Just a couple of months ago, Gawker was making headlines for picking fights with a 9yo football fan wearing team regalia and his own family’s headdress. Now, they’re picking up the pieces.
From the moment Holden Armenta’s family announced they were launching a defamation suit against Deadspin for claiming first that he was wearing ‘blackface’ (by selecting an image that only displayed the right side of his face), and then by later claiming he was appropriating his own culture, Deadspin had no leg to stand on.
The story was late November. Now, less than 4 months later, the media property has given everyone — everyone! — the pink slip. Remarkable.
The Holden Armenta angle was conveniently left out of the Axios reporting of Deadspin being offloaded by its parent company for reasons having something to do with ‘keeping his investors in mind’. (Couldn’t include ‘risk mitigation’, could it?)
How did we come to have the entire staff let go in one fell swoop?
It was announced that the parent company sold Deadspin to a European startup which was going to keep some of the ‘feel’ of Deadspin, but would be building from the ground up with an entirely new staff and culture. That meant everyone there gets a pink slip.
In the memo, Spanfeller said none of Deadspin’s existing staff will move over with the site as part of the deal and the new owners will “instead build a new team more in line with their editorial vision for the brand.”
Impacted staffers were notified Monday that they were being let go from G/O Media, marking the third round of cuts at the firm in less than a year.
Spanfeller said Lineup Publishing approached him about the sale and that the company was not “actively shopping Deadspin.”
“The rationale behind the decision to sell included a variety of important factors that include the buyer’s editorial plans for the brand, tough competition in the sports journalism sector, and a valuation that reflected a sizable premium from our original purchase price for the site,” Spanfeller wrote in the memo.
“While the new owners plan to be reverential to Deadpin’s unique voice, they plan to take a different content approach regarding the site’s overall sports coverage,” he added. — Axios
Would those people still have jobs if Deadspin hadn’t defamed a child and rather than apologizing, doubled down? We may never know.
Another website — run by people who were part of Deadspin 1.0 back in the Gawker days — gave a little more color to the events around the sale, including the misspelling of his own company’s name by the old CEO:
“So we just got half an hour’s notice that Deadspin has been sold to a European startup and they’re not taking any staff,” senior writer Julie DiCaro posted on Twitter. “Already locked out a company slack and our laptops.” In a note to staff republished by Axios reporter Sara Fischer, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller said that the website had been sold to “the European firm Lineup Publishing.”
“I do want to make it clear that we were not actively shopping Deadspin,” Spanfeller wrote in the note. “The rationale behind the decision to sell included a variety of important factors that include the buyer’s editorial plans for the brand, tough competition in the sports journalism sector, and a valuation that reflected a sizable premium from our original purchase price for the site.” Spanfeller also misspelled Deadspin as “Deadpin.” — Defector
Are these clods starting to realize that people who champion cancel culture don’t get a lot of sympathy when the pendulum swings back the other way?
Psalms of War: Prayers That Literally Kick Ass is a collection, from the book of Psalms, regarding how David rolled in prayer. I bet you haven’t heard these read, prayed, or sung in church against our formidable enemies — and therein lies the Church’s problem. We’re not using the spiritual weapons God gave us to waylay the powers of darkness. It might be time to dust them off and offer ‘em up if you’re truly concerned about the state of Christ’s Church and of our nation.
Also included in this book, Psalms of War, are reproductions of the author’s original art from his Biblical Badass Series of oil paintings.
This is a great gift for the prayer warriors. Real. Raw. Relevant.
