If the site flopped, he said, “there will be far less noble endeavors that I’ll lose money on in my life.” He offered to buy the group a round of drinks. “Maybe 20,000 people buy $10 monthly memberships in Month 1 and we’re nearly self-sustaining immediately,” Wang wrote. He offered to help the ex-Deadspinners pursue a new venture, funded either by investors or by subscriptions. “Like so many of your readers I feel like I’ve been mourning a loved one,” he wrote. Days after the exodus, Jasper Wang, the head of people analytics at Bain & Company, sent a few former Deadspin editors an email with the subject line: “Non-asshole business person interested in (re)building a website.” He expressed condolences. For taking this principled stand, Deadspin’s flamethrowers became the toast of Twitter. Petchesky was fired soon, his colleagues quit in solidarity. Ordered to stick to sports, Deadspin protest-blogged about random topics (e.g., a guy stealing a Halloween pumpkin decoration). Managers deleted the post Barry Petchesky, who was the editor at the time, called the move a “clear violation” of the company union’s collective bargaining agreement. That was followed by a piece inviting readers to log their discontent with the site’s new auto-play videos, which made for a miserable reading experience. Before long, Deadspin published a story depicting the newly installed executives as ill-equipped micromanagers with sexist hiring practices. So it seemed inevitable when, in 2019, Deadspin clashed with Great Hill Partners, the private equity firm that acquired the site’s parent company, now called G/O Media. In its media coverage, Deadspin often highlighted a fundamental hypocrisy: that for everything journalists do to expose institutional misdeeds, their employers are often guilty of the same sins. While Deadspin gleefully called out bad behavior-mostly through commentary, occasionally in reported pieces-it also made note when major outlets seemed to moderate coverage in order to preserve access or protect financial interests, such as billion-dollar broadcasting deals with sports leagues. “But I actually don’t think that having fun making fun of people and also doing accountability reporting are mean at their heart.” “A lot of people confuse that with being mean,” Megan Greenwell, a former Deadspin editor in chief, told me. ![]() Colorful barbs were a way of punctuating Deadspin’s journalism, the staff maintained. Deadspin, the influential sports and culture blog that all but imploded a few years ago, made its name by savaging those it deemed “assholes.” Founded in 2005 under Gawker Media, Deadspin used “asshole” as shorthand for anyone the staff disliked: Floyd Mayweather Jr., the boxer, who defended Donald Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” line Dan Snyder, formerly the owner of the Washington Commanders-who, according to a whistleblower with the National Park Service, paid to have more than a hundred trees chopped down to improve the view from his mansion Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, also known to readers as a “hypocritical shitstain.” That is to name just a few.
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