hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

a man who appears to know what he wants but isn’t exactly sure how to get it

lol

G/O editorial bosses tell Deadspin no more non-sports coverage "Where such subjects touch on sports, they are fair game for Deadspin. Where they do not, they are not."https://t.co/6EP5hsOjky

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) October 28, 2019

RIP The Big Wet President

nvm, someone has given Roth the out:
‘for all Trump articles you write, the first mention of him should be "Former USFL owner" -- boom, stuck to sports.’

Hi! I’ve just been fired from Deadspin for not sticking to sports.

— Barry Petchesky (@barry) October 29, 2019

the deadspin front page is a greatest-hits array of their non-sports tuff right now

the internet was great for widely disseminating good journalism and commentary but we're running out of places that are actually allowed to produce it.

i hear blogger.com is hiring

Earlier today, @JimSpanfeller, CEO of G/O Media, fired our colleague and longtime Deadspin Deputy Editor Barry Petchesky. This will not stand. We will have updates soon.

— GMG Union (@gmgunion) October 29, 2019

i'll campaign for any candidate who promises to jail private equity firm execs en masse

Is there a good resource on how private equity works? Like a more extensive article than the HamNo one? I don’t understand how these firms are able to profit off of undermining the long term health of the companies they acquire—much less saddling them with debt. Are they not looking to flip them later?

this matt stoller newsletter is pretty good (scroll down a little for the PE bit):

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-private-equity-should-not-exist

Pretty sure if you acquired gawker/deadspin in order to strip political content from it, you acquired it to kill it

tbh the wikipedia article on asset stripping gets to a lot of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_stripping

and basically no, they have no interest in flipping it at the end, there's often literally nothing to flip

i am shocked that the former CEO of forbes.com would do such a thing. forbes.com is filled with so many articles. there are so many articles. and that's why forbes.com is the content provider we trust and don't just accidentally click on every once in a while. they've got everything on forbes.com

why don't likeminded gawker/deadspin editors + writers leave and start their own indie thing? they believe (and it seems like they're right) that what they're doing can be profitable/viable, why hang around on this sinking ship?

ask all the writers on ILM why they don’t start their own music rag

bc w/ a few exceptions we are not professional journalists?

because there's still a start-up cost and pitching a journalism venture is incredibly tricky in 2019, even if it's a website concept with a proven readship

I could see some of the larger names from Deadspin giving it a try, but many of the former Gawker writers who did good, if sometimes less controversial, work have shifted to NY Magazine, The New Republic, and the NYT Magazine, among others

bc w/ a few exceptions we are not professional journalists?

― Mordy, Tuesday, October 29, 2019 2:07 PM (forty-six seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

ok so ask the professional journalists

someone out there probably has a list ready to go, but the last several years is littered with the remains of talented people's indie projects that had at least occasionally good writing and didn't get the clicks. stuff like the awl. hmm daily had some good stuff.

deadspin crew is already making their living doing deadspin. they could do deadspin and just call it livespun. nb i do understand that starting a new thing is not like the easiest thing in the world (tho they'd have a lot of good will + build in readership i bet) but G/O sounds like misery.

(tho they'd have a lot of good will + build in readership i bet)

where is the money to pay writers

the awl could happen in 2009 but it could not happen in 2019

and like they mostly seem like go-getters who are passionate about doing journalism and believe in what they're doing

they claim that deadspin is profitable - they'd get paid by advertisers like they're doing now

this is all part of my multi-day interactive photo series: the internet is shrinking

it's not like they're being subsidized by G/O afaiui (or at least what they've claimed) - they are a money making venture for the corporation.

because there's still a start-up cost and pitching a journalism venture is incredibly tricky in 2019

― mh, Tuesday, October 29, 2019 5:07 PM (four minutes ago)

^^^^^

mordy you should hire them

then make YOUR OWN goddamn doughnuts

i agree tho tbc start-up costs for an online only magazine is pretty inexpensive as far as history of journalism goes

so they'd start a new site and need advertisers -- are the advertisers going to front cash to write or customize a content management system and set up the hosting? do they find a single investor willing to give it a try, or attempt crowdfunding? partner with someone like Medium? (groan)

tbh my first thought was there must be someone left-wing who likes the website and has enough money to bankroll it. where are the wealthy dirtbags

there's always patreon

Sell noodz for donations there we go

i don't follow the politics threads when did mordy turn libertarian

one of the reasons why you couldn't just "start a new deadspin" is because the channels of distribution -- google and facebook primarily -- are based on byzantine private formulas regarding reputation and status of each news site on the web. so the staff of deadspin could "start a new deadspin" and probably achieve a modicum of small success based on the transfer of goodwill that would happen in the social sphere, but it woudl take the machines years to understand that it should funnel readers to the new deadspin and not the old one (and this is to say nothing of the literal twitter and facebook pages that the deadspin staff has spent years building an audience for, which they would not be able to retain)

I hate to feed some of the dumbest posts in ILX history but as someone

99% of Deadspin's traffic doesn't follow any of the writers on Twitter, I'm doubtful Deadspin itself is going to advertise the new site. Deadspin is profitable now but that's with over a decade of building up the brand (most of that in a very different media environment) - all the same writers on a new site is starting from zero (see also: Grantland's place in the consciousness vs The Ringer), which is not going to be profitable and not be in a position to pay all the writers the wages they earn on Deadspin for many years (without a sugar daddy).

