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Comment by shortformblog | Hacker News Reader

Hey all, just sharing this with a quick note. Recently, I was part of a small group of journalists/researchers who determined that the sports site Deadspin sold to investors with close affiliations with the online gaming affiliate industry in Malta.

Eventually, it led to a story in 404 Media that tied specific names to the purchase and highlighted some of their M.O.: https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publish...

It turns out that one of the key figures in the Deadspin purchase is also attempting to buy a bankrupt newspaper’s website, likely because the domain (NewsPress.com) has a lot of SEO value. That’s what the above story is about.

This story is really important, because it is essentially putting a community’s history at risk. To me, it feels like a harbinger of what we could see in the future re: domain purchases.

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One outcome of the Deadspin mess might be instructive—a group of journalists abandoned it and started Defector, a successful worker co-op.

After Quitting Deadspin in Protest, They’re Starting a New Site https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/business/media/deadspin-s...

For more context on cooperatives in journalism, see https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mij/15031809.0007.203?view=text...

404 Media itself is a similar collective of ex-Vice people, I think pretty directly inspired by Defector.

to add to this, i think 404media is also where Joseph Cox went (edit: i just checked, he is a part of 404)

most people here will be familiar with his writing for motherboard.

Glad to see worker cooperatives popping up!

I don't really disagree but be aware that many of those people working in journalist cooperatives would probably make more money working at McDonalds. (Of course I'm sure they find working as a journalist more satisfying.)

McDonald's CEO made $17.8 million in cash/stock/options in 2022, so working at McDonalds must be a good gig. If entry-level workers made 1/100th what the CEO makes, that's $178,000 a year!

Thanks for digging into this and for sharing this article! I hadn't seen this latest twist.

I'm friends with a number of the "paper’s staff who staged a mass walk-out". Very difficult times. Not mentioned in this article was the staff’s long struggle for union representation which they did finally get much to the ire of the owner.

The independent.com (another great, "generic", domain name!) has been covering the saga for decades: https://www.independent.com/?s=santa+barbara+news-press

Sad tale. In its own way, as bad as the private equity management we’ve been seeing in chains throughout the country.

There has to be a great story as to how these two news sites in the same town got such high-quality domains.

What’s funny to me is that https://www.noozhawk.com/ (along with others) took up the mantle when the SB News Press went downhill. That domain is not as hot.

And Noozhawk's almost Fark clone design when it first launched was pretty good, I'm not such a fan of what it's become. And it feels like their reporting has gotten a lot more focused on north county, rather than the city of Santa Barbara itself. At least The Independent is still there for Santa Barbara, Goleta, and Isla Vista...

> To me, it feels like a harbinger of what we could see in the future re: domain purchases.

Something that the iSCSI folks considered:

      -  A date code, in yyyy-mm format.  This date MUST be a date
         during which the naming authority owned the domain name used in
         this format, and SHOULD be the first month in which the domain
         name was owned by this naming authority at 00:01 GMT of the
         first day of the month.  This date code uses the Gregorian
         calendar.  All four digits in the year must be present.  Both
         digits of the month must be present, with January == "01" and
         December == "12".  The dash must be included.

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3720#section-3.2.6....

So if there was a change of ownership, the IQN would change.

Is this a big trend lately? Buying old newspapers and then putting them back up as SEO shell farms with recognizable names?

There was another story on here just a little bit back about an East coast lady that had her article stolen by a paper she used to work for, that then returned, zombified, under the same name, yet with different bylines.

Similar to this article from Buzzfeed (2020) about pseudo-"local" news websites. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/these-fa...

> This story is really important, because it is essentially putting a community’s history at risk. To me, it feels like a harbinger of what we could see in the future re: domain purchases.

Huh? It's just a domain name. None of the history in none of the archives is going away.

From the literal article:

> After all, the archive is our collective memoir, if we can keep it. No complete digital record seems to exist in any other one place — not the Santa Barbara Public Library, UC Riverside’s California Newspaper Project, the Library of Congress, Newspapers.com, or the like.

That's seems like a straightforward thing to fix, if people care. And has nothing to do with who owns the domain name.

I chortled at the claim that deadspin is "beloved"

"Beloved" doesn't necessarily mean good journalism. The type of rage-bait that includes trying to publicly shame a Native American child for painting his face in team colors and wearing a family headdress to a football game is likely to make you quite beloved among a certain crowd.

To be clear, the “beloved” era (while noting its subjectivity) is in reference to the pre-G/O Media era, which was run under a different editorial direction. That team has since moved to Defector.

The controversy you are referencing happened last fall, years after that team had left.

Oh, I didn't know that. Thanks for the information.

Among sports fans old Deadspin, specifically the previous iteration with columnists like Drew Magary, is pretty beloved.

Currently Defector is trying hard to occupy the gap left by it.

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