Deadspin is Dead After Refusing To 'Stick To Sports' (axios.com) 251
Everyone on Deadspin's staff -- nearly 20 writers and editors -- resigned this week after the site's interim editor-in-chief, Barry Petchesky, was fired for refusing to "stick to sports." Axios reports: In the last month alone, two prominent American sports publications have been gutted and look destined to become shells of their former selves. A few weeks ago, Sports Illustrated's new owners laid off half the newsroom -- the first step in their plan to turn it into a rickety old content mill staffed by contributors making as little as $25,000 a year. Deadspin was founded as a sports blog in 2005 and was originally part of Gawker Media, which was sued out of existence thanks to a lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan (and funded by Peter Thiel). After bouncing between a few owners, Deadspin and its sibling sites like Gizmodo, Jezebel and The Onion were acquired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners earlier this year. Since then, new ownership has tried to change the tone of the site on the fly, urging writers to avoid hot-button issues or polarized political topics. The New York Times explains the tension between the management and editorial staff: While largely focused on sports, Deadspin for years had delved into a broad range of topics in a voice that was sometimes rude, often funny and always conversational. On Tuesday, the site's top editor, Barry Petchesky, was fired after refusing to go along with the order. The departures shocked fans of the site, which put a new spin on sports coverage for a generation of digital natives. But they were the result of a long buildup of resentment between the journalists and their new bosses, according to interviews with 13 current and former employees of Deadspin and G/O Media.
The main topic of discussion at the Wednesday meeting was the stick-to-sports memo, which was signed by Paul Maidment, the editorial director of G/O Media, the company that became the owner of Deadspin and sibling sites like Jezebel and Gizmodo six months ago. Stories that showed the intersection of sports and other topics were fair game, Mr. Maidment wrote in the memo. He said at the meeting that he had enjoyed a recent post about President Trump getting booed at a World Series game. But purely non-sports content was forbidden. Deadspin writers and editors considered that to be meddling.
[...] G/O Media installed Jim Spanfeller, a digital media executive who had previously run Forbes.com, as its head. Mr. Spanfeller promptly got rid of some top editors and made Mr. Maidment the editorial director. Signs of tensions between the irreverent journalists and the management team came quickly. They were not helped by an Aug. 2 Deadspin article whose reporting was critical of G/O Media, Mr. Spanfeller and his executive team. The piece took issue with their "lack of knowledge about" the sites now in their portfolio and "their seeming unwillingness or inability to get up to speed." A few weeks later, Deadspin's top editor, Megan Greenwell, resigned, saying in a farewell post that her job had become untenable, given management's demands.The next major event at G/O Media occurred on Oct. 10, with the shuttering of its politics site, Splinter. Further reading: Thank You (Deadspin); The Mavening of Sportswriting (The Ringer).
Bernie Sanders said in a statement Thursday evening, "I stand with the former Deadspin workers who decided not to bow to the greed of private equity vultures like Jim Spanfeller. This is the kind of greed that is destroying journalism across the country, and together we are going to take them on."
The main topic of discussion at the Wednesday meeting was the stick-to-sports memo, which was signed by Paul Maidment, the editorial director of G/O Media, the company that became the owner of Deadspin and sibling sites like Jezebel and Gizmodo six months ago. Stories that showed the intersection of sports and other topics were fair game, Mr. Maidment wrote in the memo. He said at the meeting that he had enjoyed a recent post about President Trump getting booed at a World Series game. But purely non-sports content was forbidden. Deadspin writers and editors considered that to be meddling.
[...] G/O Media installed Jim Spanfeller, a digital media executive who had previously run Forbes.com, as its head. Mr. Spanfeller promptly got rid of some top editors and made Mr. Maidment the editorial director. Signs of tensions between the irreverent journalists and the management team came quickly. They were not helped by an Aug. 2 Deadspin article whose reporting was critical of G/O Media, Mr. Spanfeller and his executive team. The piece took issue with their "lack of knowledge about" the sites now in their portfolio and "their seeming unwillingness or inability to get up to speed." A few weeks later, Deadspin's top editor, Megan Greenwell, resigned, saying in a farewell post that her job had become untenable, given management's demands.The next major event at G/O Media occurred on Oct. 10, with the shuttering of its politics site, Splinter. Further reading: Thank You (Deadspin); The Mavening of Sportswriting (The Ringer).
