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

"It is, however, the actual job of the executives to be the adults in the room."

hmm where have i heard that phrase before...

lmao

aksj;dlkfajkdjf paul maidment just resigned from g/o pic.twitter.com/GhIm35gOAl

— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) November 5, 2019

One down one to go

can’t believe deadspin’s whole staff retired three times in a week

*resigned

He had apparently been writing the zombie-like recent content lol

omg

you can tell, that “dead inside” voice is in his email too

http://giphygifs.s3.amazonaws.com/media/3oyix5n8juXzq/giphy.gif

Isn’t forbes the OG legacy media company to be transformed into a soulless content farm?

― treeship., Monday, November 4, 2019 3:29 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Btw, when I worked at Br1t@nn1ca, we had a CEO who would constantly cite Forbes as a model for digital-media reinvention. I always thought it just revealed the narrowness of his interests as an MBA.

why do these ghouls who take over legacy enterprises never want to do anything that respects the fucking legacy

it's always hidebound small thinkers used to the fat days who don't see the opportunities they're sitting on, replaced by bloodsucking voids who can't think of anything to do but make everything into AOL

can’t believe deadspin’s whole staff resigned three times in a week

lol yes

HR up to their necks in exit interviews.

He had apparently been writing the zombie-like recent content lol

― Jordan Pickford LOLverdrive (Neanderthal), Tuesday, November 5, 2019 12:15 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

seriously?

People on my FB feed are still constantly reposting "content" from zombie "Newsweek" when it flatters their politics

Proponents of the content farms claim that from a business perspective, traditional journalism is inefficient.[1] Content farms often commission their writers' work based on analysis of search engine queries[1] that proponents represent as "true market demand", a feature that traditional journalism purportedly lacks.[1]

seriously?

scroll up three days

i read that he was reposting old content without acknowledgment. i didn't know he was personally writing articles like this:

https://deadspin.com/springboks-kill-lions-1839563281

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

why do these ghouls who take over legacy enterprises never want to do anything that respects the fucking legacy

because they are attempting to strip-mine the enterprise and sell it

seems like an unpleasant line of work

they find the six-seven figure salaries pleasant

they might also find a bit of pleasure in the act of desecration. maybe that’s what gives private equity its libidinal charge.

the sports car with an elevator to stow it in your garage above your other sports car probably is enough

saw this on a photo of mitt romney’s garage

xp

The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows. It is not through a desexualizing extension that the libido invests the large aggregates.

https://twitter.com/UnDeadspin

https://www.thedailybeast.com/go-medias-private-equity-boss-mysteriously-scrubbed-from-site-amid-deadspin-turmoil

https://newrepublic.com/article/155627/death-rude-press-deadspin-splinter-blogs

prefacing this by saying that the vulturing of journalism and media by private equity is bad.

that said, pieces like the new republic one above never sit right with me. in most pieces that make this argument -- and there are quite a lot of them -- a lot of things are conflated under the same category, in this case "rudeness." some of those things are actively good, like investigative journalism, challenging the powerful, etc.; some of which are neutral, like saying the word "fuck"; some of which are just unpleasantness without any particular moral imperative, not punching up so much as punching everything in punch radius; and some of which are actively bad, like toxic work environments, harassment (I'd say it's bad timing for this to run on literally the same day as an expose on the years-long sexual misconduct coverups of one of the rude media outlets mentioned therein, if that weren't, like, the fifteenth such expose of it), and other things that bring about the opposite of "a more just world. there's a flailing attempt in the last third to make a distinction between good rudeness and bad, supposedly in its relationship to power and privilege; but if your "endangered rude media" includes h. l. mencken and vice, maybe it's not all that distinct from the "anti-PC media" after all.

and then the whole thing is held up as an all-or-nothing binary, with a correct side: us vs. them, snark vs. smarm, "endangered rude media" vs. "bootlickers and civility police." any attempt to tease the components apart again puts you on Team Fuck You.

which components need to be teased apart?

The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice... and so on

This apologia was singularly unconvincing to me. Its premise is asserted in several ways that attempt to be clever and even a bit dazzling, but its argument, when closely examined, is overwrought, superficial and weak. iow, it's a load of crap and also very bad writing.

Pareene seems to actively tease the components apart?

And even worse things have survived. Much as there is a parallel right-wing media that’s insulated from market forces by the ideological mission of its wealthy funders, there is another media that superficially resembles the endangered rude media, but effectively pursues the opposite agenda. It is the anti-P.C. media, where the audience’s vicarious thrill comes not from watching scrappy underdogs heckle their supposed betters, but from watching guys sitting comfortably atop social hierarchies belittle and dominate their lessers. The difference between a rude press and an anti-P.C. press is in each enterprise’s respective relationship to power. The anti-P.C. press certainly delights in titillating its audience, but it always, unfailingly, endorses a completely servile relationship to authority. The very idea of standing up to your boss is described as childish; the mature thing to do is accept domination and even abuse, unless and until you yourself manage to accrue some power over others.

seems pretty 'bootlickers/civility police'

i'd prefer 'fearlessness' to 'rudeness'

the whole section seems hastily tacked on to address the obvious counterargument that barstool, 8chan, donald trump, etc. are also known for being rude, but it doesn't explain how the likes of Mencken, who... does not have a particularly great or consistent record on relationships to power, or groups lower in the social hierarchy, and Vice, the incubator of Gavin McInnes and others like him, wouldn't fall into the non-"anti-PC" category. so why include them at all? those are just the obvious examples, but earlier the article mentions rolling stone with an aside about how wenner's friends were exempt from its rudeness -- how exactly does that square with "skepticism about power"?

s/triple negative/something that isn't a triple negative, you know what I mean

that's reasonable! i think it leads us into a punching up/down thing which pareene should have better addressed

He never says rudeness means inherently good/on the right side - but the existence of those publications gave a place to people who were good/on the right side but weren't going to have a voice at anything that had some kind of establishment credit. The dismantling of that means you're still going to get offensive media but not critical media.

