So for a variety of reasons, the Gizmodo group has been moving around from owner to owner for the last few years. In 2016, Univision bought it after
Gwaker was taken out with a $120 million invasion of privacy judgment by Hulk Hogan (funded by Peter Thiel)
For whatever reason Univision sold off the Gizmodo Media Group (and The Onion) to a hedge fund out of Boston called Grant Hill Partners earlier this year. Gizmodo Media Group and the Onion were rolled into G/O Media, and included Gizmodo, io9, Jezebel, the Root, Jalopnik, Deadspin, Kotku, the AV Club, the Onion, and some others that I'm not remembering.
Grant Hill Partners hired Jim Spanfeller, whose previous claim to fame was turning Forbes into a clickbait site, to run the show. Being journalists,
Deadspin wrote an article on how things were run now.
Oh, and important, the writers unionized a few years back.
In August, the Deadspin Editor Megan Greenwell quit,
citing a lot of problems including the disagreement about editorial decisions and "non-sports" posts. At some point in the last few weeks, they killed The Splinter, which was the politics oriented publication.
In the last week or so, all sites across the platform have been featuring really annoying autoplay ads WITH SOUND, to the point that each site posted a "sorry about the ads, we don't have anything to do with them, here's the email address to complain." I'd link to those posts, but they were taken down. The Union, though,
helpfully posted the content on Twitter. (The Union
disputes that the posts were taken appropriately.)
On Monday,
the Daily Beast reported that new management sent another "just stick to sports' memo to the staff at Deadspin.
Going back, Deadspin has, yes, primarily been a sports blog, but it's been a lot more too. There are traditions, like posting about bears on Fridays or delving into observations that the readership would like. Zapruder type analysis of absurd videos. Random shit. Non-sports stuff doesn't dominate, but it is and always has been part of Deadspin. And most importantly, that shit gets good traffic, especially in slow times of the year when the only people who care about the latest Oriel vs. Blue Jays game were probably at the game.
It's developed a pretty good commentariat that has been there for years.
Due to assholes being assholes on Jezebel many years ago, regular commentors are vetted before their posts are allowed through. Random accounts' comments are "greyed" You have to click extra to see them, and mods and admins and other readers have to actively bring those comments to the regular views.
So going back, on Tuesday, in response to the memo, not a single article posted was directly sports related. TONS of comments came in. And on Tuesday afternoon,
the interim editor of Deadspin was fired for not sticking to sports.
The comment threads and Twitter erupted. Not a single article was posted after around noon that day.
Yesterday, the comments were turned off across the entire G/O Media landscape, and the
Wall Street Journal got to the bottom of the stupid autoplay ads:
The ads are no longer playing on the site, and as far as I understand it, Farmers has pulled the campaign.
Everyone I've read says that a) Deadspin was a pretty profitable site, b) the engagement numbers (which are helpfully next to every single post on the site) are very good for the "non-sports" stories as they are for the pure sports stories, if not better, and c) this is the stupidest way a company got tanked ever.
So yesterday and today, there have been mass resignations on fucking principle, which in this day and age is a pretty rare thing. I've counted well over a dozen. Some stories have hit the site since Tuesday, but a lot of them were filed before this brohuhaha began. Drew Magery today was a pretty major hit.
Diana Moskovitz (click on any of those articles you'll just be amazed at her writing) was the loss that hit me the hardest.
To review: they managed to piss off their writers, their readers, and their advertisers in one fell swoop by killing a product that wasn't at all in any trouble.
