According to WSJ [1] the issue was that the ads were autoplaying with sound on. Just auto playing by itself isn't considered intrusive by the industry.
Some of us don't want to spring for unlimited data plans and get rather frustrated when reading textual news incurs the charges associated with streaming video. Bandwidth is not boundless for everyone.
The real and less romantic story is this: The journalists at Deadspin and its sister sites, like most journalists I know, are eager to do work that makes money; we are even willing to compromise for it, knowing that our jobs and futures rest on it. An ever-growing number of media owners, meanwhile, are so exceedingly unwilling to reckon with the particulars of their own business that they refuse to accept our eagerness to help them make money.
(...)
A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart. They know what they know, and they don’t need to know anything else.
Why don't the journalists who know how to run the business pool their resources up and start a business then? What's stopping them? What do they need those venture capital vultures for?
Journalists aren't exactly known for being paid well. They need resources to start up an outlet and the primary place to get those resources in venture capital which would just start this entire process over again.
Many community newspapers start with low resources and grow over time to become the voice of their community. They’re not going to become rich in most cases.
A content-based website is extremely cheap business to start, as far as running businesses goes. Seriously, you don't need any capital whatsoever, no offices, machines, just pay someone to set up a website. Millions of people start all kinds of businesses in this country every year, often much poorer than journalists.
The reason they don't do this is because running a content-based business is much harder than they claim it to be, and it's easy to claim things when you don't have skin in the game: when the venture-capital owned company goes under, they'll just get another job, while if they start their own business, pool up some initial capital and work for free for a few months until they make enough revenue to pay themselves reasonable salaries, they're risking much more.
>pool up some initial capital and work for free for a few months until they make enough revenue to pay themselves reasonable salaries
And there is the problem I was referencing. It is a pretty big ask for everyone to just work for free for months and it is something only a privileged few can do. Plus a site like Deadspin isn't a small site. I'm not sure of the exact headcount, but it looks like roughly 10 writers have left recently. That isn't counting any tech people, any sales folks, or any other operational people. The idea that "content is cheap" is basically the exact problem that caused this whole debacle in the first place.
"don't have skin in the game" -- can you explain what you mean by saying that journalists don't have skin in the game of journalism?
Your first paragraph says that content-based websites are easy even for poor people; your second says it's hard and that you have to work for free for months. I'm confused. How are poor people supposed to work for free for a few months and then have enough to pay themselves reasonable salaries with health care/insurance and retirement and PTO?
I mean they did. The actual business we are talking about was started the way you suggest, and was then destroyed by a vindictive billionaire, and is now being (apparently) mismanaged by a bunch of other rich people.
Is your premise that the journalists have no right to be mad at what they perceive as an unjust wielding of economic power?
The actual business we are talking about was started the way you suggest, and was then destroyed by a vindictive billionaire, and is now being (apparently) mismanaged by a bunch of other rich people.
If so, that's only more reason to leave. If they all leave, they can start a competing business managing it the way they want, while the rich people are left with worthless husk.
I'd also like to note that it was not destroyed by "vindictive billionaire", but by a result of jury trial, which punished them for keeping a private sex tape up despite the court order telling them to take it down. Allow me to opine that it doesn't really give me a feeling that they know how to run a successful business.
They were destroyed for publishing revenge porn[1].
Whoever at that organization gave the greenlight on publishing and publicizing sexually explicit videos without the express consent of the people appearing in them are lucky to not be in prison.
Gawker was trying to destroy someone by publishing tabloid news and then overpowering them in court, until someone richer than them showed up (because they did the same to him before).
It was their own strategy used against them in a legal battle, over tabloid news instead of some hard-hitting report. They aren't a victim in any sense.
> Why don't the journalists who know how to run the business pool their resources up and start a business then? What's stopping them? What do they need those venture capital vultures for?
Maybe they've got families to feed? Not everyone can just quit and start a business that indefinitely burns cash.
