[The question about the former Deadspin workers isn’t just
what’s next for them; it’s also about what’s next for us, the
media consumers who need their voices so badly]
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CAN DEADSPIN LIVE AGAIN AS A WORKER-OWNED WEBSITE?  
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Ari Paul
November 8, 2019
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
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_ The question about the former Deadspin workers isn’t just
what’s next for them; it’s also about what’s next for us, the
media consumers who need their voices so badly _

,

 

Like the Hebrews departed Egypt, so too did DEADSPIN editorial staff
embark in a mass exodus after the sports site’s parent company
decreed a “sports stories only” rule, leading to the firing of one
editor and then the resignation of as many as eight staffers.

In addition to disrespecting the sacred boundary between business and
editorial decision making, G/O MEDIA’s edict was seen largely as a
way to silence DEADSPIN’s writers from doing what had become their
trademark: snarky
[[link removed]] editorial
[[link removed]] indictments
[[link removed]] of
the American
[[link removed]] corporate
[[link removed]] class
[[link removed]].

Will Leitch, who founded the site as a part of GAWKER MEDIA before
litigation dismembered that online empire, told the NEW YORK
TIMES (10/30/19
[[link removed]]):

To watch the way they punched and screamed and clawed on the way out
the door is truly inspiring, and as true to the spirit
of DEADSPIN as anything I could have ever imagined. They refused to
give in to the bad guys. During a time when so many people have made a
profession of that very thing, I find it downright heroic.

G/O’s ban on DEADSPIN covering politics beyond sports comes just
after the same media company shut down its politics-oriented
website, SPLINTER, another haven for former GAWKER scribes,
including labor journalist Hamilton Nolan. The explanation offered for
the shut down was a lack of traffic (DAILY BEAST, 10/10/19
[[link removed]]).

[Deadspin: The Future of the Culture Wars Is Here, and It's Gamergate]

_DEADSPIN (10/14/14
[[link removed]])_

That DEADSPIN’s owner could think that a sports site should be
cleansed of the political is, of course, absurd on its face—in a
world of Chinese backlash against the NBA, Colin Kaepernick, and labor
struggles between players unions and owners, how could sports writers
be enjoined from writing about the larger themes underlying these
stories? In a statement
[[link removed]], the
Gizmodo Media Group Union, a local of the Writers Guild of America
East (WGAE), called G/O MEDIA’s move “morally reprehensible,”
and said such tunnel vision “is not what journalism looks like, and
it is not what editorial independence looks like.”

Sometimes lost in the coverage of the DEADSPIN debacle is the
context of its former relationship to GAWKER. DEADSPIN, like a few
other GAWKER offshoots, survived after GAWKER was destroyed by the
political maneuvering of PayPal co-founder and right-wing
activist Peter Thiel
[[link removed]].
Thiel’s beef with GAWKER was partly personal, but no one could
deny the political tension
[[link removed]] between
the two parties.

After Thiel’s success in destroying GAWKER, many of its
left-of-center writers went on retain their voices at other websites.
But the debacle illustrated the threat that pissed-off rich people
pose to an aggressive media outlet. And it raised the fear that even
popular websites whose writers attack corporate power and report on
poverty, labor and inequality will eventually find their independence
to do so thwarted in a for-profit media world.

Response to the DEADSPIN staff walkout has mostly focused on the
ex-workers’ undeniable bravery. As anyone working in journalism
knows, good staff jobs at interesting places are hard to come by; a
great many journalists grit their teeth and do as the boss tells them
for fear of wasting away on unemployment. But the question about these
former workers isn’t just what’s next for _them_; it’s also
about what’s next for _us_, the media consumers who need their
voices so badly.

[Deadspin: 46 Times Vox Totally Fucked Up a Story]

_DEADSPIN (12/30/14
[[link removed]])_

It’s not so outlandish to suggest that the growing number of
out-of-work writers and editors from places
like DEADSPIN and SPLINTER could, instead of applying to work at
another corporation, band together to start a new worker-run media
enterprise. This is a dream, to show the bosses that the journalists
they employ don’t really need them, that has been dreamed before: 
Striking DETROIT FREE PRESS and DETROIT NEWS workers published
[[link removed]] the
pro-union DETROIT SUNDAY JOURNAL while on the picket line. The
five-day-a-week news program FREE SPEECH RADIO NEWS, which boasted of
reporters all over the globe, was started by workers in response to
a strike
[[link removed]] at PACIFICA
NEWS NETWORK.

