Front Burner - Deadspin and the zombification of news

Episode Date: November 4, 2019

Every member of the popular sports and culture website Deadspin’s editorial staff has resigned, after the firing of the site’s interim editor-in-chief. But tensions have been rising between Deadspin’s journalist and its executives since a private equity firm took over in April. Those executives issued an edict last week to “stick to sports.” Today on Front Burner, Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley discusses the mass exodus at Deadspin and what it says about the future of independent digital media.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Have you ever dreamed of quitting a job in protest with all your colleagues? Well, that is exactly what the entire staff of writers and editors at the super popular sports and culture site Deadspin did over the last week. In a nutshell, they thought their new bosses were ruining the website, so they quit.

By Friday, there was no one left. It's a pretty gutsy move, one that even got support from U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. What's happening at Deadspin? Essentially the hollowing out of quality and critical journalism in exchange for what some may call advertiser-friendly content. Well, it isn't isolated. Today, I'm talking with Slate's Ben Mathis-Lilley about Deadspin and what it means for quality journalism more broadly. This is Fronturner. Hi, Ben. Hey. So look, let's start with some of the basics here. How would you describe Deadspin as a website or the pre-mass exodus Deadspin? Sure. Deadspin was one of the first, it's the first one I remember reading regularly, sports blogs.

So it started up during the aughts, and it was one of the first places where, you know, instead of reading kind of a traditional recap of a game, they would just, you know, pick out the most interesting thing that happened and write about that. And, you know, write about the funnier side of, write about the personalities of the players and just cover the games and cover sports more like a fan, I think is how people would put it. And they do sort of non-sports stuff too, right? They morphed into this over the years. I remember they do this sort of annual hate on Williams-Sonoma catalogs, which are pretty funny.

Yeah. Phillips Soup Maker. It also says there's video, although this is a print catalog. So it's a pot? Sorry, it only makes four cups of soup. They also posted like a video of stitched together clips of news anchors at Sinclair Broadcast Group TV stations

from around the country reading the same script. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming, social media. Some really thoughtful writing is coming out of Deadspin about the Trump presidency, pressy in pieces about Gamergate. Yeah, so I think that the way I would, I think of it is that they wrote about sports, but they also wrote about anything else that a particular kind of sports fan was interested in. One of their most popular columns was called the Jamboree, and it was just going through all the NFL games of the week. But then the writer drew,

Drew Magary would throw in, you know, chili recipes, or, you know, kind of observational humor about doing home repair and raising his kids. But also, as you said, they covered the NFL critically. And in a way, they've covered NFL owners, and the Colin Kaepernick situation and been very critical. And in a way, I think that kind of morphed into the way they covered Trump. So it kind of grew from just covering sports to writing critically about sports and business and politics and everything that sports touches on. And is it fair for me to say that Deadspin, they didn't necessarily have the kind of compromise advertising and broadcast relationships that we've seen inhibit other sports journalism. The staff had a lot of editorial independence, right?

Right. So they didn't, like, unlike ESPN or unlike Fox Sports, they weren't also trying to sign partnerships with leagues to broadcast games. So they had a leeway, you know, for instance, with the controversy that the NBA has gotten into with China regarding protests in Hong Kong. It started with a tweet from Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey that read, quote, fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong. That tweet prompted swift backlash from the Chinese government and Chinese business partners who pulled their money from the Rockets. They are able to write about that subject honestly without worrying about offending

their NBA broadcast partners. ESPN has to be much more circumspect because the NBA, you know, rights to broadcast NBA games is a huge part of ESPN's business. So yeah, they had that independent perspective and it allowed them to be, I think, a lot more honest in a way that was very valuable to readers. I want to talk about how things may have shifted there, particularly in the last six months. You know, at one point, this popular sports and culture website was owned by Gawker until, of course, Hulk Hogan sued Gawker out of existence. This could be a podcast all on its own. Gawker published part of a Hulk Hogan sex tape and the costly courtroom battle is bringing Gawker to its knees.