What it has to do with the topic is that you need money to support a family. Moving to a lower cost of living area does not mean you can support them on nothing, so does not solve the problem we were talking about.
The topic was whether journalists know how to run their business given all their critique.
Seems like it’s either easy and so they should get on with it (and it’s undeniably cheap to get started) or it’s much harder than it looks and they don’t really know what they’re talking about.
> Why don't the journalists who know how to run the business pool their resources up and start a business then? What's stopping them? What do they need those venture capital vultures for?
The answer is super simple - because they would starve to death before they managed to start making a profit. Most people don’t have that much savings for a runway.
Someone said ‘move to a lower cost of living area’ but there is no zero cost of living area to move to until you become profitable.
This is the same situation that the vast majority of entrepreneurs are in and they make it work. What is so special about journalists that they always need special rules or consideration?
> like most journalists I know, are eager to do work that makes money; we are even willing to compromise for it.
Is this journalism in 2019? Pump out content to make a buck and fuck journalistic integrity because they have kids to feed? Real journalism takes too long and doesn't generate enough revenue?
One could say the same about Russian troll farms, they too have kids at home to feed.
I think you are completely misreading this, given that the context is people quitting their jobs over perceived threats to journalistic integrity.
There are other compromises that can be made such as pay, working conditions, working on dross stories to make up for the expense of the really good ones, etc.
I looks like the new bosses were pushing sports on the journalists. I don’t see how that implies losing integrity. Not caring about integrity would be things like fabrication, omission, taking one side of the issue, etc. Focusing on one section of news doesn’t compromise integrity.
“Stick to sports” doesn’t mean “report only about sports.” It means, “do not follow that story any further because it makes me uncomfortable.” This could be for various reasons but ultimately means sticking to one side of an issue, omitting details that would anger the Powers That Be, or even fabricating details to put a positive spin on an otherwise damning report.
“Stick to sports” means, “screw journalistic integrity”
That's emphatically not what "stick to sports" means.
For a lot of people, sports are an oasis of tranquility carved out of the incessant rage and cultural bickering that blares 24/7 everywhere else. There's a lot of old duffers that would rather hear about David Price's fastball rather than his political positions, or Kyrie Irving's crossover dribble rather than his speculations on the geometry of the Earth.
It's still a weird pivot for Deadspin to take, because that was never what they were about or where their audience was. My suspicion is that it was a reaction to the ratings baths that ESPN has taken as they embraced the culture war, rather than Top 10, box scores and replays - and alienated a big chunk of their audience. In both cases it's a warning about knowing your brand and your audience...
>It's still a weird pivot for Deadspin to take, because that was never what they were about or where their audience was.
I have been a Deadspin reader since at least 2006. It might have gotten more political over recent years (hasn't everything?), but I think you fundamentally didn't understand Deadspin's purpose if you think it was the place to go to read about David Price's fastball. There are countless places on the internet that cover stories like that better. The thing the separated Deadspin from the crowd was that they didn't stick to what happened on the field in sports and that was a key factor in them building their audience.
The clear intent of the sentence is to state that journalists do understand the need for their publisher to function as a business, i. e. to rebut the other stereotype of journalists that they often get to hear, namely that they are unrealistic idealists.
As I understand it the owners told them to focus on sports not politics, and these "journalists" refused. It sounds to me that a site dedicated to sports, should focus on sports.
"Deadspin is a sports news and blog website, originally founded by Gawker Media. Deadspin posts commentaries, recaps and previews of major sports stories of the day, as well as sports-related anecdotes, rumors and video"
I'm not a reader of deadspin, but if their content no longer aligned to this, and was primarily focussed on politics. Its little wonder the owners said knock it off.
Coincidentally, ESPN, has done the same thing, putting the focus back on sports[1]
> I'm not a reader of deadspin, but if their content no longer aligned to this, and was primarily focussed on politics.
See, if you had been a reader for a while, you would have known that they frequently covered non-sports topics, and that's a big part of what their readers liked.
