Esse Est Percipi

I mostly saw the rise and fall of the 2010s digital news era as an outsider, a guy who kept insisting that his little site was worthy of just as much time as the big guys.

Sure, I had my chances to lean on some of those empires. My seven and a half years collaborating with the folks at Motherboard were some of my favorite in journalism. But that was all freelance. It’s not like I ever worked in the Vice newsroom. It was nice being an outsider, in a sense.

But I think the story I keep coming back to is that of the network that became G/O Media. It was once Gawker Media, and it shaped internet media in ways that we’re still kind of grappling with now. It was the last vestige of a generation where the word “Technorati” meant something.

The problem is, the people with authority and money took the wrong lessons from Gawker’s success. They saw a network of sites with a connected personality, a selection of verticals that all hit advertiser-friendly demographics. From a standpoint of selling to advertisers and maximizing search engine traffic, sure, the logic absolutely makes sense.

But the part that failed to connect with the people on the money and private equity side was that the culture mattered more. It wasn’t that we wanted to read articles about music on a sports website. It was, rather, that we wanted to read great writers who mostly wrote about sports but had enough good taste to feel boxed-in by a sports mandate.

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton was many things, but one of those things was a writer, and writers understand that sometimes the stick-to-the-vertical mandate gets a little limiting. Which is why even his most in-the-weeds sites were willing to bend.

All this explains why G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller, having upset a generation of journalists by doing significant damage to what was left of the Gawker Media network, hit folks the wrong way on Wednesday. Crawling out of his abyss after spending half a decade as an internet villain in a suit, he wrote an epilogue, stating that the G/O Media network had been whittled down to just one site. (The Root, technically a Slate expat, in case you were wondering.) Sure, he buried the news during a holiday weekend, but everyone with half a brain knew it was technically dead a long time ago.

There was an extremely long, massive-paragraph section of his rant where he touched on the very tension I’m touching on here. Here’s that section, in full:

But this also highlights one of the biggest challenges in this discussion. What, in fact, does successful engagement look like. In some ways this is an impossible question to answer. Buzzy, insightful, muck raking articles are clearly important elements of pushing editorial brands to greater and greater levels of industry recognition and respect. But there are times when this type of content does not drive the most visitor interaction. There needs to be an appropriate balance between these two goals, editorial impact and respect, as well as reader affinity. At one and the same time the two are clearly linked and yet can also be goals at cross purposes. And within this wrestling match comes a recently elevated issue of the writer as activist. Often now, the writer wants to choose topics and story angles to match their own specific world view. A practice that often actually works against the very brand building that some would suggest supports such practices. All editorial coverage comes with some level of writer bias but the basic first day story should be as fact based as possible and when the writer does add personal views later in the timeline, that reporting or opinion should be clearly labeled for the reader. All too often we stray from these core practices, and this is as true today in legacy brands as it is in digitally native brands. We certainly saw this up close and personal in the early days at G/O Media when at times there were even arguments about what the core mission of the sites were and who was responsible for defining and supporting those missions.

A poster child here might be Deadspin and the early issues we had with the incumbent staff. Who owned the site and who had to make the site work was theoretically not a core factor in what the site reported on nor how it did that reporting. We asked for the slightest of changes, to cover just sports, sports related issues as well as sports adjacent stories. That was perceived as beyond the pale by the legacy team and as such they left en masse. An outcome that the management team certainly did not want. But that said, with a new team which was also feisty to say the least (just ask our IP lawyers) but who stayed within the sports realm, we returned the site to previous traffic levels and made a profit for the first time in many, many years. And, in the end, we sold the site for more than we bought it for.

(A good sign this guy isn’t generally a writer: Two spaces after sentences, which I had to edit out. What a joke.)

Spanfeller, known among his haters as “Herb,” has worked on the business side of media for more than 45 years, and his point of view is painted by the revenue part of the pie. But his phrasing seems to clearly center the brand as the key part of the product, rather than the creatives who built that brand. It’s why he can look at a situation like Deadspin, which he infamously caused to happen by not listening to the existing staff, who was much closer to the product than he was, and see himself as validated. Oh, we sold it for more money than we got bought it for!

Doesn’t matter that the people he sold it to have slapped a gigantic “Betting” section on the site because they came from the gaming industry. “It profited. I was right.”

(Also, there’s a bunch of stuff about unions in here. Those unions fought to keep the editorial integrity of the products you were trying to change—of course they resisted!)

Over the past few years, Spanfeller has overseen the final stages of dismantling perhaps the most influential editorial empire the internet has ever seen, selling its various parts to any willing buyer. Oh sure, The New York Times makes more money, and other outlets arguably did it better without getting mired in ugly legal battles that may soon become films.

But even in its demise, it has been deeply influential. Defector, borne from the ashes of the original Deadspin, has inspired a generation of worker-owned media outlets of all shapes and sizes. The newsletter revolution very clearly has its DNA in crazy pieces like that time Caity Weaver ate endless appetizers for content, or when Manti Te'o fell victim to a catfishing scheme. (Side note: The author of that very popular latter piece, Timothy Burke, is going through some things. He has a legal fund you should support.)

Workers emphasized that they had agency, even in the network’s decline under G/O Media, and they carried that agency to places that actually respected that agency. I see the Gawker Media diaspora everywhere, whether sites like Aftermath or Hamilton Nolan’s great newsletter, and it’s usually attached to some fucking amazing content. The NYT has a surprisingly strong bench of former Gawker Media folks, and they’re usually working on the content in the paper you don’t hate-read.

Jim Spanfeller claimed in his long rant that he “learned a lot” from his G/O media journey. “Been surprised by more things than I expected and grown as a person and a manager,” he wrote, two spaces separating the previous sentence from this one: “May you live in interesting times goes the proverb, and I have.”

I would like to argue that the internet learned significantly more from Great Hill Partners’ ownership, and Spanfeller’s stewardship, of G/O Media. Example: Former Deadpspin EIC Megan Greenwell recently wrote a book inspired by her experience, called Bad Company. She used a terrible moment to tell a more important story about private equity. That’s a far more essential conversation than whether Spanfeller lived in “interesting times.”

This whole situation taught a lot of people that if you want to protect a style and tone you like, you can’t rely on someone else to do it for you.

May the next generation of online writers remain endlessly scrappy.