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. Jim Spanfeller looked like the main characters from Caddyshack melded together, and had the demeanor of a personal injury lawyer. It was his introductory town hall, and he was there to strike a conciliatory note. He said he wanted to learn. "If I fuck up," he said, "let me know. My door is open."
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.
Deadspin, the site I helped run as managing editor, had weathered severe storms. 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. But this was a different sort of crisis. We worked directly for private equity now, and private equity is undefeated against journalists.
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The PE industry, if it can be called that, purchases what it sees as flawed companies. 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. In practice, this usually means saddling their acquisitions with debt and/or awarding themselves lavish salaries, management fees and bonuses. When the hollowed-out company collapses, the executives wipe their bloodied snouts and move on. Univision had sold us to Great Hill, in fact, while dealing with its own private-equity investors.
Spanfeller gushed about the "content" we produced, but never mentioned anything he liked. The path to profitability and success was direct and obvious to him. We just needed to create more content and let him run the ship.
Spanfeller had made his name turning Forbes.com into an unreadable content mill a decade earlier. 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. It was soon clear he planned to apply that innovation to the former Gawker Media empire.
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. That may seem insignificant given a total headcount of 400, but the layoffs focused on the editorial leadership. At the time it seemed hasty and unwise. Eventually I came to feel that it was because those roles presented potential obstacles to what was coming next.
An email from Spanfeller appeared in my inbox at 4:31 p.m. that day, with the subject line "Moving Forward." "Today was a tough moment in the very new life of G/O Media," Spanfeller wrote. "But it was a necessary step." He described the firings as "process motivated," not part of a strategy to make the company smaller. And he mentioned his plans, which included removing the firewall between our fiercely independent newsrooms and the ad sales department that supported them. 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.
The penultimate paragraph of this email contained a series of soon-to-be-broken promises (emphasis Spanfeller's):
"As you will soon see, we will be adding headcount across our operations. The focus and requirements of these new positions will often be different than what we had, but we will add. We will hire more content producers. We will build out our go-to-market abilities. We will add depth and scope to our development capabilities. We will find new ways to stimulate consumer trials of our great content. We will invest heavily in our Kinja platform. And we will develop our abilities to support our teams with back-office competence. We will do all this while working hard to promote diversity within our company. And finally, we will welcome our unions as positive agents in achieving all these goals."