I am (was) an avid reader of Deadspin, and the non-sports content was a large part of why I read that site for 10+ odd years. The reality is that, even for people who love sports, there often isn't very much to say about them. Rather than force them to churn out the same kind of article about why LeBron James is good at basketball that you could read on any number of websites, Deadspin allowed their writers the freedom to write about whatever they wanted to, whether that was a brilliant analysis of Loony Tunes (https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-wile-e-coyote-explains...), poignant commentary about the ways in which journalistic language undermines sexual assault victims (https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/against-allegedly-18197033...), or tell a harrowing story about recovering from a major brain hemorrhage (https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-night-the-lights-went-...). The perspective offered by Deadspin was unique, and I will miss it dearly.
Things are spinning out of control over at Deadspin.
Several staffers at the news site announced their resignations on Wednesday — amid a struggle with their G/O Media bosses who recently issued a memo telling writers to file only sports stories.
The internal revolt began Tuesday with rebellious staffers continuing to write non-sports stories — and the deputy director saying he’d been fired for not following the directive.
“Hi! I’ve just been fired from Deadspin for not sticking to sports,” tweeted Barry Petchesky.
On Wednesday, sports writer Lauren Theisen posted an image she said was of “the meeting where management tried to get us to move past Barry’s firing.” She then announced that she was leaving the site over how her colleagues were treated.
Features writer Kelsey McKinney and media reporter Laura Wagner were also among the many staffers to announce they quit Wednesday.
A G/O spokesperson said in a statement: “They resigned and we’re sorry that they couldn’t work within this incredibly broad coverage mandate. We’re excited about Deadspin’s future and we’ll have some important updates in the coming days.”
I don't understand why sports writers would be mad about being told to stick to sports. If I go to a sports website, I want to see sports articles. That's the job. Instead, you got progressives writing political articles tangentially related to sports if at all. If they want to write political articles, don't write for a sports site.
I’m in adtech and know enough publishers. I can’t share exact numbers but readership is way down. Constant political stories and culture outrage doesn’t make good sports reading. Contrast this with barstool sports which is doing well.
>Constant political stories and culture outrage doesn’t make good sports reading.
>Contrast this with barstool sports which is doing well.
There is a high level of irony in these two comments considering Barstool doesn't "stick to sports" either. They just approach a lot of the same issues from the opposite direction as Deadspin.
Barstool has noticeably more coverage of actual sports and much less divisive political and cultural content. Low-brow/college humor is very different than left vs right politicking. It is not surprising that you will suffer audience loss when picking one side of the battle.
A magazine targeting men distributing pictures of scantily-clad ladies? The humanity! On a more serious note, I don't hear any issue with tabloids putting guys in speedoes on the front, let alone hear it called, "politically divisive." What distinguishes the two?
I’m not surprised to see this given what has happened to Gizmodo. It used to be one of the few tech sites I’d check daily but it has basically just become a constant stream of global warming and left-wing propaganda that even I, as left leaning, got sick of having rammed down my throat.
Contrast that with another G/O Media site, Jalopnik, which continues to be one of my favorite sites on the Internet. The Verge also seems to have moved on mostly from trying to straddle “culture” and tech and is better for it.
Readership isn’t down because anyone who goes to Deadspin was offended by politics. That you would compare them to Barstool as an equivalent suggests one of us is badly confused. The company has been bought by a series of wet brained “investment” professionals who never bothered to discover what they bought. I have no idea why you would buy what was Gawker and then think neutering it would make it better.
This is completely wrong. Gawker Media was a profitable, growing company until Peter Thiel wrecked it and its subsidiary sites were sold to a series of increasingly incompetent owners. Deadspin's "non-sports" articles were regularly among its most widely read.
Gawker was a $200M company taking on a much smaller person until Thiel got involved. He used their own strategy of outspending the other side against them, and they decided to die on a hill of tabloid gossip rather than real news.
