Deadspin editor quits, blasts G/O management

Not many of us are John Oliver.

 

Hard to say. I know they've been searching for a new EIC, and he or she might have cleaned house anyway, although none of the previous EICs had done that upon arrival. But when they posted all non-sports stories on the day they were told to stick to sports, they had to know Barry was going to get binned at least. Nick Denton might have allowed them to be scamps (and look where it got him), but the new guys weren't.

 

I guess Magary would be the sports blog equivalent. Strangely, he never seemed to engage in the kind of corporate trash-talking his colleagues reveled in. He'd retweet some stuff and stuck an inflammatory email at the end of his final mailbag on Tuesday, but that's the extent of it, from what I can recall.

 

They weren't being scamps as they saw it. They negotiated complete editorial independence into their union contract.

 

Those folks are emotionally immature, and angry. And they have long been so.

Their reaction to strife wasn’t to lean into the union and go on strike - to fight for it - but to put sugar in the gas tanks, if you will. There’s something noble in burning it down and something dangerous, too.

 

Then why not go on strike? What was the union for if you’re just going to quit the job?

 

That's a perfectly cromulent question to which I don't have an answer.

 

But instead of using the union to fight it, they blew the union up.

EDIT: @Alma with the same thought.

 

And lest anyone think Roth is a total fuckhead:

 

I’ll posit: The union was a virtue signal.

 

Maybe it's just that we don't know how to do nuance anymore.

 

It's a little bit of all of these.

Gawker/Deadpain has always confused journalistic integrity with sophomoric self-dramatization, all the way back to its founding.

And it always overplays its hand. Always.