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Deadspin’s Last Staff Member Quits. But Deadspin Is Not Dead, the Boss Says.

The site’s editorial team, more than 20 journalists, resigned after an instance of what they saw as meddling by G/O Media.

Inside the Deadspin office last year. All of the site’s writers and editors have resigned.Credit...John Taggart

And then there were none.

The exodus of staff members at the popular sports website Deadspin started on Tuesday, with the firing of the interim editor in chief, Barry Petchesky, who had refused to obey an order from higher-ups to confine the site’s posts to sports-related subject matter.

On Wednesday, more than eight staff members quit in protest. The next day, more writers and editors followed. On Friday, the last remaining journalist from a staff of more than 20 — the writer Dave McKenna — resigned.

Diana Moskovitz, a senior editor, was technically the last one standing. She had handed in her resignation two weeks ago, and Friday was set to be her last workday. She had no idea, when she gave notice, that she would be the last of the original team to post a Deadspin story.

She spent most of Friday working from a Starbucks in Manhattan. At 10:24 a.m., she put up a post headlined “Was Deadspin a Good Sports Blog? A Very Short Debate.” The article had a word count of one. “Yes,” it read. By evening, it had more than 110,000 page views.

Ms. Moskovitz said no one from G/O Media — the company that operates Deadspin and related sites like Jezebel, Kotaku and Gizmodo for the private equity firm Great Hill Partners — had contacted her on her final workday.

“I don’t know if they didn’t remember or just didn’t care that I was there,” she said in an interview.

She noted that her access to the site’s content management system was cut sometime during the afternoon.

Despite the swift collapse, Jim Spanfeller, the chief executive of G/O Media, vowed that Deadspin was not dead. “We’ve got quite a number of recruiters out there pounding the pavement, trying to find great people,” Mr. Spanfeller said in an interview Friday. “We don’t just want to get any old person — we want to get good people.”

Luis Paez-Pumar, a former Deadspin staff writer who resigned Thursday, was not convinced that the site had much of a future.

“What Deadspin was is not what it is going to be,” he said, adding: “It’s going to be basically a site that attempts to replicate the voice that we had, but without editors, specifically, but also writers, who really understand what that voice is.”

Mr. Paez-Pumar said the staff resigned “knowing that we stood up for what we believed in, and what we believed was both horrible treatment of the site and its history, but also specifically of Barry, who is the site and its history.”

Of the site’s immediate future, Mr. Spanfeller said they would “make do” and put up new content. “Is this a great thing for the company? No,” he said. “Is it a great thing for Deadspin? Definitely not. But we think, while it’s a painful moment, we’ll certainly be able to soldier on.”

Tensions between the executives and the journalists had been simmering for months.

The private equity firm Great Hill Partners bought Deadspin and other digital properties that were once part of Gawker Media, as well as The Onion, from Univision in April. Gawker Media had become the property of Univision in 2016, two months after filing for bankruptcy. That company was under pressure because of a $140 million judgment against it from an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit brought by Terry G. Bollea, who wrestled professionally under the name Hulk Hogan. The suit was secretly funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel.

Great Hill Partners packaged its acquisitions under the name G/O Media and installed Mr. Spanfeller, formerly an executive at Forbes.com, as chief executive.

In August, Deadspin, which mainly trafficked in sports-related articles, posted a story that contained reporting critical of G/O Media and Mr. Spanfeller. The site’s editor, Megan Greenwell, resigned three weeks after that story appeared.

A turning point came Monday, when the G/O Media editorial director, Paul Maidment, sent a memo to the Deadspin staff instructing them to stick to publishing articles that had something to do with sports. A recent Deadspin article on President Trump getting booed while attending a World Series game, for instance, was fine with him, he said.

The staff, feeling that the executives were meddling, protested the order by publishing non-sports-related material on Tuesday. Then came the editor’s firing and the larger exodus.

“It was not our intent to lose anybody,” Mr. Spanfeller said. “I’m sorry about what has happened, without equivocation.”

He denied that he had ever wanted to quash the distinctive Deadspin voice.

“What this really came down to is a sense that they wanted to be able to write about things that were relatively far afield,” he said.

The resignations lit up social media and drew a reaction from Senator Bernie Sanders, who tweeted on Thursday: “I stand with the former @Deadspin workers who decided not to bow to the greed of private equity vultures like @JimSpanfeller. This is the kind of greed that is destroying journalism across the country, and together we are going to take them on.”

Ms. Greenwell, who recently worked as an advice columnist for The New York Times, posted a blog in August criticizing G/O Media management and decrying the spread of private equity among media companies.

Mr. Spanfeller pushed back on the notion that Great Hill Partners was bad for journalism. “We’re trying to add jobs, not reduce jobs,” he said. “We’re trying to hire more journalists, not have less journalists.”

Before she lost access to the site, Ms. Moskovitz published a short and sweet post at 1:07 p.m. headlined “Thank You.” It expressed gratitude to the site’s readers and shot quickly past 100,000 views.

A correction was made on 
Nov. 2, 2019

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of Megan Greenwell's Deadspin resignation. It was three weeks after a critical post, not three days.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Deadspin Isn’t Dead, Owner Says, as Last Staff Member Signs Off. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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