Former SPLINTER writer Nolan, a WGAE activist, said of the prospect
of a worker-run site:

It’s clear that worker-owned media is an idea whose time has come,
and, yes, people are interested in the concept and people are talking
about it. But beyond that, I think it’s too early to say right now.
I do believe this is a model that makes too much sense not to happen.

Nathan Robinson, editor of CURRENT AFFAIRS (10/31/19
[[link removed]]),
painted a bleak picture in his call for worker-run publications:

Look at the tragic losses that have happened recently in media: MAD
MAGAZINE, the VILLAGE VOICE, SPLINTER, PACIFIC STANDARD.… Often,
workers at these companies do not get the opportunity to try to save
them. Consider PACIFIC STANDARD: Its crack team had been building a
highly respected outlet, but their patron simply
[[link removed]] “lost
interest” and decided to give them the chop. FIRST LOOK
MEDIA recently decided
[[link removed]] to
pull the plug on the NIB and TOPIC, and staff were simply told:
That’s that, sorry.

This is not always simply a problem of “profit”; PACIFIC
STANDARD, for instance, was overseen by a nonprofit. But it is always
a problem of ownership: A magazine dependent on a patron operates at
the whim of that patron, regardless of whether it is for profit or
not. Even though THE ONION’s success is entirely due to its
hilarious writers, its ownership has passed to UNIVISION and then
to G/O because THE ONION’s writers do not own it. This is
ludicrous: They make the funny articles, the funny articles are the
entire site, why on earth should anyone other than the writers of THE
ONION own it?

The biggest threat to journalism today is not “technology.”
Journalists can innovate ways to use technology to produce excellent
new work, and even to get people to pay for it. The big problem is
ownership: The journalists don’t own the companies.

[Deadspin: It's Not Your Responsibility To Make This Easy For Them]

_DEADSPIN (9/16/19
[[link removed]])_

The odds are stacked against DEADSPIN’s refugees, of course. The
cost of paying writers a living wage, never mind hosting a major
website and retaining a media attorney (a must if you’re going to be
doing daring journalism), isn’t pocket change. One of the reasons a
place like FREE SPEECH RADIO NEWS couldn’t survive is that it
relied on a bare-bones staff, scattered across several cities, relying
on freelance reporters, mostly working piecemeal. (Disclosure: This
writer knows this from experience, as he was a former correspondent
for that program.) Without a patron like the INTERCEPT has in Pierre
Omidyar—the same funder who pulled the plug on
the NIB and TOPIC—journalists had to spend hours of volunteer
time doing small-time fundraising, which kept the operation chugging
on for a while before that model became fatally unsustainable.

So a new venture can’t rely on the rag-tag models that have briefly
sustained idealistic worker-run enterprises. It will take months of
raising capital to create an operation with at least a small paid
staff with the potential for growth.

This is a big risk, it may not work out in the end, but this
shouldn’t be the end of the collective editorial project that
existed at DEADSPIN and SPLINTER. And media simply can’t exist at
two poles, with corporate-controlled media at one and small,
unsustainable, do-it-yourself operations at the other. But anyone
interested in this will have to pound the pavement looking for
funders, people or groups with money that want, deep within their
hearts, for independent media to survive. It’s a worthy and humbling
experiment, but we’re at a breaking point, so it’s necessary.

Dave Zirin, a sports writer for THE NATION and other publications,
agreed that a new worker-run publication would be ideal. He told FAIR:
“We need their voices, now more than ever. The greatest obstacle is
of course the capital that would want to see these voices
amplified.”

_Ari Paul has reported for the NATION, the GUARDIAN, the FORWARD,
the BROOKLYN RAIL, VICE NEWS, IN THESE TIMES, JACOBIN and many
other outlets._

_FAIR [[link removed]], the national media watch group, has
been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship
since 1986. Uniquely, FAIR works with both activists and journalists.
We maintain a regular dialogue with reporters at news outlets across
the country, providing constructive critiques when called for and
applauding exceptional, hard-hitting journalism._

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