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cactusflinthead

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cactusflinthead

cactusflinthead 27594

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SHUT UP AND SPORT

G/O Media Tells Deadspin Staff in Leaked Memo: Stick to Sports

Deadspin’s new bosses have issued an order to the website: Do not cover anything other than sports.

In a Monday memo to staff, G/O Media editorial director Paul Maidment told the employees of the site—which primarily covers sports, but also frequently writes about media, politics, and culture—to abstain from stories that do not have an explicit link to sports.

“To create as much great sports journalism as we can requires a 100% focus of our resources on sports. And it will be the sole focus,” Maidment said. “Deadspin will write only about sports and that which is relevant to sports in some way.”

The top editorial leader at G/O—the new company overseeing Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jezebel, Lifehacker, and a number of former Gawker Media sites—told employees that stories with tie-ins to sports were permitted to run on the site but that they should leave non-sports stories to the company’s other websites. 

 

How about no?

 

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Judge Roybeanbag

Judge Roybeanbag 11810

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This is mostly true and is concerning to me.

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A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart. They know what they know, and they don’t need to know anything else.

 

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hayden_horn

hayden_horn 11360

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so i was trying to decide where to put this myself. i think it is actually best here.

but the same thing happened at klbj, for both the am and the fm. non-conservative politics has to be avoided. they shitcanned jeff ward to have a half-rate sports talk show with ed clements and jason dick, and then added a 6pm hour of conservative commentary. dale dudley on the fm has been clearly told that they must avoid politics, and his wiggle room is that he can "talk about people, not politics."

i find it strange that there are highly successful shows/websites that are having essentially censorship from their owners about their previously successful content. people don't go to deadspin just for sports. just as people don't go to the ringer for just sports takes. sports, pop culture, and yes, politics are all intertwined, and i've been sort of enjoying how the writers at deadspin are intentionally toeing the line in a sort of revolt. they have been tagging their articles with "stick to sports" with their thumb clearly aside their nose and middle finger proudly in the air.

it's a fucking successful website but the rich white man club can't have any negative talk about trump. and i think that's really what it comes down to.

it's sad to see what's happening at deadspin over the past couple of years. say what you want about them, but in between some of the fluffy click baity shit, you have pieces like this brilliance:

https://deadspin.com/its-absolutely-fine-that-donald-trump-got-booed-at-the-1839425624

my favorite part (thought it's worth the time to read more fully):

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The United States is not the one of these two countries that has a literal queen sitting in a palace, and yet it somehow has by far the more norm-addled and pompous political culture and easily the world’s smarmiest and least useful political media.

it's true.

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hayden_horn

hayden_horn 11360

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and it's not just online media or radio this is affecting:

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/sinclair-broadcast-group-national-expansion-2020-sports-networks.html

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Sinclair Broadcasting Group is the largest owner of local television news stations in the United States. It currently airs original programming on 193 channels throughout the country, enough to reach 39 percent of all American homes.

The company is also owned by a longtime Republican donor, and proudly operates as a platform for conservative propaganda. Sinclair formally promised to provide favorable coverage to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign (in exchange for access to the GOP nominee). Since the mogul’s election, the media giant has ordered all of its affiliates to air commentary that advances White House talking points, and coerced their own anchors into personally reporting that the mainstream news media is biased against the president.

Given the warm relations between Sinclair and the Trump administration, many observers expected the FCC to rubber-stamp the broadcaster’s proposed purchase of Tribune media last year — a merger that would have enabled Sinclair to broadcast local news to 72 percent of American households. But then Sinclair tried to subvert the lenient ownership rules that the administration had set for it, and, in a rare outburst scrupulous governance, FCC chair Ajit Pai flagged the issue, and the deal ended up falling through.

But Sinclair never gave up on its dreams of expansion. Earlier this year, it launched an ad-free streaming channel called STIRR that aims to deliver local TV news and other entertainment to cord-cutters coast to coast. The broadcaster proceeded to stock up on the best damaged-goods conservatives cable news had to offer — hiring former Fox News anchors Eric Bolling and James Rosen (both of whom left Fox amid allegations of sexual harassment), along with Sebastian Gorka and former CBS News anchor Lara Logan. These heavyweights will ostensibly produce conservative agit-prop for syndication on Sinclair’s local news channels and STIRR. Meanwhile, Sinclair also bought itself a piece of YES, the New York Yankees broadcast network, and is currently the top bidder for a package of regional sports networks that the Walt Disney Company is auctioning off.

It is unclear whether Sinclair will force regional baseball announcers to deliver “terrorism alerts”  between batters. But even if the broadcaster leaves its sports stations well enough alone, those stations should still provide Sinclair with a healthy source of revenue for funding its propaganda operations; Wall Street analysts are bullish on SBG’s stock.

