G/O Media sells Deadspin, lays off entire editorial staff with barely any notice
"Sports blogging site Deadspin was sold to a European publisher and the entire staff was reportedly fired with barely any notice Monday — just months after the publication was forced to apologize for accusing a young Kansas City Chiefs fan of wearing “blackface.”
Jim Spanfeller, the CEO of parent G/O Media, broke the news of the sale and the layoffs in a memo to staff as the media company sold off another site in its crumbling empire.
“Recently we were approached by the European firm Lineup Publishing expressing interest in purchasing Deadspin to add to their growing media holdings,” Spanfeller said. “Lineup Publishing is a newly formed digital media company described in their words as ‘dedicated to creating, acquiring and managing high quality media brands across a variety of sectors.’”
Lineup Publishing will “not carry over any of the site’s existing staff and instead build a new team more in line with their editorial vision for the brand,” the CEO added. “While the new owners plan to be reverential to Deadpin’s unique voice, they plan to take a different content approach regarding the site’s overall sports coverage. This unfortunately means that we will be parting ways with those impacted staff members.”
A rep for Deadspin said 11 staffers were impacted.
In the memo, Spanfeller emphasized that he wasn’t shopping the sports site when the offer came in.
The Daily Mail reported that Deadspin’s writers and editors were given just 30 minutes notice of losing their jobs before being locked out of their company laptops, citing a private post on X from senior editor Julie DiCaro.
G/O Media sold Deadspin to a European start-up and laid off its editorial staff, according to the company’s CEO. The sports site’s staffers were based in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Deadspin, which had been owned by G/O since 2019, made headlines last month when it was slapped with a lawsuit by the family of the 9-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan accused by the site of wearing “blackface” in a story it penned last November.
Holden Armenta’s parents, Shannon and Raul, alleged that Deadspin intentionally published a defamatory article, exposing “the family to a barrage of hate, including death threats.”
Deadspin tweaked the article amid a firestorm of criticism and added an editor’s note, saying the publication “regret[s] any suggestion that we were attacking” Armenta.
The family filed the defamation lawsuit for unspecified damages. It is still winding through the courts."
