New gawker site series#

And we will develop our abilities to support our teams with back-office competence. We will invest heavily in our Kinja platform. We will find new ways to stimulate consumer trials of our great content. We will add depth and scope to our development capabilities. We will build out our go-to-market abilities. The focus and requirements of these new positions will often be different than what we had, but we will add. “As you will soon see, we will be adding headcount across our operations.

New gawker site series#

The penultimate paragraph of this email contained a series of soon-to-be-broken promises (emphasis Spanfeller’s): He called it getting “rid of internal obstructions.” It did not seem to strike him that this would remove the trust our readers had in our work. And he mentioned his plans, which included removing the firewall between our fiercely independent newsrooms and the ad sales department that supported them.

“But it was a necessary step.” He described the firings as “process motivated,” not part of a strategy to make the company smaller. that day, with the subject line “Moving Forward.” “Today was a tough moment in the very new life of G/O Media,” Spanfeller wrote. Eventually I came to feel that it was because those roles presented potential obstacles to what was coming next.Īn email from Spanfeller appeared in my inbox at 4:31 p.m. That may seem insignificant given a total headcount of 400, but the layoffs focused on the editorial leadership. Originally, Spanfeller told Variety he didn’t “plan to cut our way to growth.” Despite his reassurances, on April 30, G/O Media laid off 25 staffers. It was soon clear he planned to apply that innovation to the former Gawker Media empire. His innovation was to produce a lot of low-quality words as cheaply as possible, under the banner of a brand someone else had established with heartfelt work. Spanfeller had made his name turning into an unreadable content mill a decade earlier. We just needed to create more content and let him run the ship. The path to profitability and success was direct and obvious to him. Spanfeller gushed about the “content” we produced, but never mentioned anything he liked. Univision had sold us to Great Hill, in fact, while dealing with its own private-equity investors. When the hollowed-out company collapses, the executives wipe their bloodied snouts and move on. In practice, this usually means saddling their acquisitions with debt and/or awarding themselves lavish salaries, management fees and bonuses. It counts on its own brilliance in a wide variety of very specific fields to make those companies more efficient, with the aim of profiting from a sale. The PE industry, if it can be called that, purchases what it sees as flawed companies.

ICYMI: Explosive BuzzFeed scoop raises eyebrows We worked directly for private equity now, and private equity is undefeated against journalists. There was the bankruptcy following a vicious-and successful-lawsuit, brought by the wrestler Hulk Hogan and secretly funded by the right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel, as well as a sale to the Spanish-language media company Univision. Spanfeller, the hand-picked chief executive of our new owners, the private-equity firm Great Hill Partners, introduced the first members of what would become his “leadership team.” When someone in the audience wondered why Susie Banikarim, our editorial director, wasn’t there, no one on stage could provide a reassuring answer.ĭeadspin, the site I helped run as managing editor, had weathered severe storms. It was his introductory town hall, and he was there to strike a conciliatory note. Jim Spanfeller looked like the main characters from Caddyshack melded together, and had the demeanor of a personal injury lawyer. Subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Facebook and Instagram to stay up to date on all the latest fashion news and juicy industry gossip.The new chief executive of G/O Media, the company that used to be Gawker, addressed his new staff in a makeshift auditorium around the central stairs of our Flatiron offices. Goldberg snapped it up for a paltry $1.35 million in a bankruptcy court auction in 2018, and positioned first Carson Griffith, and later Dan Peres, at the helm…though things never got off the ground either time.īDG has declined to comment on when the site will raise its head again, nor do we know of any other staffing hires yet. The site has remained dormant since then-owner and founder Nick Denton famously lost a $140 million lawsuit after publishing Hulk Hogan’s sex tape. But Bryan and I have talked about Gawker before and I told him the first thing he’s not gonna like is that the Gawker team will want to unionize. As per Keith Kelly of the New York Post, Spiers tweeted: “She’s great and I hope it works. Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker back in 2002/03, praised the hiring of Finnegan-but also predicted clashes between BDG owner Bryan Goldberg and the incoming editorial staff.