I knew we were doing what was right. And even if we would have lost, it would have been good because everybody would have known what Gawker was all about because I exposed them. And then it was bought up by this private equity firm called Great Hill Partners, who formed this media company called GeoMedia to oversee Deadspin and a few other websites, correct? Yeah, well, first it went to Univision and that was for a few years and then and then, you know, bought it from Univision. Right. So but for most of its existence, it had been part of Gawker Media. And now, yeah, now it's under GNO. So GNO brought on the CEO, this guy named Jim Spanfeller. This is this is how I understand it. And last week, the union representing all these staffers who who quit en masse called his behavior, quote, bad business and, quote, morally reprehensible. So what happened at Deadspin when G&O took over this company? So, yeah, I think the kind of proximate cause of the difficulty with the staff was that G&O made some changes just to the way to all the, not only Deadspin, but all the other

former Gawker sites worked. And particularly on the advertising side, the business side of operations, at least from the perspective of the of the Deadspin employees, and the Deadspin writers and editors, were passing up in particular, very well qualified women who had worked at the company for years in favor of bringing in kind of like, you know, this old boys network. A bunch of his old cronies from mid-2000s Forbes without posting the jobs publicly. So we wound up with a lot of people who were not qualified to do the job and were incompetent. And so Deadspin prepared a story about this. Deadspin has reported on other sports media companies very extensively. And so they had prepared this story, working on this story. And even before it came out, the executives at GNO were saying internally to the rest of the company, this story

is kind of a hatchet job on us. It's not fair. You know, they're coming into this with the bias. And so that actually led Megan Greenwell, who is the editor of Deadspin, editor-in-chief of Deadspin, to resign from the company. I think that was about two or three months ago, and said, you know, I don't think I can work under executives who treat me this way or who talk about me this way in front of the staff. And I think that the staff would be better served by having someone else who maybe have a better relationship with them. Right. And she wrote this piece after she resigned that was quite negative towards the company, right? Yeah. I think that, you know, in addition to those specific criticisms about staffing,

they suspected, quite reasonably, given the history of the executives involved at GNO, that they were going to kind of load the site with ads, you know, push them toward a more clickbait oriented direction, try to get a high volume of posts that weren't necessarily as high quality as they were used to, because the kind of business strategy was to just get as many eyeballs on the site as possible in the short term to sell advertising without maybe being as concerned as they needed to be about the long-term reputation, viability of the site and the reputation of its writers. Right. And I know, you know, maybe some of the reason why they believed this was, you know, what they were hearing in boardrooms, but also because Jim Spanfeller had done something like this before, right? Yeah. So he, you know, the thing he's associated with is Forbes.com.

So we'll use web analytics to measure our web traffic every minute of the day. You know, the editors are constantly reviewing that and making decisions based upon that in terms of what goes where in terms of placements. Forbes is obviously a financial magazine that's been around for a long, long time. And its website, Spanfeller, I think up until 2010 worked there and really pushed it in what you would call maybe a more clickbaity direction or more aggregation. You know, again, lots of posts, not necessarily original reporting, kind of sensationalistic headlines that the story doesn't maybe deliver on. I think the best example I saw of this was a former, someone who had worked for Forbes.com during that era, saying at the end of one year, 2006, they needed to hit a quota for an ad campaign that they were

running. And so they just started writing about topics related to India, you know, business in India, beaches in India, big lists of things in India, because the Indian audience was the biggest English speaking audience that was reading websites at the end of December, because of that's when that's when Americans celebrate Christmas. You know, many Americans celebrate Christmas. So obviously that's a strategy that it did work. You know, I'm sure they got lots of people visiting their site from India, but that doesn't really redound to the trustworthiness and long-term prestige of the Forbes brand.

