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I learned many surprising lessons from my 20 months as editor-in-chief of Deadspin, the skeptical, irreverent, hilarious, trailblazing sports outlet that entertained, offended, and educated audiences in roughly equal measure.
I learned from a cease-and-desist letter that Jacuzzi is a trademarked brand, and that the hotel room in which a world-famous soccer star was alleged to have raped a woman contained a mere “spa” or “hot tub.” I learned from inhaling Chartbeat that our very dumbest stories and our very smartest stories would always be our biggest traffic drivers. I learned from our general counsel more than I ever wanted to know about the precise limits of fair use. I learned from my coworkers — all of them brilliant and entirely deranged — that there is no limit to how hard I can laugh in a soul-suckingly bland Times Square cubicle farm. Even knowing how it all ended, I’d still take the job 100 times out of 100.
The most consequential lessons I learned, though, were about the ways in which I had misunderstood “free market” capitalism, and about what that meant for the industry that gave me my career. Those are the lessons I haven’t stopped agonizing over six years later, the ones that led to my first book but also caused scores of sleepless nights.
Until Deadspin, I naively believed that a company making money required the company to sell goods or services. Boosting profits, under this line of thinking, requires either selling more of the company’s existing goods or services, or finding new goods or services to sell. This misunderstanding made me genuinely optimistic when Deadspin and our sister sites were purchased by a private equity firm and renamed G/O Media in 2019. The numbers my bosses had shown me indicated that Deadspin was profitable, even if our parent company was not. I knew we could be more profitable if we made basic moves like developing a subscription program, but our previous owner — the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision — never seemed to care enough to put in the time.
Our new bosses at Great Hill Partners promised real financial expertise: Its executives told me on their first day in charge that they agreed we needed a subscription program. As far as I could tell, things were looking up.
Had I paid better attention to what was happening in the rest of the media industry, my read on the situation would have been far less rosy. I did know that Alden Global Capital had been devouring and decimating local newspapers; just a year earlier, The Denver Post’s editorial board had published a package of articles begging for their newspaper to be rescued from the hedge fund’s clutches. Yet even as I rooted for my colleagues in Colorado to escape, I accepted the conventional wisdom that the root problem was newspapers not adapting fast enough to the digital age, that Alden was a just vulture feasting on the scraps. Embarrassingly, I thought that being digital-only, that being profitable, that being cool would protect us.
Being cool didn’t protect Deadspin, as has been thoroughly chronicled by my colleagues and me. I quit my job three months after the acquisition. The rest of the staff followed me out the door two months after that. The site sat dormant for months, then went Weekend at Bernie’s mode for a couple of years, during which its most notable story was one that called a Native American 9 year old racist for wearing a headdress at a Kansas City Chiefs game, leading to a defamation suit that is still ongoing. In 2024, Deadspin was sold to a Maltese company and became a referral site for online casinos. This July, G/O Media began “working towards a full wind down,” in the words of CEO Jim Spanfeller. One of the most influential companies in the history of digital media was finally, mercifully dead.
Being cool didn’t protect Vice News either. Once the swashbuckling rogue of digital media, the site was destroyed by a combination of its madman founder and its greedy private-equity investors-turned-owners. When Vice News stopped publishing in February 2024 — nearly eight years after Gawker’s demise, five after OG Deadspin’s — it marked the final nail in the coffin of the era in which any media outlet was thought of as cool. On one level, that’s for the best; I can think of exactly one Deadspin employee in the site’s history who could accurately be categorized that way. But it also makes clear just how much private equity has taken from us: not just local newspapers providing invaluable information about communities, but also blogs willing to get weird, to try things no one else would.
After several years of reporting on and obsessing over how private equity works and why, I finally understand the root of my misconceptions about capitalism. I had thought that the point of buying a beloved, profitable publication was to make it more profitable, to strengthen the fundamentals of its business model in hopes of a lucrative exit years down the road.
That is not the point of buying a beloved, profitable publication (or any business). The point is to make the private equity firm more profitable. The Denver Post and Deadspin and Vice News are just widgets, endlessly interchangeable in the service of maximizing shareholder value. Only chumps make money by selling goods or services these days; the real geniuses rely on management fees, deal fees, dividend recapitalizations, real estate deals, and the like. That allows — requires! — a private equity firm to divorce its incentives from that of its own portfolio company, making it, at best, agnostic to whether the company lives or dies. In many cases, the best decision for the firm is the one that directly undermines the company it controls. The reason there are no weird blogs anymore is that it’s more fruitful to drive them out of business.
When G/O Media began “working towards a full wind down” this summer, Spanfeller wrote a 2,300-word “epilogue” to the company’s existence, the main thrust of which seemed to be to demonstrate that coherent writing skills are not a prerequisite for running a media company. (Sample sentence: “At one and the same time the two are clearly linked and yet can also be goals at cross purposes.”) He barely mentioned the journalism produced by the sites he oversaw for six years except to criticize it for being biased; his few references to the people who worked for him were mostly dedicated to railing against unions. Yet he couldn’t resist bragging about what a success he’d been, despite all those mean bloggers and bargaining committees plotting against him.
Every one of the eight sites Spanfeller had taken over six years earlier had either gone out of business or been reduced to a shell of its former self, but that didn’t matter. The key point came seven paragraphs in:
“We will exit having increased shareholder value.”