Bernie Sanders said in a statement Thursday evening, "I stand with the former Deadspin workers who decided not to bow to the greed of private equity vultures like Jim Spanfeller. This is the kind of greed that is destroying journalism across the country, and together we are going to take them on."
Dead? How to spin it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Who would have ever thought that people didn't want to go to a sports website to read about non-sports? .. ...
And that when new management came in to make the business successful, they'd stop to practices that were driving away readers?
.
Must be racism!
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Who would have thought that a publisher would care what the writers write about, as long as it is bringing readers and ad impressions?
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:5, Informative)
That's just it, they don't really care. They posted the ad impressions they got. Turns out, most of the people reading a sports website only read the stories that were about sports and not the stories about politics.
So management told their writers to stop screwing around and stick to the content people actually read. And instead, everyone quit.
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Broken-ass
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:4, Interesting)
It isn't a troll. Just some idiot with modpoints didn't like to hear the truth. This is the exact reason that I'm telling people to use the abuse flag to file a report against the mod trolls.
Mod trolling in comments (Score:2)
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:4, Informative)
Citations:
Back in 2010 https://deadspin.com/the-top-1... [deadspin.com]
And again in 2017 https://deadspin.com/the-100-m... [deadspin.com]
And 2018, since 2019 isn't going to get written now https://deadspin.com/deadspins... [deadspin.com]
Going strictly sports would likely have killed viewership.
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, yeah, no. Like the summary said, tangentially-sports related articles were OK.
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well thats nice for them. So you are suggesting that the new owners (pro-Trump?) didn't like the writers politics (I guess they were anti-Trump or something?), and thus wanted them to write about sports instead? Why not just come out and say it? You guys sure like your drama. But here is a reality check: it was probably about money all along. That is really all those VC types care about.
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:4, Insightful)
If, as you contend, publishing political stories would've resulted in more viewership and more ad revenue, isn't it the writers who were being greedy by wanting to write political stories since they maximize income? While it's the private equity owners who were sticking to principle and trying to keep it a sports site?
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Where? All I see is comments that the non-sports posts got more traffic than the sports posts.
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Not Parisian Opinions, but the fact stories that will be published will be solely based of revenue and popular traffic.
My primary news source is NPR that I listen to on my way to and from work. It does have a Liberal bias, I know that, but compared to most Commercial stuff out there, their bias is mostly tempered and more focused on the fact. NPR has the impression of being the boring news channel. But the thing is they try to maintain journalism
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:5, Insightful)
The top 15 posts, by traffic, on Deadspin 2012-2017 with the posts about sports removed
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:4, Interesting)
So it's really just a list of popular non-sports stories, not a list of the most popular stories?
Look at the beginning of each line. It shows the rank for that article. So you can see that in 2017, for example, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th most popular stories were not sports related.
apropros to nothing: (Score:2)
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:5, Informative)
Deadspin is part of a family of sites, and they already own several others that are dedicated to the stuff Deadspin dips into. It seems like they wanted to dedicate Deadspin to sports, in order to diversify the different brands, and give Deadspin a unique niche.
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That might be a reasonable suggestion, except that they shut down the politically-focused Splinter News 3 weeks ago.
So perhaps it has more to do with the slant of the politics than the appropriateness of the stories on a site that people have understood for a long time was not just about sports.
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Or maybe it has to do with making more money. You do know these are VC types, right? They aren't "out to get" anything else but more money.
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It's not even that Bernie Sanders is calling him out for trying to keep the sport blog sports when they also purchased Gizmodo, Jezebel and The Onion. Keep them niche blogs on task and let the Onion cover the rest.
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh, dumbshit, people DO want to go to a sports website to read about non-sports. One of the interesting features of Deadspin was that they published their metrics with every single article, so you could see which of their posts was most popular. Turns out that the non-sports posts were many times more popular than their sports posts.
Also, Deadspin was one of the most-viewed sports blogs on the web, and they were very profitable. They were easily the crown jewel of the entire G/O Media portfolio. So clearly, there is a market for this type of writing, and their VC owners shot their own dicks off by making the mistake of thinking the talented people who worked for them were as gutless and without honor as they were..
Everything about the demise of Deadspin smells like a political operation. That's cool, because the writers who quit this week are very popular and very talented and will be somewhere else and will forever be pests to the billionaire venture capital pricks who destroyed something great.
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, at least the writers can learn to code.
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just based on word choice here, I'm guessing that those "heroic" writers were... rather one-sided, politically? And it's your side?
