There is joy in my heart today

[Francisco 2.0 32416]

Some of you mouth breathers will have it, too:

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/business/media/deadspin-staffers-start-defector.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimesbusiness

 

https://defector.com

 

Quote

One of the biggest staff rebellions in online media took place last year, when all of the journalists working at the irreverent, sports-centric website Deadspin resigned in protest after clashing with their bosses.

Now Deadspin’s former writers and editors — 18 of the roughly 20 who quit last year — have reunited to start a digital media company, Defector Media, that they will own and operate themselve

 

Quote

Defector Media is scheduled to start a podcast next month and roll out its website in September, its founders said. Tom Ley, a former features editor at Deadspin, will be the editor in chief. The business side will be led by Jasper Wang, a former Bain & Company employee who said he had been an avid Deadspin reader since age 19.

Defector’s founders said the company had no outside investors, and each employee has taken a stake of roughly 5 percent in the venture. Unlike Deadspin, a free site that relies on ads, Defector will offer subscriptions at $8 a month, with an annual subscription available at a discount.

 

Quote

The 19 staff members will be paid as the money comes in, and they can vote out the editor in chief with a two-thirds majority. They will also own their own intellectual property, meaning they will get the money if Hollywood shows an interest in their work for Defector.

“If you’re going to take a moonshot, you may as well do it exactly the way you want to,” said Kelsey McKinney, a former Deadspin writer who has joined the new company.

 

 

Spoiler

The dispute at Deadspin became heated about a year ago, when journalists at the site published an investigative piece that was critical of Deadspin’s own parent company, G/O Media, as well as of Great Hill Partners, the private equity firm that had taken control of G/O Media in April 2019.

In October, Paul Maidment, then the editorial director of G/O Media, which also operates The Onion, Jezebel, The Root and other websites, sent a memo to the Deadspin staff, telling them to stick to publishing articles that had something to do with sports.

Staff members pushed back against what they saw as management’s crossing a line by getting involved in the editorial process. After they published articles on a pumpkin thief and how to dress for a wedding, the top editor, Barry Petchesky, was fired. Within a week, the rest of the site’s reporters and editors had quit in protest.

Since the exodus, Deadspin itself has carried on under G/O Media, moving to Chicago from New York and hiring Jim Rich, a former editor in chief of The Daily News, as its newsroom leader. (He is now G/O Media’s editorial director.)

While the people who left Deadspin plan to write on sports for the new site, they will be free to go off-topic when the mood strikes them.

After their departures last year, they created a Twitter feed, @UnDeadspin, to highlight articles by former Deadspin journalists published by other outlets. They also reprised the distinctive Deadspin voice in pop-up blogs around the time of the Super Bowl and again in April.

“A lot of us felt adrift,” Mr. Ley said. “If we felt that way, it’s likely there are pretty significant numbers of former readers who felt that way and would be willing to pay money to have that kind of publication come back.”

The former Deadspin staff members also received emails from fans of the site, which had started in 2005 under the publisher Gawker Media. One came from Mr. Wang, of Bain & Company. Before the pandemic, he met with former Deadspin people at the Gold Star Beer Counter in Brooklyn. Now he finds himself taking on the challenge of starting a moderately staffed digital outlet as its vice president of revenue and operations.

“The hardest part is still the hard part,” Mr. Wang said, “which is having writers with talent and followings, and having these writers willing to hold hands and jump together. Once they decided to do that, building the scaffolding of the business is easier than it’s ever been.”

He said he was optimistic because readers have become accustomed to paying for online content, noting the sports fans who subscribe to The Athletic. He added that vendors like Pico, Stripe and MailChimp have made it easier for media companies to outsource business functions. In addition, he said, the thinning of newspaper sports sections, the dissolution of ESPN the Magazine and layoffs at Sports Illustrated may have created a vacuum.

Defector staff members said they did not expect the kind of growth coveted by the venture capitalists who have increasingly dominated online journalism. Rather, they said, they hoped to be able to pay themselves competitive salaries while developing a sustainable media business that produces content they are interested in.

“It would be cool to show that this could be successful,” said Samer Kalaf, a former Deadspin managing editor who has joined Defector. “If we tried it and it doesn’t work, at least we can say we tried it.”