And then after that, he moves on and he starts this site called The Daily Meal, which was a food and drink website. You know, that was sold to Tronk Media, which is a former Tribune company in 2017. But, you know, just to give you a. Much has been made of Tronk. Some people listening might have heard the John Oliver bit just ripping this company apart. This Tronk team will work with all of the local markets to harness the power of our local journalism, feed it into a funnel, and then optimize it so that we reach the biggest global audience possible. What the f*** did she just say?

Right, same kind of approach you saw from Tronc, and I think the same problems that their employees had with it. But if you look at the Daily Meal today, it's stories like snack foods that you won't believe have been around for more than 100 years, or Disney celebrates Frozen 2 with Olaf Dole Whip Sunday. I had the opportunity to hang out with Guy Fieri of Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, and here are some of his summer barbecue tips. You know, and that's, you know, those are stories that people might click on, they might share a little, but that's close to being just sponsored content or advertising, you know, advertorial, you might call it. It's not really what, to get back to the subject, it's not what investigative reporters and columnists at Deadspin and Gawker Media are used to doing.

Okay, so things hit a boiling point this week, right? Tell me a bit more about how it played out. It's just wild. So, yeah, so I think Wall Street Journal has done some good reporting on this. One of the specific precipitating events here was that the company executives had promised Farmers Insurance that they would play their video ad a given number of times. And they realized at some point that they weren't going to get to the amount that they had promised. And so they just started auto-playing the ad whenever anyone came to Deadspin.com. Ooh, people hate that.

People hate it. Readers hated it. They complained to no avail. The management said, this is how we're. People hate it. Readers hated it. They complained, you know, to no avail. Like they just, the management said, we're going to, this is how we're going to do. We have to get this quota. So it's the, you're going to have autoplay ads on your site. The staff is already upset about that. And at the same time, they've been pushing them kind of all along to not write about

as many non-directly sports related topics. So like you mentioned, like kind of the Donald Trump coverage or the column I mentioned, the Jamboree. And they, from the perspective of GNO, this was kind of a waste of resources that could be spent pumping out more sports content, I think is the idea. In a statement, Deadspin's parent company, GeoMedia, says that non-sports content simply isn't successful on the site. In fact, the statement claims that posts that weren't about sports accounted for less than 1% of traffic in September. And it all came to a head.

The interim editor, I think his title was deputy editor, who's the interim editor, Barry Pacheski, was fired because he refused to cut back on the non-sports content or the sports tangential content. Jim was upset about the specific Deadspin blogs that were featured on the homepage and told them to, quote, get the f*** out. And he walks back and just says, I got fired. And like, obviously, we all think he's joking because like who the f*** would fire, you

know, the most important like tenure vet of this blog. After that, the rest of the staff quits over the course of a couple days. And so, really, yeah, unprecedented for a site to go from, you know, operating pretty well, being very popular, to just not having any writers in the few days. Yeah, and some of these stories are really crazy. Some of these stories are really crazy. Like after the resignation started, I know one of their most prominent writers delayed quitting so he could edit and publish all the freelance articles in the queue just so that everybody could get paid. And also it seems like they're kind of trolling their bosses. So when they published a piece about the World Series earlier this week, all the hyperlinks in that piece were like negative stories about GNO media. And I don't know, it's hard to figure out what's happening here. But it looks like they scheduled a bunch of tweets

that are very critical of the ownership. And then maybe they must have changed the passwords and walked out the door because these tweets were still going as of Saturday morning, after everybody had quit. Yeah. So yeah, a lot of this stuff that, you know, is kind of the, I guess, the modern equivalent of giving the finger to the boss as you're walking out the door. And I called up this article, there's about the Cleveland Browns, you know, a decision the coach made. And you're reading this article about just something that happened in an NFL game. And then you get to the bottom and it says, well, geez, it looks like the management of

this team made a very short sighted decision that screwed over his employees in the long term. You know, and like, so they're hiding a lot of these little like shots at the management in their writing. So for Andy Dalton to leave or to get so rudely shoved out, well, that just makes the rest of us think, you know, maybe we're not long for this team here. Yeah. Maybe it's time that the Bengals, who clearly are owned by a bunch of skinflints and losers. Yeah.