Regardless if Deadspin did so well then it would continue doing so in the years since the lawsuit.
Gawker media were confident they could operate freely in legal grey areas and fall back on their “freedom of speech” defense when they published Hulk Hogan’s sex tape without his knowledge.
The fact they decided to go to court and challenge Hogan over his claims of defamation was their own poor choice. The only thing Thiel did was bankroll Hogan’s legal team.
A.J. Daulerio’s deposition and subsequent cavalier appearance and court testimony was probably the last nail in their coffin.
In short, Gawker had been playing with fire before and escaped. The fact they thought this would be another easy escape proved to be their undoing.
Nobody but Gawker and their editors who thought they could publish anything, about any celeb is what cost them their publication and their jobs - not just one guy who financially supported Hogan in his civil case.
Let's not forget why Thiel was upset at Gawker. They outed him as gay, putting his life in danger because he did business in places where the penalty for homosexuality is death.
No, money doesn’t easily solve anything, and it can actually bring attention (like tabloids that want to expose your sex life). And existence of billionaires? Envy of other people’s wealth and taking it away by force is at the forefront of every catastrophic economic outcome.
Anyone who has ever had an unreliable car begs to differ. Among a million other examples. Not being able to just solve unexpected problems is the worst part of being poor.
> Envy of other people’s wealth and taking it away by force is at the forefront of every catastrophic economic outcome.
I didn't say 'taking it away', it's more a comment on how taxes should be more progressive.
But if you did knock every billionaire down to 100M... nothing bad would happen. It's less than one percent of one percent of people going from "filthy rich" down to "still filthy rich".
This is an outrageous position to take. You’re basically acknowledging that Thiel could come to face physical violence due to Gawker’s irresponsible actions but that he could just change his actions and choices to avoid this. That is, it reads like “No his life isn’t in danger if he goes out of his way to avoid the danger”.
Going to a very small list of countries purely to make more money, when you already have a billion dollars, is not at all a necessary or important life activity. The inability to do so is a very trivial inconvenience.
Running a tabloid news story is not a necessary or important life activity either, especially when it actively harms someone else (regardless of their wealth or connections).
Barstool took their niche as the edgy sports-adjacent content mill, and does it better. Not least because Portnoy is still willing to give the finger to the leagues and ESPN.
Bill Simmons' grand Grantland experiment showed, for a brief shining moment, what the best possible version of this kind of thing was, but he lost his cover in Bristol, and the plug got pulled.
This was Univision wasn't it? Kotaku is falling apart right now too, also done an impressively terrible job killing off the AV Club (I reckon there could be a case study in there about how not to do a rebrand tbh, have hardly viewed it since). They seemed to think they could just pull the audiences from about a dozen very different websites and mould them into one site.
Univision bought most of the remains of Gawker, merged it with their own site Fusion (later renamed Splinter, now defunct) and the Onion/AV Club, and sold it to the current owners of G/O at a massive loss.
In this media environment, with profitability seemingly tied to the whims of Facebook's recommendation algorithm and major sites like Mic and ThinkProgress dropping left and right, I don't know if anyone can survive without a deep-pocketed owner who can fund years of losses.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] thread[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/hostilities-rise-inside-g-o-med...
Autoplay is evil everywhere unless I enable it explicitly.
(...)
A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart. They know what they know, and they don’t need to know anything else.
Why don't the journalists who know how to run the business pool their resources up and start a business then? What's stopping them? What do they need those venture capital vultures for?
Many community newspapers start with low resources and grow over time to become the voice of their community. They’re not going to become rich in most cases.
The reason they don't do this is because running a content-based business is much harder than they claim it to be, and it's easy to claim things when you don't have skin in the game: when the venture-capital owned company goes under, they'll just get another job, while if they start their own business, pool up some initial capital and work for free for a few months until they make enough revenue to pay themselves reasonable salaries, they're risking much more.
