The Deadspin blog is getting a major make-over, and its run as "sports news without access, favor or discretion" is coming to an end. New management issued a memo Monday ordering writers to stick to sports, and the memo was leaked to The Daily Beast.
That's not what this irreverent, off-the-wall gang signed up for and they are ticked off! Deadspin is where you find stories making fun of Tim Tebow's pre-marital purity and Drew Brees' connection to Focus on the Family. One Deadspin writer prayed that the Christians at Liberty University would not win a game in this year's NCAA basketball tournament. And, of course, Deadspin has belittled Donald Trump time and time again.
Not anymore.
The Daily Beast revealed Monday that the new management company, G/O Media, issued a memo telling Deadspin employees to skip stories that don't have an explicit link to sports.
Telling Deadspin writers Drew Magary, Lauren Theisen, Tom Ley and others to cut the political snarkiness is like telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos to stop going soft on Democrats.
G/O Media editorial director Paul Maidment gave the order, "To create as much great sports journalism as we can requires a 100% focus of our resources on sports. And it will be the sole focus. Deadspin will write only about sports and that which is relevant to sports in some way.”
The "new" Deadspin will feature sports stories and leave non-sports stories to the company’s other websites. Maidment's memo said, “Where such subjects touch on sports, they are fair game for Deadspin. Where they do not, they are not. We have plenty of other sites that write about politics, pop culture, the arts, and the rest, and they’re the appropriate place for such work.”
The abrupt change at Deadspin is causing no shortage of angst among employees, and The Daily Beast reports that one person said, “This isn’t what any of us signed up for. It’s amateurish and pushing longtime readers away and making the sites difficult to enjoy.”
Push back against these changes started two months ago. Former editor in chief Megan Greenwell left the site in August, but not before writing in her last story that she could not continue at Deadspin with the changes that were coming. “That's not something I feel I can ethically do,” she said.
Greenwell said she and her colleagues knew that most Deadspin readers do not want the site to stick to sports. She told incoming management that the non-sports content brings in more traffic and more revenue opportunities, but they ignored her.
"The tragedy of digital media isn’t that it’s run by ruthless, profiteering guys in ill-fitting suits; it’s that the people posing as the experts know less about how to make money than their employees, to whom they won’t listen," Greenwell wrote.
Deadspin has been selling “Stick to Sports” merchandise on its site as a joke. But the joke's on the liberal writers for whom sticking to sports is now a reality.
