Deadspin is dead. Again.
Sports news and commentary Deadspin has been sold again — and its entire staff has been laid off.
Let me use the meme that every single person talking about this story has used:
Deadspin, once owned by Gawker Media, became part of private-equity backed G/O Media in 2019. In a memo to company staff Monday, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller announced that Deadspin was sold to European firm Lineup Publishing.
You can take the Deadspin out of Gawker, but you can’t take the Gawker out of Deadspin.
With the sale, the 11-person staff of Deadspin was pink-slipped. “Deadspin’s new owners have made the decision to not carry over any of the site’s existing staff and instead build a new team more in line with their editorial vision for the brand,” Spanfeller wrote in the memo. “While the new owners plan to be reverential to Deadpin’s [sic] unique voice, they plan to take a different content approach regarding the site’s overall sports coverage. This unfortunately means that we will be parting ways with those impacted staff members, who were notified earlier today.”
For those unfamiliar with it (which, judging from its serial failures to produce a profit, is the majority of Internet sports fans), Deadspin was a site that believed the biggest problem with sports reporting was not enough poisonous, radical left-wing social justice got injected into it. As far as I can tell, their biggest claim to fame was getting pwned by Ted Cruz on Twitter. Nor did then editor Tim Marchman follow up to boasts of willing to fight in an octogon when real MMA fighters chimed in their willingness to do so.
Deadspin was trash, and the people writing for it were trash, and it underlies yet again just few online reporting venues of long-lasting value the dotcom boom produced.
So what garbage leftwing site will be next to bite the dust without ever having turned a profit? Salon? Kotaku? Maybe we should have an online media deadpool…
Tags: Deadspin, layoffs, Media Watch
Provider 1 bids 300 quatloos on Kotaku.
Read it for a short while around 2011-12, mostly because I would occasionally look at Jalopnik. It quickly became apparent that most of their writing wasn’t very good and the more interesting stuff was often cribbed from elsewhere… much like Jalopnik.
Oh, please, let Salon be next. One brick at a time…
Who is now the defendant in Holden Armenta’s defamation lawsuit: G/O Media or Lineup Publishing?
That’s an interesting question. I Am Not A Lawyer, but one of the articles I read about the death of Deadspin said that G/O Media would continue to be the defendant in the Armenta lawsuit, and that Lineup Publishing was not assuming that liability.
However, I would give that the same media discount I would give to any discussion of legal matters. It makes sense to me that G/O would continue to be liable for acts done under their ownership, and Lineup would not be held responsible for acts by previous owners. But if there is one thing I have learned, it is that: the law is not what I think is right, or what makes sense to me, or even (in some cases) what the law actually says. The law is what the courts decide.
An interesting related question: what happens to ‘s defense? Was G/O Media paying for his legal defense as well as their own? And now that he’s not employed by G/O Media, will G/O’s lawyers continue to defend him? Or will G/O continue paying for a separate lawyer, if G/O’s lawyers were not defending both parties? Does Carron Phillips even have a lawyer?
What’s interesting to observe here is that this goes towards my point about the left’s Gramscian march through the institutions being an essentially pointless exercise, doomed to failure.
They thought, collectively, that “If we get control of the media, we can say/do whatever we like, because everyone gets their ideas from the media…”
While that may be true for a lot of the left, it is proving to be in error with regard to everyone else, because every single one of the institutions that the Gramscians have captured has lost the “market share of the mind” that they once had, and they’re on their way towards extinction.
Fundamentally, there’s a massive difference between substance and the essentially unsubstantial. You think you’ve got control of something when you take it over, but then you discover that the reality is that the power and authority that thing possessed was there because it reflected a truth, a need… Now that you’ve removed that truth, substituting your ideology for it? Guess what? There goes your power and authority, because nobody is listening to your bullshit anymore.
This is precisely what the media, academia, and governance is doing before our eyes: Rendering themselves utterly meaningless, in the name of the ideology the people who captured those institutions have forced on them.
What works, works. What doesn’t, won’t. It’s that simple… And, as a corollary, if your shit don’t work, it won’t be around much after everyone notices that fact.
Or, so my redneck friends would put it.
“Maybe we should have an online media deadpool…”
My money is on Rolling Stone. They used to be an iconic countercultural dynamo. Now, they are just boot-licking apologists for the status quo.
Like I said… Capturing the heights only does you any good if there’s any validity to that which you’re attempting to impose.
Fire will always trump smoke; if your bullshit won’t walk, your talk means nothing.
This is something that the leftoids don’t seem capable of grasping, even as they drive their newly captured positions into bankruptcy.
In the end, things have to work. They don’t work? You’re accomplishing nothing by taking them over and trying to bend them towards your ends.
From the complaint I have seen, the Armenta family are not suing Carron Phillips personally, just G/O Media, although Phillips’ name comes up a lot since he was the writer of the article.
I would assume that G/O Media and Lineup Publishing had a provision in their purchase agreement as to who would bear the costs of any pending lawsuits against Deadspin. In fact, as part of the due diligence of the buyer, G/O Media would most likely have had to disclose the existence of the Armenta “blackface” lawsuit (even if the buyer presumably knew about it already, since it has been publicly reported), and thus the parties would have decided how to handle it between themselves.
Would not the sale of Deadspin be seen as an attempt to get out from under just debt, were they to lose the lawsuit filed by the Armenta family?
I seem to recall having seen a similar principle applied to a local liability case, wherein the company involved sold off all of its assets, including its name, and then went “Oh, so sorry… That business entity no longer exists…”
As I recall, the judge didn’t look on that too kindly, and transferred the lawsuit to the new owners, who then went after the old owners who were at fault. It wasn’t at all pretty… I think the lawsuit ran on for years, and when it was all over, there were effectively no winners because the fees and fines amounted to almost the entire amount they were fighting over.
I may be mistaken, but I don’t think you can just sell out your operation to avoid paying for a lawsuit. If that’s what Deadspin did, my guess is that the new owners have either been indemnified for it, or they’re pretty confident of a win. Either way, they have to know about it all…
@Kirk: G/O Media still owns other websites even after selling off Deadspin — Gizmodo, Kotaku, The Onion, Jalopnik, and others. I wouldn’t think that they are trying to escape the lawsuit with this sale.