolls an entire lawsuit -- in shadow, of course, because he's afraid of being obviously called on the hypocrisy -- against Gawker because his previous fee-fees got hurt.
This is the same Thiel who believes, almost unilaterally, that corporations should be able to do what they want without interference.
The same one who backs disingenuous, sociopathic goons like Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, and continues to back Trump despite all of his moral cowardice and treason.
I'm suddenly supposed to believe that he's some altruistic, moral figure? Why? Because some people didn't like Gawker's tone?
Fuck that. Thiel is slime.
Eh, agree that most of sports "journalism" is closer to PR than news, but my recollection of deadspin was that it was basically a gossip rag written by bro-y edgelords with a mean/vindictive streak.
Speaking of journalism, kinda hard to trust a news site that doesn't know the difference between "peak" and "peek"...
GSM is not a real news site; it's the PR arm of the Global Sport Institute at Arizona State University.
As explained, Deadspin got killed effectively by the Hulk Hogan sex tape civil trial, a chilling and horrible verdict, but I have seen some reprehensible behavior by Deadspin and gawker style sites.
As a good example, Markelle Fultz was a first overall pick but suffered what appears to be some sort of pinched nerve issue that greatly affected his ability to shoot. He finally is an effective NBA player for the Orlando Magic, but Deadspin was brutal and unrelenting in mocking his difficulties rehabbing and regaining form.
This is not some attention-starved social media blusterer, it was just a garden variety lottery pick trying to make his way in the pro leagues.
Basically, his "sin" was that video surfaced of him awkwardly trying to shoot free throws, and then the great bully brigade of the internet got going.
One of the desperations of the gawker sites was that once a term or topic soared in "clickability", they would hammer that term over and over.
Some people like Trump and Musk love this, any publicity is good publicity. But Fultz was always quiet.
It also gets a bit hairy with players like Ben Simmons, who get publicly mocked and derided by armies of online sociopath/fans. Sure he's paid millions to "take it" to some degree, but there are clearly lines and gawker style sites push and cross them in desperation to gain relevancy (in an era when the relevancy of the old stalwarts like Sports Illustrated and local newspapers have evaporated).
A couple of those discomfort points were counterbalanced by just heaploads of great funny stories. Deadspin was the only site I checked multiple times a day, alas defector hasn't risen to that yet.
Why do you think that is? Does Defector have a smaller staff than Deadspin did at its peak?
Prime Deadspin was hit or miss for me. I didn't really care for the social-justice and "culture" content, with an increasing number of non-sports articles that felt like a college newspaper. When the PE came in and had the stick-to-sports decree, in theory I agreed, but obviously they executed that poorly, which accelerated all the departures.
I welcome left-wing and anti-establishment takes on sports. Mainstream sports are hyper conservative (flags! anthem! flags! jet flyovers! flags! honor the military! flags! honor more military! uniforms! borderline eugenics!) with THE MOST RIDICULOUS corporate welfare with publicly financed stadiums, publicly financed training areas, massive tax breaks and favorable tax law, and a fawning bootlicker media/PR division.
Left wing takes on sports are extremely important because there are many societal themes at play with sports. The manipulations by the right to fleece the taxpayers. The last functioning unions and debates about fair pay and revenue sharing. Health care and pensions. Race and discrimination. Homosexuality discrimination. Blind loyalty and jingoism vs loyalty to higher ideals and sportsmanship. So much sausage making that is too boring for regular enterprises to get attention becomes front page news in sports.
Of course there's the corruption. Soooo much corruption, favorable non-prosecution, getting let off by the cops, fake "investigations", repugnant work conditions.
And the comments on deadspin were pretty good. Any site with "pretty good" comments is a gem in the cesspool. The usernames were fantastic. HN users have disappointingly lame usernames by comparison.
Gawker executive testimonies did not help their case.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/09/gawker-media-t...
That was Gawker, the gossip site. Deadspin is still around.