It feels like Deadspin is kind of dying like it lived, right? Like very sarcastic and like pulls no punches. Yeah. You know, I think that the kind of one, if there's one through line of all their coverage, it's just that they hold powerful people to account and they are willing to be critical, very powerful people and powerful institutions. And, and, and yeah, that's how they're, that's how they're going out. We will continue doing the best we can, even if this is the last dead cast you ever hear. I hope it's not. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. So look, I get why the writers and the editors are angry about the ads and these new characters coming in and passing people over for promotions and this edict to stick to sports.

promotions and this edict to stick to sports. But from a business perspective, bottom line only, you know, are these guys running this company making smart moves right now? You know, did this work at Forbes, for example? Will this give them more revenue? Well, you know, I don't have access to their financial information. But what all the people who worked there and the editors, the top editors at Deadspin always said was that it was sustainable. So it was making enough money and it was getting a lot of traffic. One thing we do know is that it had a lot of readers. It was very popular. There are sites that measure this independently. So yeah, we know it was very well read. We know just when they exposed the Mante Teo story, I don't know if you remember this, but a college football player

had completely fabricated this story of having a girlfriend who I think was suffering from cancer or some sort of chronic disease. It wasn't true. There wasn't even any, this person didn't even exist. It had been reported many, many places incorrectly and Deadspin figured it out. The story first reported on the sports news website Deadspin

says the picture we all saw was of another woman who is very much alive and says she doesn't know Tao at all. And so they were pervasive in the culture of sports and they were very well read. And according to people who worked there, it was sustainable. They were bringing enough revenue to sustain the site, pay the employees. The fact that like left to our own devices, all we would do is make money for the people that own our website. People read our blogs. People listen to the podcast. This stuff works. Could they have made more money by going to this model of high volume, lower quality? Yeah, maybe. As Forbes continues, this is years after Jim Spanfeller worked there,

but they say that they made more money last year than they have in a long time. There is certainly a way to make money doing it this other way too. It's just I don't think it's as satisfying for the people who work at that company. Right, more advertising revenue opportunities, when you can drive more eyeballs to a site with less resources to produce the journalism, right? Exactly. Or if you even want to call some of those journalists out. Right.

And, you know, and I don't mean to be totally glib about just doing quick blog posts. I mean, I've done many in my day, and I don't think it inherently lacked journalistic integrity to do a short story or just to make a joke or, you know, certainly that has its place. But I think that the problem that you got into with Deadspin was they didn't want to do any of even any of the more substantive stuff at all. You know, it just they didn't have any interest in, you know, mixing in the kind of funnier posts with like Deadspin would do, you know, serious investigations into sexual assault allegations on college sports programs. And so

I don't think that the current management had the appetite to do that stuff as well as the kind of sillier or more easily monetized posts. Right, right. The union that represents deadspin writers, you know, they also said that this idea, this mandate to stick to sports is a thinly veiled euphemism for don't speak truth to power. That's how they read it. Yeah, I think that's true. Like, I think that, you know, I was talking to someone, a friend of mine who hadn't followed this story closely, and he said, well, is it really that strange to ask a sports website to stick to sports? And my response is, well, I don't think

that is really what they meant. I think that I don't think that they would have been happy with, you know, 15 stories just absolutely trashing the NBA for what it's doing with the Hong Kong protests. You know, I don't think that's what they wanted either. Right. Because, you know, when you have these critical stories of such powerful institutions, it becomes difficult, or more difficult to get sponsorship or advertising deals. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think that is underlying all of this. Obviously, every institution in sports is has close connection to the sportswear industry, to Nike, Adidas. These companies have big sponsorships with FIFA, with international soccer, with the NFL. And so it's just this really, really interconnected system of big money.