And that’s probably bad news for Democrats. It is hard to overstate how much the conservative movement has benefited from its associated billionaires’ investments in mass media. A 2017 study from researchers at Emory and Stanford estimated that Fox News increased the Republican Party’s share of the two-party vote in 2004 and 2008 by 3.59 and 6.34 percentage points respectively. Just this month, a study using the same methodology found that counties where Fox News has a low channel number (and thus, slightly higher viewership) tend to have more conservative fiscal policies as a result.

it's a real problem, i think. 

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wildcat09

wildcat09 29237

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39 minutes ago, Bottlecap said:

David Roth and Drew Magary are national treasures, especially when they go in raw on el trumpo. Fuck BIG BILLIONAIRE. 

When Trump's administration ends Roth should compile all of his articles about Trump into a book. It'd be the definitive book on the Trump era and nothing else would even come close. Also he could remember some guys in it too.

Edited by wildcat09
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NameAlreadyInUse

NameAlreadyInUse 5106

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I accidentally caught one of those Sinclair editorials on the tail end of the local news.   I wrote a strongly worded letter that was never answered and quit watching that channel.  I would've been ok with them just giving a different opinion, but when they make up bullshit and act like they are stating a fact, I just can't get on board with that.  So yeah.  This is my concern, dude.

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cactusflinthead

cactusflinthead 27594

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It irritates the hell out of me when the suits decide to shut down a story. I'm ornery that way. 

I have some hope that the people that will be fired for today will find gigs in other places. 

The idea that sports and politics have no intersection is ludicrous. Tell that to the ghosts of the Negro League. There is no reason why to quash the natural extension of politics in to sports except that it is embarrassing to those in power. 

Dumbass, that's exactly why they got in to journalism. To embarrass and goad those in power. If they didn't make such a damned easy target...well, never mind. The vulgar talking yam can't help it. 

I have no doubt that this stems from the boos and the acceptance of them.

 

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89416

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10 hours ago, cactusflinthead said:

I have some hope that the people that will be fired for today will find gigs in other places. 

Yeah, at the very least, should they have the savings, they could band together and start up their own site, and will have plenty of traffic from the get-go.  This happened to a friend of mine who worked for one of the big blogs that AOL had bought and then later shut down - he and his co-workers had a replacement site up and running even before the previous one had shut down.

These folks know their advertisers, are very well networked, and so they could drop $100 (or less), start up their own site, contact the advertisers, and be off and running.

 

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atomheartbevo

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10 hours ago, cactusflinthead said:

Dumbass, that's exactly why they got in to journalism. To embarrass and goad those in power. If they didn't make such a damned easy target...well, never mind. The vulgar talking yam can't help it. 

I have no doubt that this stems from the boos and the acceptance of them.

While pissing off the suits above certainly didn't help their cause, this was always going to be how things went down, regardless of who they mocked (or didn't).  As somebody who follows DS and a few of the other Gawker/Gizmodo sites, things have been really going downhill over the past several months, and it wasn't necessarily politics.

It was pretty clear a while back that whoever bought the company planned to cut costs and use all of the sites to promote the popular content of the other sites, which can help drive up advertising revenue, but it can also drive down staffing needs - You have X amount of writes for a site, but if all of the sudden 25% (or more) of that site was being replaced by stories from other sites, you can cut a writer or two or three.

That was the appeal of that company - while they may be different domains, they were all hosted as one large site, and if you got a popular story going on one site, it only took a few clicks to promote it across all of the other sites, and voila, you almost instantaneously drive up the number of views.

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cactusflinthead

cactusflinthead 27594

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17 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Yeah, at the very least, should they have the savings, they could band together and start up their own site, and will have plenty of traffic from the get-go.  This happened to a friend of mine who worked for one of the big blogs that AOL had bought and then later shut down - he and his co-workers had a replacement site up and running even before the previous one had shut down.

These folks know their advertisers, are very well networked, and so they could drop $100 (or less), start up their own site, contact the advertisers, and be off and running.

 

This is exactly what I hope for. 

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wildcat09

wildcat09 29237

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20 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

While pissing off the suits above certainly didn't help their cause, this was always going to be how things went down, regardless of who they mocked (or didn't).  As somebody who follows DS and a few of the other Gawker/Gizmodo sites, things have been really going downhill over the past several months, and it wasn't necessarily politics.

It was pretty clear a while back that whoever bought the company planned to cut costs and use all of the sites to promote the popular content of the other sites, which can help drive up advertising revenue, but it can also drive down staffing needs - You have X amount of writes for a site, but if all of the sudden 25% (or more) of that site was being replaced by stories from other sites, you can cut a writer or two or three.

