Deadspin gawker1/26/2024 And that is sports, but it's also a lot of other things that draw readers to the site and have always drawn readers to the site for more than a decade.Ī lot of our readers come to the site for whatever we are writing about culture, politics or just, you know, random silly rankings of like board games or whatever. I mean, mostly what Deadspin is, is a place where writers can write about whatever they care about. We don't see it as a sports site first and foremost. Once we did put stories, both old and new, on the site that were not directly related to sports, our interim EIC Barry Petchesky was fired.ĭeadspin is a sports website first and foremost, so why was the dictate so objectionable to you and other writers that you had to stick to sports? We had previously been told to stick to sports, and we had ignored it successfully for months, and so we didn't figure that this would be any different. What happened after you were told to stick to sports?įirst we decided that we were going to post blogs on the site that didn't have anything to do with sports as sort of a direct action we could take to push back against this mandate. Wagner spoke to As It Happens guest host Megan Williams about why she's no longer a staff writer at Deadspin. Management and staff members have butted heads since the private equity firm Great Hills Partners bought Deadspin and several sister sites earlier this year.ĭeadspin was formerly a part of Gawker Media, which declared bankruptcy and shut down after losing a lawsuit to wrestler Hulk Hogan that was funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. "We're sorry that they couldn't work within this incredibly broad coverage mandate," said Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman for G/O Media, the company that runs Deadspin.īut the tensions go back further than that. The resignations come after the company fired the site's interim editor for refusing to adhere to management's edict that writers "stick to sports" even though editors say non-sports coverage generates more than twice as much traffic. Wagner is one of at least seven staff members who resigned from the popular sports, culture and politics website on Wednesday as part of a long brewing conflict with management over editorial direction. (That thread spans most all of the company’s run, from a dire CNN hit in 2007 about a celebrity-location spotter to a post last summer about a media executive and an escort that led to a staff mutiny.) The house style could turn mean and prurient and knee-jerk and some writers would too often punch down.īut the sites were at heart a life-affirming throwback, a mid-size and profitable media entity driven by a desire to hold the powerful to account.Laura Wagner loved her job at Deadspin, but she says can't keep working there because she believes its new owners are driving the site into the ground. In their pursuit, the Gawker sites occasionally and conspicuously crossed the line they toed, and the ensuing drama could overshadow the work. Even when Gawker announced aspirations to transcend publishing and become a major tech player, those initiatives never came together well enough to displace journalism as the company’s primary business. The company’s goals flowed from its editorial mission rather than its business aims. But others could be touched first only by Gawker sites, unencumbered as they were by financial relationships with major entities. Some of these stories any outlet would have chased and published. All of the titles produced stories like these, from Gawker’s revelation that the mayor of Toronto smoked crack to Jezebel’s documentation of how extensively fashion magazines photoshopped their cover subjects to Gizmodo’s surfacing of an iPhone before it hit the market. In previous years, Deadspin had exposed Brett Favre’s penis (in the process of exposing that he had sexually harassed a woman who worked for the New York Jets) and the finances of professional sports franchises. We revealed that the girlfriend had never existed. Probably the biggest story we published while I was there was one I co-wrote, about Manti Te’o, the All-American linebacker at Notre Dame whose girlfriend’s death had featured prominently in many meaty stories about his season and his life. There was no better way to get ahead there than by publishing a big scoop, one that upset powerful people. I worked at Deadspin from 2011 to 2013 and did so blissfully unaware (as did many of my coworkers) of which advertisers paid our salaries or who Denton’s friends were. In an article last week, TIME writer Jack Dickey wrote the following about his experience working for Deadspin, Gawker Media’s still-operating sports site.
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