And there is the problem I was referencing. It is a pretty big ask for everyone to just work for free for months and it is something only a privileged few can do. Plus a site like Deadspin isn't a small site. I'm not sure of the exact headcount, but it looks like roughly 10 writers have left recently. That isn't counting any tech people, any sales folks, or any other operational people. The idea that "content is cheap" is basically the exact problem that caused this whole debacle in the first place.
Your first paragraph says that content-based websites are easy even for poor people; your second says it's hard and that you have to work for free for months. I'm confused. How are poor people supposed to work for free for a few months and then have enough to pay themselves reasonable salaries with health care/insurance and retirement and PTO?
Is your premise that the journalists have no right to be mad at what they perceive as an unjust wielding of economic power?
If so, that's only more reason to leave. If they all leave, they can start a competing business managing it the way they want, while the rich people are left with worthless husk.
I'd also like to note that it was not destroyed by "vindictive billionaire", but by a result of jury trial, which punished them for keeping a private sex tape up despite the court order telling them to take it down. Allow me to opine that it doesn't really give me a feeling that they know how to run a successful business.
Whoever at that organization gave the greenlight on publishing and publicizing sexually explicit videos without the express consent of the people appearing in them are lucky to not be in prison.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_porn
It was their own strategy used against them in a legal battle, over tabloid news instead of some hard-hitting report. They aren't a victim in any sense.
Maybe they've got families to feed? Not everyone can just quit and start a business that indefinitely burns cash.
Seems like it’s either easy and so they should get on with it (and it’s undeniably cheap to get started) or it’s much harder than it looks and they don’t really know what they’re talking about.
> Why don't the journalists who know how to run the business pool their resources up and start a business then? What's stopping them? What do they need those venture capital vultures for?
The answer is super simple - because they would starve to death before they managed to start making a profit. Most people don’t have that much savings for a runway.
Someone said ‘move to a lower cost of living area’ but there is no zero cost of living area to move to until you become profitable.
That’s why they need VC.
They’re paid a pittance. They can’t build up any savings.
Is this journalism in 2019? Pump out content to make a buck and fuck journalistic integrity because they have kids to feed? Real journalism takes too long and doesn't generate enough revenue?
One could say the same about Russian troll farms, they too have kids at home to feed.
What a sad world we live in.
There are other compromises that can be made such as pay, working conditions, working on dross stories to make up for the expense of the really good ones, etc.
“Stick to sports” doesn’t mean “report only about sports.” It means, “do not follow that story any further because it makes me uncomfortable.” This could be for various reasons but ultimately means sticking to one side of an issue, omitting details that would anger the Powers That Be, or even fabricating details to put a positive spin on an otherwise damning report.
“Stick to sports” means, “screw journalistic integrity”
For a lot of people, sports are an oasis of tranquility carved out of the incessant rage and cultural bickering that blares 24/7 everywhere else. There's a lot of old duffers that would rather hear about David Price's fastball rather than his political positions, or Kyrie Irving's crossover dribble rather than his speculations on the geometry of the Earth.
It's still a weird pivot for Deadspin to take, because that was never what they were about or where their audience was. My suspicion is that it was a reaction to the ratings baths that ESPN has taken as they embraced the culture war, rather than Top 10, box scores and replays - and alienated a big chunk of their audience. In both cases it's a warning about knowing your brand and your audience...
I have been a Deadspin reader since at least 2006. It might have gotten more political over recent years (hasn't everything?), but I think you fundamentally didn't understand Deadspin's purpose if you think it was the place to go to read about David Price's fastball. There are countless places on the internet that cover stories like that better. The thing the separated Deadspin from the crowd was that they didn't stick to what happened on the field in sports and that was a key factor in them building their audience.
The clear intent of the sentence is to state that journalists do understand the need for their publisher to function as a business, i. e. to rebut the other stereotype of journalists that they often get to hear, namely that they are unrealistic idealists.
Sad world, indeed.
What does it sound to you that a site not purely dedicated to sports—like say, I dunno, Deadspin—should do?