That was the appeal of that company - while they may be different domains, they were all hosted as one large site, and if you got a popular story going on one site, it only took a few clicks to promote it across all of the other sites, and voila, you almost instantaneously drive up the number of views.

Yeah, all the Gawker network sites were doomed the moment some vulture capitalists bought them up and that has nothing to do with partisan politics.  Most private equity acquisitions are just bust out scams.

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Pato del Muerto

Pato del Muerto 52342

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I’m dipping my toes into waters I should stay away from, but isn’t this top down content dictation an issue that Republicans have bitched about for decades with the likes of the major broadcasters?

and didn’t liberals try to build their own talk radio stations in response to the heavily conservative talk radio?

is this somehow new ground with deadspin or Sinclair?

 

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Longhorn_Fan68

Longhorn_Fan68 33842

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15 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

I’m dipping my toes into waters I should stay away from, but isn’t this top down content dictation an issue that Republicans have bitched about for decades with the likes of the major broadcasters?

and didn’t liberals try to build their own talk radio stations in response to the heavily conservative talk radio?

is this somehow new ground with deadspin or Sinclair?

 

you see, the thing is, they're all full of shit.

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atomheartbevo

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2 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

I’m dipping my toes into waters I should stay away from, but isn’t this top down content dictation an issue that Republicans have bitched about for decades with the likes of the major broadcasters?

and didn’t liberals try to build their own talk radio stations in response to the heavily conservative talk radio?

is this somehow new ground with deadspin or Sinclair?

Sinclair dialed it up to an 11.  Such that it was immediately obvious that it was a political ploy meant to try and sway its viewers.  There is no hiding that at all - they are Fox News on the local level.  They are making money, sure, but they are also pushing a scripted viewpoint that was written up high, and they want all stations to conform to that.

The Deadspin situation is much more...nuanced.  There are some politics at the higher levels, sure, but if you look at what they are doing - Gizmodo Media or whatever they are calling themselves these days, they are the sum of their parts, and they are explicitly about targeting affluent millennials - it says it right on the front page of their parent site.  

And keep in mind that they are in the situation they are, because of politics - Gawker, which no longer exists, was taken down by a Trump buddy, and politics played a huge part of that, even if a porn tape of Hulk Hogan banging his friend's wife was the way in which Gawker was taken down.  All of the political stories that would have been posted on Gawker, those writers/stories have taken refugee elsewhere on the related sites (Root, Deadspin, etc.).

They exist to make money, and one of the ways to do that is to keep viewers around, and one of the biggest ways for an interconnected media company to do that is to regurgitate content from one brand to all of the other brands.  AOL should have pulled this off years ago with all of their blogging sites like Joystiq, WOW, etc.

Let's say you are on Gizmodo, reading about this or that gadget, and the site throws up a story or two about high-tech cars on Jalopnik.  You might have spent 20 minutes on Gizmodo, but now you pop over to Jalopnik and spend another 10-15 minutes.  And in the course of that, Jalopnik throws up a story from Lifehacker and you pop over there for 5 minutes.  You went from 20 minutes on a single brand to 35-40 minutes on related brands.  That's a win for advertising and affiliate sales - and those sites also throw up stories from their Inventory (sales/affiliate site) which generates actual cash for them as well.

The Deadspin political/sports stories certainly have an audience on Deadspin, but they are a helluva lot harder to push on all of the other related media sites.  You can push a Deadspin article about some high-tech stuff relating to the World Series on Gizmodo, or a Deadspin motorsports story on Jalopnik, but when you go in deep on Trump getting booed and why he should get booed, that article gets really hard to sell on other sites to a lot of people who don't give a shit about sports and politics.  Their target audience is 18-44 year olds, with an emphasis on millennials, and far too many in that group give no shits about politics.

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atomheartbevo

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1 hour ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

I imagine Roth won't be far behind him, or is he already gone?

I believe Roth was among the 7 or so who quit yesterday.

They've closed comments down on Deadspin, and are apparently closing them down on some of the other sites.    And they are bringing in some foreign writers or something to toss in a few articles on Deadspin (there are international versions of these sites).

Also, some of the other sites are running Trump articles as a "fuck you" to upper management.

So enjoy those sites while you can, there will probably be some more firings/resignations/closing down of comments/etc.

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hayden_horn

hayden_horn 11360

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this whole thing actually reminds me of a couple of things in our meandering journey in austin sports. 

how hornfans shat itself, spawning the shag. 

this was around the same time that 1300 the zone was going through some similar tumultuous change, as new ownership could not grasp their audience and their staff, and ended out fucking their own face, spawning the horn.

then @blacklab does a reddit AMA, and drops a "tree fiddy" as a joke and that becomes an actual part of a real case in court, resulting in a sham judgment handing shag over to kevin fucking morgan, and the result is the surl. kevin fell victim to the idea that the users of a website go there because of a URL the same way ownership of the zone or klbj think that the loyalty to a radio station is the frequency (i still haven't tuned back into 590 AM after they shitcanned ward, and probably won't anytime soon).

looks like the same thing happened to deadspin and all G|O properties. it's amazing to me how rich people just expect people to fall into line.

it doesn't always work like that. some attempt to understand your audience, your staff, and what the business is trying to fucking accomplish goes a long way.

anyways. deadspin is dead. way to fuck the golden goose you idiots.

