In the past week, our sites have been inundated by incessant auto-play ads, which is a terrible user experience and something that we have never had on our websites.Īfter we got a lot of reader feedback about that, all of the company sites posted a short statement saying that we were aware of the auto-play and that we also didn't like it and we were trying to figure out what we could do about it. ()Ĭan you tell me what some of the other issues were that you were objecting to and that led to so many of the writers resigning or quitting? Management and staff members have butted heads since the financial equity firm Great Hills Partners bought Deadspin along with sister sites like The Root, Gizmodo and Jezebel earlier this year.
I have internal data from a few months ago that show that the posts on The Concourse, which is the non-sports sub vertical of Deadspin, far outperform the posts that directly are about sports. They're kind of picking and choosing their statistics there. In fact, the statement claims that posts that weren't about sports accounted for less than one per cent of traffic in September. Ultimately, we all sort of came to our own conclusions that it just wasn't a place where we could continue to work, not just because Barry, the heart and soul of Deadspin for more than a decade, had been fired, but because the management had been encroaching on our editorial independence for months and months and months and didn't show any signs of relenting on that.ĭeadspin's parent company G/O Media says that non-sports content simply isn't successful on the site. We regrouped and decided what we could possibly do to make continuing to work at this site tenable. Here are some times Deadspin didn't stick to sports:- your editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky was fired. Saying that it's a sports site is kind of missing the scope of what Deadspin is. And that is sports, but it's also a lot of other things that draw readers to the site and have always drawn readers to the site for more than a decade.Ī lot of our readers come to the site for whatever we are writing about culture, politics or just, you know, random silly rankings of like board games or whatever. I mean, mostly what Deadspin is, is a place where writers can write about whatever they care about. We don't see it as a sports site first and foremost. Once we did put stories, both old and new, on the site that were not directly related to sports, our interim EIC Barry Petchesky was fired.ĭeadspin is a sports website first and foremost, so why was the dictate so objectionable to you and other writers that you had to stick to sports? We had previously been told to stick to sports, and we had ignored it successfully for months, and so we didn't figure that this would be any different. What happened after you were told to stick to sports?įirst we decided that we were going to post blogs on the site that didn't have anything to do with sports as sort of a direct action we could take to push back against this mandate. Wagner spoke to As It Happens guest host Megan Williams about why she's no longer a staff writer at Deadspin.
Management and staff members have butted heads since the private equity firm Great Hills Partners bought Deadspin and several sister sites earlier this year.ĭeadspin was formerly a part of Gawker Media, which declared bankruptcy and shut down after losing a lawsuit to wrestler Hulk Hogan that was funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. "We're sorry that they couldn't work within this incredibly broad coverage mandate," said Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman for G/O Media, the company that runs Deadspin.īut the tensions go back further than that. The resignations come after the company fired the site's interim editor for refusing to adhere to management's edict that writers "stick to sports" even though editors say non-sports coverage generates more than twice as much traffic. Wagner is one of at least seven staff members who resigned from the popular sports, culture and politics website on Wednesday as part of a long brewing conflict with management over editorial direction. Laura Wagner loved her job at Deadspin, but she says can't keep working there because she believes its new owners are driving the site into the ground.
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