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Let me guess...you don't know a thing about Deadspin, do you?
Nope, I never heard of it before today. Like I said, it was just a guess based on your word choice and other comments.
Now I'm thinking I might have been mistaken by that, and your intensity is because you were a fan of the site?
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Yes, big fan. Their late-night music threads were terrific, and the commenting community was first-rate.
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:4, Informative)
You seem to forget that their crybaby staff whined about ads (on an ad supported site) and cost them a $1M deal with Farmer's Insurance.
The great thing is that the barrier to entry for a stupid online blog is pretty low, so all of you Workers of the World can just get together and start one. Why don't all these brilliant writers go start a new blog and sell ads with their amazing, one of a kind articles about how rich people suck and Trump is Orange?
So I guess we'll see what happens. Will these amazing, unique writers who are _totally_ better than the randos they like to quote on Twitter, go and start a new site or bolster an existing site to startling levels of success, or will Deadspin just hire some sports writers and continue on as a sports site? Time will tell.
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:4, Informative)
For good reason. Remember, the reason the ads got higher metrics on the sports stories is because all the regular Deadspin users had long since given up on auto-play videos and the horrible G/O ad clutter and started using Ad-Block.
It wasn't just the staff complaining about the ads. It was the entire readership of Deadspin.
Re:Dead? How to spin it... (Score:4, Informative)
with their amazing, one of a kind articles about how rich people suck and Trump is Orange?
Don't forget about the hard-hitting investigative journalism that is Can I Fuck To My Friend's Band? which is currently on the front page!
https://imgur.com/ahkGnBP [imgur.com]
I sure hope they find a way to keep this pillar of journalism alive!
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Don't forget about the hard-hitting investigative journalism that is Can I Fuck To My Friend's Band? which is currently on the front page!
https://imgur.com/ahkGnBP [imgur.com]
Formerly on the front page. If it were currently on the front page you could have just linked to deadspin instead of to imgur. And it was a response to a reader letter [deadspin.com].
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The staff were just echoing reader complaints. Those intrusive ads were almost certainly losing readers. They were the a bad business decision, which resulted from prior bad decisions.
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Yes, the intelligent thing to do if you disagree with a management decision like that related to the business of your company is to publicly lambaste it. That's what all the best, most important employees do lol.
You do realize that these employees were hired to do exactly this, about everything in the world, right? I mean, it's their job to "publicly lambaste" EVERYTHING.
These weren't librarians or baristas they had hired. These are bloggers and journalists paid to post ridiculous crap and get the maximum number of eyeballs looking at it. This would be like you saying, "I can't believe that all these comedians made a joke about this. It's so serious!"
Well no shit. That's what they do. And if that wasn't their prima
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Turns out that the non-sports posts were many times more popular than their sports posts.
As Tim Pool pointed out [youtube.com], those metrics cannot measure the number of people who showed up to read about sports, then got disgusted by all the non-sports stuff and left the site.
So what you are telling us is that when Deadspin published a lot of non-sports content, then among the readers who read the site anyway, many non-sports articles were popular. And my counter-points are:
0) It seems very possible to me that there a
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Can't refute the claim attack the person making it.
Good job. You do dead "What did we get stuck in our rectums last year" spin a great service as to what they stood for.
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You're referencing a hilarious Deadspin article that was not only one of it's most popular, but also had among its highest ad-impression metrics.
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You understand that Tim Pool has a political agenda that is antithetical to everything that Deadspin stood for, right?
I find this comment fascinating on multiple levels.
0) Tim Pool has a political agenda? He claims that he is a somewhat left-of-center person who wants government to help people, and aside from that he calls issues as he sees them. Are you claiming anything different from what he claims?
I believe Tim Pool; here's your chance to convince me otherwise.
1) Deadspin "stood for" something? What?
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No, they didn't.
Back in 2016, Deadspin had been profitable. But not so much recently. Deadspin's revenue had been dropping. That's WHY Univision sold it off in the first place. It doesn't matter how happy your writers are if they can't get the revenue needed to stay in business - and a former moderately successful website was failing. The owners attempted to increase advertising, and the writers responded by attacking the advertisers. There's dumb shit, and then there's turning your website into a veh
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No, we don't know that. Deadspin was profitable when G/O bought it, and it was profitable when they destroyed it. They didn't "cost" them a motherfucking thing. But now, by alienating the actual talent that drew people to the site, they've cost themselves the entire purchase price. Deadspin is gone, and their investment is worth bupkis. N
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Who would have ever thought that people didn't want to go to a sports website to read about non-sports?