"Deadspin is a sports news and blog website, originally founded by Gawker Media. Deadspin posts commentaries, recaps and previews of major sports stories of the day, as well as sports-related anecdotes, rumors and video"
I'm not a reader of deadspin, but if their content no longer aligned to this, and was primarily focussed on politics. Its little wonder the owners said knock it off.
Coincidentally, ESPN, has done the same thing, putting the focus back on sports[1]
[1] https://ftw.usatoday.com/2019/07/espn-dan-le-batard-no-polit...
See, if you had been a reader for a while, you would have known that they frequently covered non-sports topics, and that's a big part of what their readers liked.
Compare and contrast:
https://twitter.com/gmgunion/status/1189287651146383361
I think that says it all really
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G/O_Media&oldid=9...
>Contrast this with barstool sports which is doing well.
There is a high level of irony in these two comments considering Barstool doesn't "stick to sports" either. They just approach a lot of the same issues from the opposite direction as Deadspin.
Contrast that with another G/O Media site, Jalopnik, which continues to be one of my favorite sites on the Internet. The Verge also seems to have moved on mostly from trying to straddle “culture” and tech and is better for it.
Here's Deadspin sticking to sports in 2017 https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/a-full-transcript-of-donal...
Here's Deadspin sticking to sports in 2016 https://adequateman.deadspin.com/the-2016-hater-s-guide-to-t...
Here's Deadspin sticking to sports in 2013 http://deadsp.in/cgmoid5
2012 https://deadspin.com/what-happens-when-a-35-year-old-man-ret...
I'm done diving into the archives but that's a pretty hot take you're throwing out there.
In fact, here's a person whose job it was to sell ads for Deadspin explaining that you are incorrect: https://twitter.com/jillian_schulz/status/118967386127042969...
Regardless if Deadspin did so well then it would continue doing so in the years since the lawsuit.
This is wrong.
Gawker media were confident they could operate freely in legal grey areas and fall back on their “freedom of speech” defense when they published Hulk Hogan’s sex tape without his knowledge.
The fact they decided to go to court and challenge Hogan over his claims of defamation was their own poor choice. The only thing Thiel did was bankroll Hogan’s legal team.
A.J. Daulerio’s deposition and subsequent cavalier appearance and court testimony was probably the last nail in their coffin.
In short, Gawker had been playing with fire before and escaped. The fact they thought this would be another easy escape proved to be their undoing.
Nobody but Gawker and their editors who thought they could publish anything, about any celeb is what cost them their publication and their jobs - not just one guy who financially supported Hogan in his civil case.
A billionaire can afford security or not go in person.
Does not going in person harm his ability to make deals? Maybe, maybe not. But that doesn't even resemble "life in danger".
Regardless nobody should have such personal details revealed as news without their own doing, no matter how rich or famous they are.
But when it comes to "I need to visit this country for business", money easily solves that.
> Regardless nobody should have such personal details revealed as news without their own doing, no matter how rich or famous they are.
Yeah, sure. Though I'd say that the existence of billionaires is a significantly larger problem...
Anyone who has ever had an unreliable car begs to differ. Among a million other examples. Not being able to just solve unexpected problems is the worst part of being poor.
> Envy of other people’s wealth and taking it away by force is at the forefront of every catastrophic economic outcome.
I didn't say 'taking it away', it's more a comment on how taxes should be more progressive.
But if you did knock every billionaire down to 100M... nothing bad would happen. It's less than one percent of one percent of people going from "filthy rich" down to "still filthy rich".
Bill Simmons' grand Grantland experiment showed, for a brief shining moment, what the best possible version of this kind of thing was, but he lost his cover in Bristol, and the plug got pulled.
In this media environment, with profitability seemingly tied to the whims of Facebook's recommendation algorithm and major sites like Mic and ThinkProgress dropping left and right, I don't know if anyone can survive without a deep-pocketed owner who can fund years of losses.