The Deadspin revolt of 2019.
Last week, the owners of G/O media fka Gizmodo fka Gawker Media told the staff of the sports vertical Deadspin to stop publishing non sports stories on the sports site. The staff reacted by quitting.
The chattering class was outraged at the owners for telling the staff of a sports site to stick to sports. No killing of controversial sports stories just no more political clickbait.
This is insane. If the order was to say only write positive things on these teams who are paying us for the coverage then taking a stand for integrity is righteous. This was not that. To say that someone must pay you for content other than the content you were hired to write is not true. If the staffers wanted to write politics they could have made their own site on their own time.
In August, a former editor claimed in an article the political content got better views than the sports content. What does that matter? Should the ny times stop publishing journalism because op-eds get more traffic? The worse part of being an employee is you are the ship not the captain.
Was the staff wrong to quit Deadspin? I don’t think they were. They didn’t want to be sports writers. This was a story with no heroes no villains. The owners want a sports site, the staff wanted a name brand playground. What was slimy was for the former staff to act like martyrs. In a time where mass layoffs in media will only become more common, they threw away an union job because they wanted their anti trump rants to have the deadspin banner instead of their blogs. They will argue Deadspin died before they did this but it won’t be true.
I hope G/O media gets Deadspin restaffed asap with writers who are grateful for the rare gift of paid work. The media industry has become too small for tantrums and is only getting smaller.
-E.C. Fiori
The Radical Centrists 