Online news site Deadspin could have trouble coming back from the dead.
Following a week of turmoil that saw some 25 writers and editors resign this week, Deadspin then lost its only new writer. Alan Goldsher, a Chicago-based freelancer, quit an hour after posting his first story, when a horde of Deadspin supporters on Twitter eviscerated him for taking the job in the first place.
“I’ve listened to the room, and I’m out of Deadspin,” Goldsher tweeted at 2:53 p.m. Friday — 53 minutes after posting his first-and-only story. “I hear what you guys are saying and I respect it. This clearly wasn’t a good idea, and I appreciate that I was pointed in the right direction.”
Goldsher even thanked his trolls — saying the avalanche of negative comments, including being repeatedly called “scab,” had helped him make new friends.
“Guys, here’s a weird one: Getting destroyed on the Twitters has turned out to be a super-positive thing. I’ve had some great communication, made some new cyber-friends, and learned a whole bunch. So strange how a crap experience turned into a cool teaching/learning moment,” Goldsher wrote.
“Didn’t click the link, you’re a rat and a scab,” one person wrote, using the derogatory term for strikebreaker. “I ain’t clicking this, scab,” another person said.
“In a weird way, I have to thank you guys for all the insults and cries of ‘scab.’ If that hadn’t have happened, I would’ve had no clue that the general public felt this way,” he said.
Goldsher is collateral damage of a staff revolt at Deadspin that kicked off Monday when higher-ups at parent company G/O Media demanded the staff stick to sports reporting.
Deadspin writers — who have been at odds with their new boss, Jim Spanfeller, since he took over the site in April — primarily cover sports, but also write about culture and media.
The sports-only edict triggered a backlash that had staff posting entirely non-sports stories to the site, and resigning en masse over the next three days.
By Friday, it appeared that none of the former staff was left. Goldsher’s 2 pm tweet, about Kevin Durant, was the last posting as of this writing.
One of the last full time editors to leave was senior editor Diana Moskovitz, who says she gave two weeks notice on Oct. 29 — only to tweet that she had her access cut off by Friday afternoon. At least one of her posts — naming a new editor-in-chief who she said was set to quit by day’s end — was later removed.
G/O Media’s “stick to sports” edict on Monday was not all that rankled the editorial staff. In a bid to boost traffic to its advertisers, G/O Media’s free web sites recently began allowing pop up videos ads to appear without readers clicking through to them. The editors and writers regarded this as unwelcome intrusions and invited readers to comment on their experiences.
Readers, not surprisingly, disliked ads that popped up randomly without them clicking on it.
Management then shut down the comments section. Farmers Insurance, one of the companies that was utilizing pop up ads, reportedly pulled a $1 million ad campaign from the company after the editorial backlash.
G/O Media, which also owns the Onion, Gizmodo and Lifehacker, did not respond for comment.