Deadspin editor quits, blasts G/O management

Here's a group of writers (a highly uneven bunch in my opinion, some excellent, some must misses) who had something they thought was good and that was actually making money blown to bits for no reason except some rich shit's ego. No wonder they're pissed. Are they a melodramatic group? Oh, sure. They were before all this, too.

 

This is an important point. If Deadspin was wildly profitable, I imagine there would have been considerably more suitors even knowing they don't always play nice. As someone who has been on both sides of things, I've learned that reporters often have no clue whether the company they work for is profitable or not especially when it's privately held. That G/O had to take a craven advertisement deal like that $1 million auto-play ad suggests to me Deadspin isn't nearly as profitable, if it is at all, as all its outgoing employees suggest.

 

The site died the day AJ got on the defendant's stand.

Everything else is just rearranging the Titanic deck chairs

 

Leitch weighs in with a nice eulogy for the site ...

Volume 2, Issue 83: We Were Lucky

 

I scrolled over the link and the alt text said "read if you like vanilla."

 

This is my favorite new yogurt.

 

This is my favorite person from Iceland

 

It's great to hear from journalists how businesspeople arefucking over their great institutions.
Never is it explained why they would do it or who or what out there would do anything differently except as some charity case.

 

@Double Down -
There was the Derek Thompson piece in the Atlantic this month spotlighting the great extent millennial lifestyle is dependent on venture capital.

Netflix is about $20 billion underwater, as well. Still operating at a loss (like Twitter).
I hate to make this a generational thing but none of these models are sustainable and millennials should better understand the broken world they've inherited.
I give them a lot of credit in certain regards - they've never known the country at peace, either literally or ideologically.
But in other ways they haven't a clue and the teeth-gnashing of last week reflected that.
Like what did they expect to happen when this Spanfeller guy took reins of the publication. There was no way for it to end well.

 

^^^^
I know nothing about business, other than what goes up must come down, but it seems like that nails it. Note that Gen Xers are taking advantage of that too.

The VC folk have taken/will take these companies public, unload a lot of their shares and probably come out ahead. The rest of us ...

We’ll be pining for 2008 when the next downturn comes around.

 

It's very strange to me how highly Deadspinners regarded themselves. How many Deadspin writers were exceptional? Like, how much "important" work did they do? A handful of stories? And most of those they fucked up in some way. The vast majority of posts were disposable; they did a ton of aggregation and theft; and a lot of things they wrote, especially early on, were amoral at best, sinister at worst. For a place that became "woke," it had a long and sordid history of wronging people, including people who didn't deserve it, like that poor girl on the toilet stall floor. I went there plenty, mostly as a diversion, and because sometimes they could be funny and a good source for media gossip, but I never saw it as anything more than a little entertainment. These people thought they were part of some cause, like they were crusaders against everything bad in the universe. It was a fucking blog, man. They really did lose sight of what they were, and I think it cost them everything in the end. They're like every other person in history who flew for a couple of seconds and then decided they were birds.