Of course, even though the last of the current-until-Thursday editorial staff at the sports (and fairly often, not-sports) blog Deadspin has now quit, as the mounting fallout from new owner G/O Media's "stick to sports" mantra that was enunciated just a few days ago erupted into Vesuvius, the website isn't going away. CEO Jim Spanfeller and the other hacks, including new Deadspin editorial director Paul Maidment, who turned Forbes into 50 percent "contributor" material will probably do what was their ultimate goal anyway — make it another Bleacher Report, or even worse, Barstool Sports.
Neiman Lab offers a roundup of hot takes and Tweets about Deadspin's demise and what it might portend.
As for yours truly?
As I said on Twitter more than once this last week, I visited Deadspin for four reasons:
1. To see ESPN pwned
2. To see Bill Simmons pwned
3. To read some often-wrong sports hot takes, sometimes almost as wrong as Bleacher Report, Barstool Sports or Fansided sites (along with seeing them pwned)
4. To read some of that non-sports writing that Spanfeller wanted to gut and that on Nieman's roundup, contra his claims, got more views than sports stuff.
A lot of the stuff under No. 4 had political overtones, usually at least mildly left of center. And THAT was the problem for the G/O vulture capitalists. That's why they simply closed down Deadspin's sister, Splinter, shortly after they bought the former Gawker carcass from Univision. To riff on what Ben Mathis-Lilley notes at Slate in talking about zombie websites, much of what remains at a place like Forbes is not just clickbait, but in the hands of these vulture capitalists, it's wingnut clickbait.
New Republic salutes Deadspin staff's courage in walking out, while noting they were in a rare situation — apparently profitable.
And that gets me back to bullet points 1-3, and those other sports sites.
Deadspin didn't really do sports reporting. It did, on its sports work, oh, 20 percent analysis, and 80 percent in the categories 1-3 plus other hot take type opinion, and an occasional cold take.
Sure, it was fun.
But, it was also, for me, like the stereotypical Chinese dinner. Digested and gone from an empty stomach half an hour later.
I'd read it little in the past 3-4 months, I confess. So, I'll kind of miss it. But not really miss it. The non-sports hot takes will find new homes. And people will follow the hot takers on Twitter if they need to. (That said, it's easier when they're all on one site, just like when much of the best basketball, and I think football, reporting is at ESPN. ESPN, with the exception of the relatively recent add of Jeff Passan, largely sux on baseball, and The Athletic is behind a paywall.)
And, to riff on New Republic, there's probably more "reckoning" like this. We've seen on the news website site, "readjustments" at places like Vice. Look how ESPN poached from and crowded out Yahoo on the sports news side, then The Athletic went paywall with premium sports news. NBC Sports went with a mix of bloggers and the occasional actual writer. There's only so many sports teams, and just so much, or so little, in the way of breaking news, and insightful analysis, and ever-shrinking online ad dollars at the same time.
And the "Mavening of sportswriting" that Bryan Curtis decries? Maven itself has already moved it beyond sports in the narrow sense to broader "leisure" writing. (It owns Backpacker, for example.)
The final lesson? Back to New Republic. If your company, especially but not only if you're in the media, is taken over by the vulture capitalists of private equity, start updating your escape plans immediately.
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