Rolling Stone certainly published a great deal critical of those in power throughout the '70s and '80s. I never saw a Vice magazine in print, so I only know them from making fun of gentrifying creeps via Dos and Don'ts but yes they seem mostly terrible.

Annnnd...

Our statement on the recent lawsuits involving G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller. pic.twitter.com/ZiuhXunUKS

— GMG Union (@gmgunion) November 8, 2019

When pressed about diversity during a town hall meeting in April, Spanfeller allegedly said, “Haven’t thought about it, but I hear you guys. Obviously, diversity is important, I get it.”

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmj9ve/lawsuits-go-media-ceo-jim-spanfeller-fostered-hostile-work-environment-for-women

this thread put it better than I did, probably:

i think there has to be a way we can mourn the eroding of "rude press" that interrogates power, while also remembering that the people in power at those bastions of bravado and rudeness were often men who let stuff like eric sundermann and other shitty media men run unchecked

— jgz (@jennygzhang) November 8, 2019

specifically the "maybe the only difference now is that only the top dogs are allowed to be shitty to their subordinates" part

Someone linked to this David Roth interview on the politics thread, but I thought this was an important point about Spanfeller's intentions:

I don’t even think he’s a Republican. I think he’s like an As the father of daughters… type Dem. Initially when we were trying to see if we could still figure this shit out… We thought that they were mad about the Trump stories like getting booed at the World Series. Dan McQuade did a blog that night with the video and a few paragraphs and it did like 750,00 uniques. It was fine, it was perfectly amusing, it didn’t have any editorializing in it. Then I wrote the next day, it had a lot of editorializing, but I made sure to get World Series in the headline. They were like both of those are fine, it’s not a Trump thing. He doesn’t like Trump. The stuff that made him mad were silly posts. I think the idea was if you want us to sell this to advertisers they want to know they can go look at the front page of the site and they’d understand it and get why it’s sports.

Even Barry Petschesky's NYT op-ed took this righteous, high-minded "Sports is about more than just the game" angle, and I'm not sure that Spanfeller and Maidment actually objected to that? They just didn't get the idea that the site had a ~personality~ that was a huge basis for the audience it attracted.

More:

I think some of it too was the types of sites that he wants, and the extent I’m able to figure out any business justification for what he did is this: It’s that he is not a reader. He doesn’t have a very advanced idea of why people would read websites. What he’s trying to do is get these mushy, normal, middle websites. And you’re allowed to write them as well as you want. He’s not mad if you do a good job on a blog post. But he doesn’t care if you do a good one either. You just have to stick within that. He’s trying to sell this stuff to advertisers that he imagines that are even more conservative than him. So with politics I guess a Splinter headline that’s really sharp-edged or any of the stuff that he would actually see, because I really don’t think he read any stories on any sites -- if he saw that he was like you’re fucking it up because the people I’m trying to sell ads to are like banks or insurance companies. If you have a post that’s like health insurance is a fucking racket and it should be Medicare for All immediately, then in his mind, and this is the closest I can come to figuring it out, he’s like well how am I going to sell that to Etna?

i think that any venture capital owner who doesn't get the spirit or purpose of a thing they own (which is to say all of them) is perfectly capable of literally meaning they want the writers to stick to sports, literally.

I guess that's true, but I feel like the perspective it's coming from is this dumb, weak "Let's just make this easier for all of us."

i get what yr getting at but he has a bunch of ideas in there re: management that make me think he's working thru it still/is still too close to it.

there's the "make life easier by not doing dorky posts about cats,"

there's the literal "stick to sports you chuds,"

there's "stick to sports so we can monetize you for the algorithm better you chuds"

there's the "BECAUSE I SAID SO" angle that Greenwell showed in her exit piece & everyone else kinds of hints at

there's the fact that they are big stupid venture capital shitlords who never deserve the benefit of the doubt

If I wan't invested in GMG or the people who write for it I would always assume some combination of the last three, probably in reverse order, before i assumed there was any grey area in "stick to sports"

the intersection of sports and culture at large was 100% their brand. Deadspin didn't really care much about the actual analysis of sports, like why is this particular offensive formation suddenly very popular or how does this college prospect's game translate to the pro level. The Ringer and ESPN among others are much better at that. but every day basically there's some sports story that crosses over into larger issues of race, gender, class, etc. and that was Deadspin's bread and butter. I would've loved to see what they had to say about the response to the Myles Garrett-Mason Rudolph brawl last night, for instance.

Deadspin dot com had 2.2m unique visitors in November, according to Comscore. It had 19.9m unique visitors in October, its best month in at least 3 years. Looks like the “force all your employees to resign” strategy is going swimmingly.

— Kevin Draper (@kevinmdraper) December 17, 2019