Edited by hayden_horn
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wildcat09

wildcat09 29237

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1 hour ago, hayden_horn said:

this whole thing actually reminds me of a couple of things in our meandering journey in austin sports. 

how hornfans shat itself, spawning the shag. 

this was around the same time that 1300 the zone was going through some similar tumultuous change, as new ownership could not grasp their audience and their staff, and ended out fucking their own face, spawning the horn.

then @blacklab does a reddit AMA, and drops a "tree fiddy" as a joke and that becomes an actual part of a real case in court, resulting in a sham judgment handing shag over to kevin fucking morgan, and the result is the surl. kevin fell victim to the idea that the users of a website go there because of a URL the same way ownership of the zone or klbj think that the loyalty to a radio station is the frequency (i still haven't tuned back into 590 AM after they shitcanned ward, and probably won't anytime soon).

looks like the same thing happened to deadspin and all G|O properties. it's amazing to me how rich people just expect people to fall into line.

it doesn't always work like that. some attempt to understand your audience, your staff, and what the business is trying to fucking accomplish goes a long way.

anyways. deadspin is dead. way to fuck the golden goose you idiots.

Yeah the whole thing immediately reminded me of this group of assholes.  It's annoying to see Deadspin die but I'm glad it's dying as spectacularly as it is over something so fucking stupid.  I can't imagine a way to make the ownership group look dumber than they do now. Meanwhile, the writers will catch on at other places, many of which their readership already read at least occasionally, though hopefully a core group can start something new together. Not that the vultures that fucked it up would actually learn a lesson from it, but it's the closest thing to a giant middle finger that anyone can really accomplish against their types in our shitty society.  

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HornOnTheBayou

HornOnTheBayou 8881

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10 hours ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

The new Deadcast is up -- Magary and Roth played it pretty close to the vest on there, but didn't pull any punches either. I guess you could tell Magary was gone from some of the things he said...

They need to end back up together and continue their podcast. I need my Trump Question of the Week.

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alincoln

alincoln 2364

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Deadspin was an interesting place that was always becoming less interesting while somehow remaining interesting. It consistently maintained a roster consisting some of the most talented writers on the internet coupled with something else.  In Leitch's era, that other consisted of a bunch of guys who capably wrote about sports in an indistinguishable Deadspin snark voice.  In Daulerio's era, that something else consisted of shit-posting fuck ups who made me laugh more often than not.  Most recently, the something else consisted of a bunch of navel-gazing, self-important and humorless cunts who will struggle to find permanent positions in an industry already overflowing with themselves.  

 

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Bottlecap

Bottlecap 1522

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11 minutes ago, hayden_horn said:

it was. 

and fuck dave portnoy (of barstool sports) dancing on the grave. competition is good you stupid fuckbag.

that little bitchboy is probably relieved that they won't get to dress him down this week like they did every week. Fuck barstool sports. What a collection of incel losers.

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Prepuce of Doom

Prepuce of Doom 20985

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I usually eat lunch at my desk, and like to have a few engaging, long-ish articles to read while eating. I typically click open a bunch of tabs for interesting articles, and then don't have to do much beyond poke my down arrow or click to the next tab (both my mouse and my down arrow covered with a napkin, because gross keyboards are gross...) 

My usual routine would be to run through all of Deadspin, Jalopnik, and other sister blogs and open tabs for whatever interests me before digging in, but now it looks like that routine is no longer reliable. 

Any suggestions for other similar sites with long-ish entertaining writing across multiple subject areas, updated on a daily basis? 

Edited by Prepuce of Doom
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hayden_horn

hayden_horn 11360

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4 minutes ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

I usually eat lunch at my desk, and like to have a few engaging, long-ish articles to read while eating. I typically click open a bunch of tabs for interesting articles, and then don't have to do much beyond poke my down arrow or click to the next tab (both my mouse and my down arrow covered with a napkin, because gross keyboards are gross...) 

My usual routine would be to run through all of Deadspin, Jalopnik, and other sister blogs and open tabs for whatever interests me before digging in, but now it looks like that routine is no longer reliable. 

Any suggestions for other similar sites with long-ish entertaining writing across multiple subject areas, updated on a daily basis? 

The ringer is all i can think of

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