Readers who turned to the irreverent and unpredictable sports, news and pop culture blog Deadspin on Thursday morning, hoping to get the eclectic blog’s take on the National’s win of the World Series were disappointed to see only a story about Jordanian soccer. (Not that there’s anything wrong with Jordanian soccer, mind you.)
Why was this? The site’s new venture capitalist owners had fired the blog’s editor in chief for refusing to obey an order to limit their coverage to just sports. This firing was followed rapidly by at least eight Deadspin journalists resigning, putting the future in doubt for the popular site.
The following guest blog post originally appeared on Shannon McRae’s Facebook page. It is reprinted here by persmisson.
It’s not that I always loved Splinter. Sometimes the political takes could be painfully annoying and restricted in perspective. But sometimes it was brilliant, so I checked it every morning, before breakfast. Now it’s gone, the way Gawker is gone, and for far less reason.
These past couple of days, I’ve been watching Deadspin’s highly public implosion. I am the opposite of somebody who cares about sports, except for the comforting ambient sounds of a football game at family gatherings.
But I also checked Deadspin every day: for the sharp political commentary you truly couldn’t get anywhere else, for the pop culture reviews, for the “how to be a 21st-century man” guidance, which was always witty, David Roth’s political analysis, which was always as incisive and crafted as a blade. And dammit, for Jolie Kerr’s cleaning tips, and Albert Burneko‘s excellent recipes, carefully conveyed in bro-speak, so guys could learn to cook. Deadspin was great because it taught other men how to be men in such gentle, remarkable, intelligent ways.
And now it’s gone. The vulture capitalists who acquired them to add to their media portfolio told them to “stick to sports,” and that the main value was in advertising and new traffic–not at all in excellent writing, strong journalism that regularly broke major stories, literally millions of readers, and a solid revenue stream. Most of the writing staff refused to cooperate with executive micromanaging of editorial content, issued blistering criticisms in a highly public fashion (twitter, Daily Beast, CNN, Washington Post, NY TImes, etc. Don’t piss off journalists). Yesterday, most of them quit their jobs.
Destroying the product and making off with the spoils is the new business model, for far too many media companies now. I saw this happen in the tech industry in the 90s (my own brush with deliberate wreckage and corporate-minded micromanaging of online media gave me some insights into this world I’d rather not have had).
I care because I care about public writing, intelligent content, and individual expression. I care because exactly the same thing is happening in academia–forcing us to regard ourselves as content providers, our knowledge as product, and students as consumers. I care because institutions that were never designed to be revenue-generating are now being run like factories–our knowledge and expertise devalued, and our labor regarded as expendable. Since tenured professors are expensive, we are being phased out, replaced by adjuncts paid less than minimum wage–academia as gig economy.
To deprive a society of the type of critical oversight provided by trained journalists, to deprive it of the type of critical thinking and analysis that a liberal arts education provides, in favor of revenue generation as the only model of value, is to destroy that society. Gawker is dead. Splinter and Deadspin were murdered. And now we are that much deeper in our own fatal stupidity.
Dr. Shannon McRae is a professor of English at State University of New York at Fredonia. She teaches English, Film Studies, and popular culture.