I just moved a brick and mortar retail store - not open a new one, same name/logo/etc., six months of notice on Facebook and Twitter, six months of putting quarter sheets in every shopping bag with the moving date and new address.

I still get a ton of people absolutely confused about why we're not at the old location.

as someone who periodically fantasizes about publishing a tiny independent print magazine or online outlet despite lacking a purpose, audience, or writers for such a thing, I don't think I can imagine starting one up that would pay (let's say) a dozen editorial, business, and technology salaries from day one.

"there are now over 30,000,000,000,000 individual web pages. But I'm guessing maybe half of them are for fake Louis Vuitton bags on Amazon.com."

There was a similar thread recently. Something about being unable to find things on the internet. There was a time when if you searched the internet for a pop song, you might get some writing about that song, or album, band, whatever. You'd get Mark Prindle's website and George Starostin and lots of individual fan pages. Older articles from Usenet by people who had just bought Volume One of Hardcore Devo and wanted to share their excitement with the world. You'd get actual content written by people.

And then a switch was flipped and lyrics websites came along, and now if you search for song titles you just get hundreds of pages of machine-generated spam. In fact Google seems to prioritise them (if I search for "beach boys" "good vibrations" I get the inevitable half-page of Youtube links, then Wikipedia (twice!), then Genius Lyrics, then Songfacts, Whosampled etc, it's quite a trek before I get an actual article about the song). The sad fact is that machine-generated spam is a more viable revenue generator than human-generated content. The internet has proven with robotic precision that machines can make more money selling advertising space than human beings.

As for setting up a publication of your own, Nathan Rabin of the Onion's AV Club tried that, and it didn't work, and he was an experienced professional with lots of contacts. Roger Ebert had a subscription club and Amazon affiliate links, but I have no idea if the former still exists and the latter was apparently stopped after Illinois started charging sales tax. I remember that he revealed a couple of times he didn't earn very much from it, and he was on the television.

In the long run all magazines fail. The Vorticists managed to put out two issues of Blast before realising no-one cared. The Strand made it to 711 issues before folding in 1950. Eagle survived until 1969 before the British comics market crashed. Punch was launched when Robert Peel was prime minister and survived until 1992 before collapsing. The only magazines that seem to survive are, as mentioned, those that have a sugar daddy or support from eccentric billionaires, e.g. the second version of Punch, which was revived by Mohammed Fayed as a vanity project, or Granta magazine, which is published by one of the relatives of the junkie bloke who let his wife's body rot in a cupboard for two months. Or 2000AD, which has Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper, although only the first Rogue Trooper story was any good. I don't know why 2000AD survives and yet it does. Private Eye is still going, perhaps because - who knows - its internet presence is minimal, and also because people will always need something to read on the train.

I mean, you'd think it wouldn't be expensive to put out a bunch of text articles with some photos, but the problem is getting people to pay for it. I used to buy physical newspapers, but they were just a diversion during my lunch break at work, or on the tube. I had no desire to buy a newspaper otherwise. Now the likes of Reddit and insert other example have a steady stream of recycled cat pictures and articles about the Gimli Glider. As mentioned passim I used to work as a professional writer, both print and internet, but gave it up in favour of a steady wage; a handful of "made men" and "made women" earn a lot from writing, but they aren't really writers, they're multimedia personalities.

xps treeship- summary of a recent paper on PE buyouts: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mayrarodriguezvalladares/2019/10/07/new-study-shows-adverse-economic-effects-of-private-equity-buyouts/amp/

paper itself https://www.nber.org/papers/w26371

RIP. What's weird for me is how quickly the doors close when the algorithms don't include you. I didn't click on a single Deadspin story this year because I don't care for sports at all, and I saw few direct links to Deadspin on my social media feeds. I had no idea my friends read the non-sports content.

i.e. if they linked to this non-sports content on social media, I didn't see it.

you didn't see anyone linking to the david roth trump stuff? that was the one avenue of stuff that was everywhere on my feed.

and the drew magary brain damage story.

RIP. What's weird for me is how quickly the doors close when the algorithms don't include you. I didn't click on a single Deadspin story this year because I don't care for sports at all, and I saw few direct links to Deadspin on my social media feeds. I had no idea my friends read the non-sports content.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, October 29, 2019 7:07 PM (two minutes ago)

well, this has nothing to do with algorithms or traffic. deadspin is a healthy site. it's just been overtaken by idiots who want to change it and so it's imploding.

oh hell yeah on David Roth Trump.

No idea about Drew Magary.