Deadspin Reporter Fired After Private-Equity Owners Ask Newsroom To "Stick To Sports"
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Deadspin Reporter Fired After Private-Equity Owners Ask Newsroom To "Stick To Sports"

Yesterday, the media blue-checkmark brigade threw a giant outrage party after the Gizmodo Media Group's private-equity overlords (or whoever owns them now it's getting really difficult to keep track) reportedly sent a memo to the Deadspin newsroom, asking them to "stick to sports" and avoid politics.

What prompted this memo? Well, earlier this week, the site's editorial staffers published a post complaining about the new auto-play video ads being deployed across the historically money-losing suite of websites. That was followed by a tweet from the recently formed G/O Media Union encouraging readers to express their unhappiness with the ads to G/O's PE bosses.

Needless to say, these bosses weren't pleased, and ordered the post to be removed.

In response, the editorial team switched the featured article display on Deadspin's website to feature only non-sports content. It was for this sin, apparently, that Petchesky was fired. He was, until today, the site's longest-serving employee,

For those who don't read it, Deadspin, like the rest of the former Gawker Network sites, 100% bought in to producing "woke" content about politics, media after Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel won their legal crusade against the company, and Deadspin produced an endless of piddle of political content, often at the expense of its sports coverage.

It has been obvious for years that the site and its writers operate from squarely within the NYC-SF-DC media bubble, and it doesn't take a genius businessman to understand that the overlap between that world, and the total addressable market for sports fans, is actually quite small. But that's not surprising, since most of the writers ascribe to the same "woke" truisms, like the idea that Donald Trump is a reprehensible Russian spy, the number of possible genders is limitless and that businesses employing them have no right to prioritize things like profit over the whims of its reporting staff.

And not 24 hours later, yet another employee has unceremoniously departed. (though, to be fair, other recent departures, like former Deadspin EIC Megan Greenwall, quit). This time, Deadspin Editor Barry Petchesky tweeted Tuesday afternoon that he was fired for "not sticking to sports" like the bosses asked.

Deadspin and its staff have often feuded with another rival sports-media franchise: Barstool Sports. The feud has been fueled by stories like this one, criticizing Barstool's 'bro culture' and  accusing it of stealing content online, and claiming its "brand was built on harassing anyone who criticizes the site or just anyone who doesn’t look like fucking Dan Katz [the host of a popular Barstool podcastt]." Barstool's founder David "El Presidente" Portnoy tweeted about the blue-checkmark's "crying in their soup" over Petchesky's media martyrdom on Thursday shortly after Petchesky took to twitter with the news.

And he didn't stop there.

In response to the firing, another Deadspin reporter tweeted that the site's new owner (and thus, her boss) was "a piece of shit."

Obviously, publicly declaring that your boss's boss's boss is a terrible human being for making editorial decisions that are well within his right to make - Deadspin's staff can spare us the sanctimonious shpeil about editorial integrity and journalistic independence - probably isn't the best career move. We imagine a full-on revolt followed by a mass exodus are at hand.

So much for that G/O Union...

Tyler Durden Wed, 10/30/2019 - 20:50
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