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

oh lol i thought it had just been spanfeller'd

No idea what that means.

that the link had been seasoned with dried leaves

Barstool - chaotic evil
Defector - chaotic good
The Ringer - lawful evil
Grantland - lawful good
The Athletic - true neutral

grantland and the ringer are more or less the same people, some of whom are great. but simmons was the same guy both places and it is, of course, not open mic night

That's why they're both lawful but Simmons has gotten worse and his influence over the site (and transition to podcast network) has gotten heavier-handed.

haven't heard about anyone killing themselves over a ringer story

lol milo otm

Mookie otm

everyone is OTM

putting aside any personal feelings i have about, the it athletic is vc funded which is a bad sign for its being at all “good”

*about it, the

also mookieproof otm

It's nice that people give enough of a fuck about sports to pay for writing about sports. If only I had made the choice as a small boy to give a fuck about sports, perhaps I would be making the big bucks as a writer today, instead of scrabbling in the gutter for nickels as a *cough, spit* music critic.

I doubt anyone outside of ESPN is making big bucks but perhaps these subscription models are allowing more sportswriters to at least make a modest living, which is admittedly a hell of a lot more than can be said for the popcrit hustle.

Athletic poached a lot of veteran sportswriters from daily newspapers and even ESPN, I don't think those guys were switching for less money

I was gonna say I figured only the writers who also
do TV and maybe pods get the big bucks but shit, they kinda all do TV and pods nowadays

I occasionally see a mention of or ad for podcasts from local newspaper people or former sports talk radio people and it seems a lot like they have listeners in the dozens.

my neighbor is a sports radio guy. the conglomerate that owns pretty much all the stations basically fired/laid off the full staff of three different stations and then un-fired most of the sports guys within a week after public outcry. I really think they had no idea what people cared about listening to, wanted to keep something and didn’t know what, and just canned everyone to see which fanbase yelled the loudest

Defector should sponsor a Chrome extension that changes deadspin to defector.com for people who still start typing it out of habit

Noticed this in a Defector story:

https://defector.com/defector-a-roaringly-successful-website-beloved-by-several-thousand-people-is-now-offering-special-holiday-gift-subscriptions/

More than 30,000 of you have purchased subscriptions to this site since it was announced, and that’s allowed us to do the work we’ve been doing.

Way upthread from Silby:

if all the contributors on that masthead become full-time employees they need like 13,000 annual subscribers at $69 a year to pay them all $50,000 a year, plus a bunch more to pay for the CMS and so on. That'd be a very high conversion rate of the erstwhile pre-ratfucking deadspin audience, but it's also not an objectively large number of customers.

So it seems like they've more than doubled this goal, and 30,000 at $69 comes out to over 2 million dollars, though the subscriber number is larger than that. Plus some subscribers are paying more than the basic $69 a year. Not bad.

and they do have ads so

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/business/media/apple-gawker-tim-cook.html

Two Gawker veterans sold the idea to Apple TV+, the new streaming service: Cord Jefferson, who left the site for a career writing for TV, and Max Read, Gawker’s former editor in chief. Apple hired two more former Gawker editors, Emma Carmichael and Leah Beckmann, as writers, and they had completed several episodes, people close to the production said.

Then, an Apple executive got an email from the company’s chief executive, Tim Cook.

Mr. Cook, according to two people briefed on the email, was surprised to learn that his company was making a show about Gawker, which had humiliated the company at various times and famously outed him, back in 2008, as gay. He expressed a distinctly negative view toward Gawker, the people said. Apple proceeded to kill the project.

Whoops!

interesting stuff at the end of that about appletv’s struggle to develop any big tv shows of merit and how that relates to their squeaky clean corporatist bootlicking culture

and of Apple News, a well-curated, if unexciting, app that is reportedly where President-elect Joe Biden gets his information.

how is that not surprising

But now, from beyond the grave, Gawker is revealing another reality in this era of media consolidation: that the chief executive of one of the biggest companies in the world, who testifies before Congress and negotiates with China, also decides what television shows get made.

I do not see how this is actually any different than the head of 20th Century Fox finding out someone hired a bunch of people who tried to tank the studio to make a series about their efforts. Casting this as a First Amendment issues is, if I’m being generous, disingenuous. No one deserves to have their television show produced.

I think the issue is more that the information that we get is increasingly dispensed by fewer and fewer companies, which is a serious problem.

I think the issue is more that the information that we get is increasingly dispensed by fewer and fewer companies, which is a serious problem.

Really? Information? I feel like information is more democratized than ever (a serious problem during a pandemic).

Last thing I want is new information, I’ve had plenty

in one way this sucks but in another way i was spared a tv series about gawker

yeah it was bad when that article framed it as “first amendment issue” (?lol)

Max’s most recent thing in BookForum is tedious in any that I was genuinely concerned about him.

lol @ "Scraper"

I do not see how this is actually any different than the head of 20th Century Fox finding out someone hired a bunch of people who tried to tank the studio to make a series about their efforts.

This is more like 20th Century Fox killing a series because the show runner once worked for someone who was critical of 20th Century Fox 10 years ago.

Things can be completely expected and still frowned upon.

So all of you saying that all of the news sites that have gone under or consolidated in recent years is a good thing?

Yes, that is what we are saying and not that an entertainment show exists at the whim of the people bankrolling it and trying to get the dude you harassed for years to pay your salary is at best a reach

Like, it’s understandable that the Gawker alums might try to spin their experiences into Prestige Television but it’s incredibly dumb to think that Tim Cook wouldn’t be like “oh those people? fuck every single thing about them”

Or is the idea now that it’s okay to out someone if they make too much money?

The gawker crew’s adventures in outing really came back to haunt them over and over

closeted skeletons

Max would have been like 15 when Tim Cook was outed by Gawker.

still laughing about the first amendment thing

too many Cooks at the pitchin

please respect my first amendment right to monetize my professional downfall

there was nothing about the first amendment in the article!

Are you arguing that the quote i excerpted isn’t asserting that the Gawker people have the right to have Apple Pay for their series?

Or do you just not get inference?

not surprised apple killed this. apple tv is an incoherent brand, but this seems like the kind of thing they would not do, even if it weren't for a probably justified grudge held by the CEO against gawker.

i do think it's stupid to cancel cord jefferson's first show if you're lucky enough to get it despite the fact that your network is basically a failure. but apple does stupid stuff all the time so whatever.

"trying to get the dude you harassed for years to pay your salary is at best a reach"

it's also ... not what happened?