What's next - Slashdot's new owners will demand that the stories covered actually be "News for nerds, stuff that matters" and avoid purely political posts?!
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There are factors like which team hires which players and for how much.
College Sports and paying the students for doing sports that bring in millions of dollars.
Tax payer money going to making stadiums.
How the audience is reacting to the game
Who the audience is reacting to the game
The idea that a sports reports should just focus on the game, in this time is actually probably racist. As a lot of Athletes are publicly protesting racist acts from the p
Diversification (Score:2)
There's nothing to indicate new readers were being driven away. It's likely they were attracting new readers (that's part of an editor's job).
I'm not a sports guy let alone a Deadspin reader. If I had to guess they ran favorable articles on topics like Colin Kaepernick, unpaid and abused college football players, and anythin
Why for sale to start though... (Score:2)
The reason Bernie calls out Vulture Capitalists is that they've been buying up all the media outlets
Healthy media outlets are not for sale to begin with...
"Vulture Capitalists" are kind enough people to try and pay someone for what has been turned into the equivalent of a meth lab house, and rebuild it in hopes of maybe making some money again.
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Anyone who was familiar with Deadspin's numbers - in which the views of non-sports content dwarfed those of sports content.
This doesn't seem to be based off of their keyword searches, but of course you may have access to information that we don't.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo... [alexa.com]
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Yeah Russia has nothing better to do than change moderation on Slashdot. What exactly would that accomplish? A chubby man living in a basement is startled enough that he drops his can of Mountain Dew?
Not the first G/O media site to die. (Score:2)
Splinter news went a couple of weeks ago.
The staff did the right thing (Score:4, Insightful)
The staff did the right thing - if they don't want to write about sports on a sports site, they should go someplace else. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
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It didn't collapse. Site is still there. They will find new writers by next week. Lots of people like to write about sports.
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Without comments, the site will die, even with new writers.
But the idea that, even if the site puts up new content, the new content will be compelling is laughable. The owners have history creating low-rent content farms.
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Why? Are these writers so special that no other writer on the planet is capable of writing sport-related articles that generate COMMENTS? You guys are way too full of yourselves. They will find a few more out of work journalism majors next week.
People have had it (Score:2, Insightful)
People are tired of ceaseless, heavily slanted, or outright fabricated, political news. Deadspin was supposed to be a sports site, they instead managed to turn it into TMZ Jr., got their ass sued off, didn't learn a damn thing from it, and are now gone completely.
The statement from Bernie is particular idiotic, even for him.
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Is that why Deadspin was so popular (and profitable)?
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It's funny. I was curious about this so I did an online search. All I see is people using the exact same phrasing "popular, profitable". Only.. I can't find a single fucking iota of data about what they mean by "profitable". The closest I saw was references (not actual article or direct link) to some Forbes article saying they had their "most profitable" year in 2018.
So unless you can provide evidence of these massive profits, I'm calling bullshit and assuming it's just a memetic talking point you lot are r
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Lol, what's he going to say about something he owns? Yeah that deadspin is a real turd.
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Yes, everyone posting the contrary opinion has never been to Deadspin.
Shut up and write about dribbling. (Score:2)
It's really strange that writers at a sports site would quit their jobs for the right to write about things that have nothing to do with sports. Which is why I don't believe that's what's actually happening.
I'm betting this was more a case of management telling them not to talk about Chinese influence on the NBA ... the NFL's fight with Colin Kaepernick ... domestic violence in pro sports.
Re:Shut up and write about dribbling. (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently management said the intersection of sports and politics is fine, like Trump getting booed at the baseball game. All the things you mentioned would count as "sports intersecting."
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Shut up and write about dribbling. (Score:5, Funny)
Thiel didn't murder Gawker. He had it put in an asylum for self harm.
They were bought to be silenced (Score:2)
The buyers weren't idiots, they knew exactly what they were doing [youtube.com]. It was money well spent.
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After Thiel murdered Gawker
You mean after Gawker told vicious lies that were egregious enough to get them convicted in court, which is usually impossible for a media organization? Why Gawker was completely awful and the mainstream media should never have stood up for them. [imgur.com] The slideshow just makes me feel ill inside.
