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Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting

thebiglead.com

41–50 of 83 posts

Re: Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting

#41
post #39
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially people living on a writer's salary in New York City in 2019

You don't have to live in New York City to run a content website. In fact, you can live wherever you want and work from home.

Buddy, there's nowhere that you can live where the shoes your children need will be free.

Re: Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting

#42
post #19

I like how a site with autoplay ads is reporting this.

According to WSJ [1] the issue was that the ads were autoplaying with sound on. Just auto playing by itself isn't considered intrusive by the industry. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/hostilities-rise-inside-g-o-med...

Some of us don't want to spring for unlimited data plans and get rather frustrated when reading textual news incurs the charges associated with streaming video. Bandwidth is not boundless for everyone.

Re: Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget why Thiel was upset at Gawker. They outed him as gay, putting his life in danger because he did business in places where the penalty for homosexuality is death.

No, a billionaire is not in danger of death because he does business somewhere that has such a penalty. A billionaire can afford security or not go in person. Does not going in person harm his ability to make deals? Maybe, maybe not. But that doesn't even resemble "life in danger".

Maybe the claim is exaggerated but having money doesn’t make you invincible, especially to larger organizations.

Regardless nobody should have such personal details revealed as news without their own doing, no matter how rich or famous they are.

Re: Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting

#44
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barstool has noticeably more coverage of actual sports and much less divisive political and cultural content. Low-brow/college humor is very different than left vs right politicking. It is not surprising that you will suffer audience loss when picking one side of the battle.

They literally became famous for their daily “smokeshow” content. If that isn’t politically divisive I don’t know what is.

A magazine targeting men distributing pictures of scantily-clad ladies? The humanity! On a more serious note, I don't hear any issue with tabloids putting guys in speedoes on the front, let alone hear it called, "politically divisive." What distinguishes the two?

Re: Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting

#45
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barstool has noticeably more coverage of actual sports and much less divisive political and cultural content. Low-brow/college humor is very different than left vs right politicking. It is not surprising that you will suffer audience loss when picking one side of the battle.

They literally became famous for their daily “smokeshow” content. If that isn’t politically divisive I don’t know what is.

Along with their sports coverage, yes. And how is “smokeshow” politically divisive?

Re: Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting

#46

Not sticking to sports is why they failed and needed new management and more invasive ads for revenue in the first place.

Barstool took their niche as the edgy sports-adjacent content mill, and does it better. Not least because Portnoy is still willing to give the finger to the leagues and ESPN.

Bill Simmons' grand Grantland experiment showed, for a brief shining moment, what the best possible version of this kind of thing was, but he lost his cover in Bristol, and the plug got pulled.

Re: Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting

#47
post #17
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalists aren't exactly known for being paid well. They need resources to start up an outlet and the primary place to get those resources in venture capital which would just start this entire process over again.

A content-based website is extremely cheap business to start, as far as running businesses goes. Seriously, you don't need any capital whatsoever, no offices, machines, just pay someone to set up a website. Millions of people start all kinds of businesses in this country every year, often much poorer than journalists. The reason they don't do this is because running a content-based business is much harder than they c…

"don't have skin in the game" -- can you explain what you mean by saying that journalists don't have skin in the game of journalism?

Your first paragraph says that content-based websites are easy even for poor people; your second says it's hard and that you have to work for free for months. I'm confused. How are poor people supposed to work for free for a few months and then have enough to pay themselves reasonable salaries with health care/insurance and retirement and PTO?

Re: Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, a billionaire is not in danger of death because he does business somewhere that has such a penalty. A billionaire can afford security or not go in person. Does not going in person harm his ability to make deals? Maybe, maybe not. But that doesn't even resemble "life in danger".

Maybe the claim is exaggerated but having money doesn’t make you invincible, especially to larger organizations. Regardless nobody should have such personal details revealed as news without their own doing, no matter how rich or famous they are.

Money doesn't make you invincible to everything.

But when it comes to "I need to visit this country for business", money easily solves that.

> Regardless nobody should have such personal details revealed as news without their own doing, no matter how rich or famous they are.

Yeah, sure. Though I'd say that the existence of billionaires is a significantly larger problem...

Re: Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting

#49

This was Univision wasn't it? Kotaku is falling apart right now too, also done an impressively terrible job killing off the AV Club (I reckon there could be a case study in there about how not to do a rebrand tbh, have hardly viewed it since). They seemed to think they could just pull the audiences from about a dozen very different websites and mould them into one site.

Univision bought most of the remains of Gawker, merged it with their own site Fusion (later renamed Splinter, now defunct) and the Onion/AV Club, and sold it to the current owners of G/O at a massive loss.

In this media environment, with profitability seemingly tied to the whims of Facebook's recommendation algorithm and major sites like Mic and ThinkProgress dropping left and right, I don't know if anyone can survive without a deep-pocketed owner who can fund years of losses.

Re: Deadspin Staffers Are Quitting

#50
post #7

Here's (some of) the reasoning from (one of) the horse's mouth: https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-adults-in-the-room-183...

The real and less romantic story is this: The journalists at Deadspin and its sister sites, like most journalists I know, are eager to do work that makes money; we are even willing to compromise for it, knowing that our jobs and futures rest on it. An ever-growing number of media owners, meanwhile, are so exceedingly unwilling to reckon with the particulars of their own business that they refuse to accept our eagerne…

> like most journalists I know, are eager to do work that makes money; we are even willing to compromise for it.

Is this journalism in 2019? Pump out content to make a buck and fuck journalistic integrity because they have kids to feed? Real journalism takes too long and doesn't generate enough revenue?

One could say the same about Russian troll farms, they too have kids at home to feed.

What a sad world we live in.

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