And if you are independent, as Deadspin was, and if you are willing to be critical when warranted, it just, yeah, I think in a broader sense, it makes it a lot harder to tap into that vein of money. Yeah, yeah. And I know that you've mentioned some other examples already, the Daily Mail, Forbes. But where else have we seen a similar strategy? I've seen you call this the zombification of news. strategy. I've seen you call this the zombification of news. Yeah. So you have two particular American brands, publications, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated. You've seen this happen at Newsweek, and it looks like it's starting to happen at Sports Illustrated, these kind of longtime, you know, icons of American journalism, where senior staff, and it wasn't as abrupt as it has been at Deadspin, of course, but gradually senior staffers leave and they're replaced by blog posts and aggregation. And so you go from Newsweek being a brand that had one meaning. And now at this point, it doesn't really mean what it

used to. I mean, you're not seeing like a lot of in-depth original reporting at Newsweek. Some, you know, and that's the kind of tricky thing. A lot of these places, you know, they'll still do some original work, but it can be overshadowed or kind of overwhelmed by this more kind of clickbait-oriented, pandering kind of centrally located hub of sports reporting and analysis and authority into a network of sites affiliated with specific teams where someone who might be 23 years old and just out of college is going to be writing all the stories about a particular team and nothing against anyone being 23 or liking a particular team. That's just not what Sports Illustrated was. And that's not, in an analogous way and that's not, you know, in an analogous way

that's not what Newsweek was. Yeah, both publications were known for exceptional journalism. What do you think this means for journalism more broadly? Bernie Sanders waded into the whole deadspin thing on Thursday. He said, I stand with former deadspin workers who decided not to bow to the greed of private equity vultures like Jim Spanfeller. This is the kind of greed that is destroying journalism across the country. And together we are going to take them on. So he also clearly thinks this is part of a much larger problem.

Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I think especially we haven't even talked about local news yet, but that's you can see that happening at just, I mean, almost every local newspaper website across the United States. And I'm sure elsewhere as well. on local issues is being replaced by, you know, copies supplied at a national level, kind of just viral stories, funny viral moments or uplifting content, videos, etc. And you see that happening all over. And yeah, and you see a lot of that is being driven at the top level by the investors who are saying, well, this is just a quicker way to make money, a better way to make money. And so I think that, you know, as opportunistic as I'm sure it was for a political campaign to jump on this issue,

it certainly, I think he has a point. And, you know, it fits with his kind of larger, his larger ideology as well. So, yeah, I think that he's probably right about that. Now, maybe people could buy subscriptions. Like, that's perhaps one way to fight this like zombification of news, what you're talking about. Is there anything else that you think people can do here? Well, you know, I kind of wrote this last week, I said, like, let's all stop clicking on these

zombie links, you know, I kind of compare it to enter, I compare it mentally to when people realize they started needing to tip your Uber drivers or people who are delivering your food on these apps like DoorDash. It's kind of this thing where like all of a sudden people realize, hey, this new economic model is inconvenient in some ways, but some people are getting left out and maybe I need to change my own behavior just a little bit to make it a little more fair. I think one thing anybody can do is just say, you know, am I sharing this news story from the source that originally reported it? Is this quality? Is this reliable? Is this fact checked? I think another model is trying to do kind of a public nonprofit model for journalism. And so I think that's one way that a lot of people are hopeful about. But really,

at this point, it's still just that it's hope rather than I think a lot of I don't think there are a lot of people confident that we that we figured out how to do it. Right, that there is like an actual viable business model here. Quite yet. Ben, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Okay, that is all for today. Thanks so much for listening. Tomorrow we'll be playing the first of a two-part series exploring the roots of political anger in Alberta and Saskatchewan and how that

anger might be addressed. It's going to be a really good one. I hope you guys tune in. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. I'm Jamie Poisson, and see you tomorrow.