Self Immolating (Score:3, Insightful)
Gawker wasn't "murdered" by Thiel. Gawker violated the right to privacy of someone and rightfully got put out of business for it. Justice shouldn't require deep pockets.
Now you have Deadspin out of business because the employees continue to think they know better than everyone.
The inevitable conclusion of unions is unemployment. And good luck getting hired somewhere else after that temper tantrum. They were told they could write about any angle they wanted as long as the source was sports. So if a spor
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This makes me a little happy (Score:4, Interesting)
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Last time I went there the page still looked like half "sponsored content" even with all my ad and script blockers. The commentary on every single story no matter what the subject is orange man bad.
It's gonna be OK, I promise ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... because I never heard of it until it wasn't.
A programming analogy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Manager: "Jim, it looks like you've been writing code for a new political website."
Jim: "That's right Trisha, I'm really passionate about politics."
Manager: "Well, you see, we're a bank. Building political sites isn't our thing. Please work on our banking software."
Jim: "This is outrageous! I quit!"
Bernie: "Look at this sad example of big banking keeping people from following their hearts. It's criminal. This won't happen when I'm president."
I mean, kudos to the staff for leaving to do something about which they are passionate. More power to them. Still, it hardly seems like something to get all twisted up over. This coming from a guy who appreciates the voice Bernie brings to the political world.
Re:A programming analogy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bernie Sanders said in a statement Thursday evening, "I stand with the former Deadspin workers who decided not to bow to the greed of private equity vultures like Jim Spanfeller. This is the kind of greedgreed that is destroying journalism across the country, and together we are going to take them on."
Insisting that their sports-focused webite focus on sports-related stories is an example of "the kind of greed that is destroying journalisim"? If the Bernie Sanders quote didn't mention the site specifically, I would have thought it was a joke, showing the silliness of injecting politics into every story...
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You are welcome to read the opinions of the readers all over the site. One of the reasons it was as successful as it was was explicitly because they weren't a straight sports blog. In fact, some of the most popular articles in the history of the site were non-sports articles.
It was certainly not for everyone, and it was a bit of a niche, but definitely a profitable niche.
"As successful as it was" (Score:3)
One of the reasons it was as successful as it was
Must have been super successful to get bought out! *rolls eyes*.
Hint, success is not equal to "has opinions I agree with".
Successful sites do not have large shifts made to content and focus.
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Actually it isn't anything like that. But that aside: this is what the world looks like once the VC money stops coming in to fund your lifestyles. Get used to it kids!
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Journalism != Software Development. Your analogy sucks.
No, analogy neatly illustrates the topic at hand (employees doing - or not - what their employer wants them to do in order to earn that paycheck the employer signs for them), and you don't like that. Analogies aren't bad just because they point out something you don't like.
False. You are mixing sets and supersets. (Score:2)
Sports and non-sports joirnalism are both subsets of journalism.
Programming is not. It is its own separate set in the set of jobs.
The difference between items in that "jobs" super-group are much greater than those in the "journalism" group.
In fact they are almost completely unrelated.
A correct analogy would be if some programmer in a game studio wanted to write some software tools (related to games in some way, or not).
But hey, any moron who drags Sanders (or Trump or whomever) into this, already disqualifi
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Hopefully that will be lesson... (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a lesson to be learned here about refusing to stick to the topic your website is about, and deciding against better judgement to throw up offtopic political crap no one cares about.
Maybe a certain technical website should reconsider running these political stories that aren't really related to technology at all.
Re:Hopefully that will be lesson... (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't say 'no one cares about', I'd say 'a very loudmouth vocal minority cares about'. It's the same thing with ESPN, people are inundated all day long with politics, politics, politics, they don't need ESPN adding another woke voice to the chorus.
Expect twitter douches to make a big deal of this, and other blogs posing as news sites to amplify these twitter nobodies to try to make it look like this is a Big Deal, when in real life probably less than 1% of the population gives even the vaguest flying fuck about this one way or the other.
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Getting less than 1% of the population to visit your site once a month is a good business. Getting them back 6 times is a winner. The difference is that while many opinion businesses survive on pissing off at least a quarter of their audience every single day (talk radio is built on this), this might not work for blogs, no matter the size. But some will rest easy, comforted by the reality that the rich old white guys that make these decisions that drive their talent away will make even more money because th
"... stuff that matters"! (Score:2)
People always forget that part of the tagline.
Maybe because if you check, it isn't actually visible on the site anymore since the BizX takeover.
