Deadspin editor quits, blasts G/O management

Your quasi-regular Deadspin / GO update:

1) It's a month later, and Deadspin hasn't posted anything new since early November.

2) Kotaku reporter Cecilia D'Anastasio left that site this week for Wired. From her goodbye column: "I don’t know what it says that among the first things our new private equity bosses did was dissolve the investigative unit I was a part of. (Thankfully, I was able to remain at Kotaku.)"

 

Kotaku was the rare games journalism outlet that actually did journalism. Sad seeing it devolve.

 

It looks like an abandoned amusement park or your typical 2006 GeoCities page that hadn’t been updated since 2002.

 

It's going to be much less than that in December as people realize it's dead.

 

Yep. The November push can be attributed to "What's all the fuss about?" curiosity, I suspect.

 

Someone fill me in... what’s the end game here?

It’s not like a magazine where you can retool, perhaps change the name, and keep the subscriber list.

The main asset, the Deadspin name and domain, is now pretty much worthless.

 

They paid real money for the site. No way they just let it sit forever, right? At some point they have to hire a new staff and bill it as some big relaunch or all that money is utterly wasted.

I doubt they have trouble finding people to take their money after this cooling off period.

 

Ehhhh. I mean, for most of the sites, it seems like their "goal" is to slowly shutter the non-profitable parts, and to focus on the cheap parts that generate revenue. Like at Kotaku, they shut down the investigative unit, and the void has been filled by clickbait-y stuff. At this point, Deadspin seems soooo distressed, why bother? If anything, they should probably just lean into the hate and run a Barstool-style "fuck you" site that appeals to right-wing folks.

 

I don't understand your point. Was pissing off the Deadspin writers part of the implementation of its plan to shutter non-profitable parts, or will the new company now dump Deadspin because it has become non-profitable.

 

Sorry - I meant the latter. Rehabbing Deadspin seems impossible at this point, without doing a mea culpa and dumping a ton of money into the site. Neither really seems like the style of current management.

 

They could run a "Where are they now?" series that features all the former Deadspin writers and editors who never realized how good they had it before they pissed uphill.