The Death of Deadspin.com

[Sylvia]

The Senseless Death of Deadspin

Dramatically shifting the website’s priorities didn’t make sense from a business perspective. Was something else going on?

nymag.com

Excerpt:

Private-equity firms and their hedge-fund brethren have become what Penelope Muse Abernathy, the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, calls “the new media barons” of the journalism industry. Over the past few years private equity has gutted the Denver Post, Sports Illustrated, and LA Weekly, in addition to dozens of local newspapers across the country. Many of these publications have become zombie versions of themselves — in no small part because new private-equity ownership tends to have different goals than previous owners. “Their sole responsibility is to their shareholders,” said Abernathy. “As where most journalism organizations feel a dual responsibility to the civic mission as well as their responsibility to make a return to their shareholders.”

Recap of the sequence of events (Nov. 1):

After Days Of Resignations, The Last Of The Deadspin Staff Has Quit

Staffers at the sports and culture website began to leave en masse earlier this week following a directive from executives to "stick to sports." The future of the site is up in the air.

www.npr.org

Writers and editors began to quit the site en masse on Wednesday [Oct. 30] and the exodus continued through Friday. The Washington Post reports "around 20 writers and editors" handed in their resignations this week.
The turmoil began Monday, when executives with G/O Media, the parent company of Deadspin and other websites including Gizmodo, The Onion and The Root, sent a directive to the staffers of the sports website to write only on sports and sports-adjacent topics.
That left many writers peeved, because Deadspin had made its mark with its irreverent, and at times piercing commentary on culture, politics and media alongside coverage of the world of athletics.

 

[oleada]

Deadspin was great - and I’m sad to see it go so unecessarily.

 

[clairecloutier]

Dvora Meyers wrote a very interesting piece on the demise of Deadspin and the major role that the site played in her own career:

Deadspin was a good (gymnastics) blog.

Last week, all of the staff at the sports and culture blog Deadspin quit in response to their new private equity owners, Great Hill, trying to meddle in their editorial output.

dvora.substack.com

For those of you who don't recognize Dvora's name, she writes about both gymnastics and figure skating, and wrote some excellent pieces about skating for Deadspin, for example this article about Mirai Nagasu.

 

[genevieve]

Deadspin was great - and the story is even bigger, because Splinter News (owned and hosted by the same conglomerate) shuttered only a month or so ago. That was my go-to news resource (becisdes FSU, of course).

Jezebel has been a hollow parody of itself for 2-3 years, so its demise wouldn't cause too much pain, but The Root is still a great source. I wonder how long before something similar happens there.

 

[Sylvia]

The Death of the Rude Press

Deadspin and Splinter were only the most recent victims of a culling that began many years ago.

newrepublic.com