Let's be honest here: This is a BizX PR outlet zombie nowadays.
People moved on to Reddit a long time ago.
The problem is, that Reddit seems like a zombie too, and I don't know where people moved from there.
Not ycombinator. That's for sure. They are a very weird in-crowd with rules on what gets upvoted or downvoted that are very different from and often almost the opp
Does every site need to be everything? (Score:3)
I think a real problem with lots of sites is they just cover too much. Not every site can be general news, and most if they try do a poor job of it.
Tightly focused sites seem like they would have a lot better chance to have quality content, and be more compelling to visit. As "funny" as Deadspin may have been, I never visited it nor did I even see links to it on social media... so it seems like they were doing a very poor job.
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I think a real problem with lots of sites is they just cover too much. Not every site can be general news, and most if they try do a poor job of it.
If only there were a site that strictly did news that mattered to nerds.
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You're missing the point. Deadspin was never trying to be everything and never covered general news.
And good riddance (Score:2)
" staffed by contributors making as little as $25,000 a year"
What a laugh! SI 'contributors' are and will be selling their work to multiple outlets. SI by this measure is overpaying! But it's not really about the pay, is it? Are these sports 'journalists' decrying the lack of value they now represent? Well, improve your product, compete, or, as the subjects of your work, athletes, know, move on. Losing sucks. Go sell cars or insurance, or run a restaurant.
"Deadspin was founded as a sports blog in 2005"
"was
Editorialize much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Deadspin was founded as a sports blog in 2005 and was originally part of Gawker Media, which was sued out of existence thanks to a lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan (and funded by Peter Thiel).
FTLOG, not, it wasn't thanks to HH or Thiel. A bunch of assholes decided to publish a sex tape in order to make money. Nothing newsworthy happened, but Gawker thought they'd make a mint.
The subject of the tape took them to court for breach of privacy, and the TNZ wannabees lost.
They fucked up, and then they paid the price.
m
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Re: Editorialize much? (Score:3)
If there is any injustice here, its that even a multi-millionaire like Hulk Hogan could not get his day in court without the backing of a billionaire like Thiel.
Don't like the rules? QUIT! (Score:2)
Don't worry ... (Score:2)
OK, but Gawker deserved to die. Violently. (Score:2)
It was direct outlet of Rupert Murdoch / News Corporation, albeit with the link well-hidden. (You can only find it, by searching top-down. Not by going bottom-up from Gawker. Useful sources are those corproate pages where they brag which corporations and brands they own, then going to their sites and looking for lower levels. Sometimes it take some other sites like Wikipedia or business info sites or my favorite system D way: The owners of the domains.)
Dead? (Score:2)
How is the site "dead"? It is still up. I just checked it (never been there before - looks like typical Hipster stupid stuff) There is content posted yesterday (something about Palestinian soccer). They will just hire new writers. It isn't that tough to find guys willing to write about sports. I know the person who submitted this probably worked there, but get over yourself.
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Didn't see the picture, but my guess are the writers are: white, young, bearded, horn rimmed glasses, flannel shirts. How close am I?
That's a lot of loyalty for a hired gun (Score:2)
So do they all have trust funds or is there already a funded successor ready to be revealed as a rescuer for the brave martyrs?
Good riddance to bad apples. (Score:3)
IDGAF about their mass resignation.
How many of these ever-so-righteous turds cheerfully outed Peter Thiel ("but he had come out to his close friends" isn't really an excuse) and then essentially defended it because of his politics?
https://thumbor.forbes.com/thu... [forbes.com]
Normally, the 4th estate relies on their privilege to protect them from recourse, their problem was that they shit on someone with a crapton of money, the willingness to take the effort to fuck them up, and the patience to wait for the right horse to back. Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long for them to publish Hulk's sex tape (hyuck hyuck, stupid pro wrestler ironic joke-person, right) and he wrung them out to dry.
Fuck them. I'm glad he destroyed them, they can go find some other online blog to posture and preen at.
Good riddance (Score:3)
The staff had turned Deadspin from a sports news site into a shitposting site. The owners wanted their sports news site to post about sports news, and not articles like "Lady shits all over the floor at a Tim Hortons and throws it at people" and "Things we shoved up our butts this year" (both recent real articles on the front page at the same time, both specifically shown by the labour union as an example of the sort of articles that needed to be protected) just goes to show you that the ownership was completely right to crack down on the staff trying to turn a sports news site into a shitposting blog.