 

 

 

Edit:

 

 

 

Edited July 28, 2020 by Francisco 2.0

[high side 3 way 54]

[Mantis Toboggan, MD 1501]

$8 a month for woke sports?  Tens of people will take them up on that.

[BehoId, The Underminer! 11669]

those guys were awesome, but i can't see myself shelling out dollars for it.

[Incredulity 11682]

 

 

[aggie08 21524]

1 hour ago, Mantis Toboggan, MD said:

$8 a month for woke sports?  Tens of people will take them up on that.

Can I pay $8/month for sports sports? Is that an option? Because on Sunday I found myself getting teary eyed that some dude named Michael Thompson won his first PGA Tour event since 2013 or some shit. Things are bleak.

[Harrison Stafford 3335]

Free news/sports/info. on the internet is a basic human right.

[MillerEP 30494]

Congrats, I hope it works out.

[clapclapclap 9000]

First part of the article isn't clear on exactly why they quit (maybe it's buried in the linked wall of words.)  So is this new venture going to be humor/sports, or WAOC?

Edited July 28, 2020 by clapclapclap
For those in Rio Linda: KAOC in the south and west

[Blotto 23568]

I will periodically come across content online that is behind a paywall, and often times I would could consider paying "something" to read the article, but no fucking way am I going to sign up for 30 separate magazines, newspapers, blogs, etc....While the aggregated monthly expense is one issue, the other issue is managing the "subscriptions", all the usernames/passwords, the hassle of cancellation, etc... No way I want to juggle all that shit.

I'm hoping in the future, someone will create a "Spotify-like" experience for journalism. I pay one monthly subscription and read what I want to read. With Spotify I pay one subscription and Spotify handles paying the labels/artists. If journalism sites had a "read with _______" button to access articles etc, and that service paid out each site, I would be able to access the content I want and the site would get some sliver of my money. It reminds me of  the wild west days of MP3 sites like Napster and all the others. I used to pirate shit all the time because I wasn't going to pay $12 for an album to listen to one song. Fuck paying $8 a month if the only reason I land on that website is to read one article. It may be worth something, but not $8. 

[Rougarou 594]

49 minutes ago, Blotto said:

I will periodically come across content online that is behind a paywall, and often times I would could consider paying "something" to read the article, but no fucking way am I going to sign up for 30 separate magazines, newspapers, blogs, etc....While the aggregated monthly expense is one issue, the other issue is managing the "subscriptions", all the usernames/passwords, the hassle of cancellation, etc... No way I want to juggle all that shit.

I'm hoping in the future, someone will create a "Spotify-like" experience for journalism. I pay one monthly subscription and read what I want to read. With Spotify I pay one subscription and Spotify handles paying the labels/artists. If journalism sites had a "read with _______" button to access articles etc, and that service paid out each site, I would be able to access the content I want and the site would get some sliver of my money. It reminds me of  the wild west days of MP3 sites like Napster and all the others. I used to pirate shit all the time because I wasn't going to pay $12 for an album to listen to one song. Fuck paying $8 a month if the only reason I land on that website is to read one article. It may be worth something, but not $8. 

What you described, readily available on anyone's phone who isn't an employee of GOOG or an incel, is called Apple News +. It's $9.99/month.

Go forth and question these things no more.

[Blotto 23568]

26 minutes ago, Rougarou said:

What you described, readily available on anyone's phone who isn't an employee of GOOG or an incel, is called Apple News +. It's $9.99/month.

Go forth and question these things no more.

1.) heavy on traditional print magazine, virtually no newspaper or internet content. 

2.) Apple can suck a dick and there is less than zero chance I'm spending what they are asking for hardware. 

guess i'll wait for google or amazon to pick up the slack. Or more likely a  new company that figures out a microtransaction ecosystem for ventures like Defector Media

[alincoln 2381]

4 hours ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

those guys were awesome 10 years ago, but i can't see myself shelling out dollars for it.

 

[atomheartbevo 89777]

  For $10 a month with Apple News+, I get all but one of the magazines I would normally read, plus get a shit-ton of other content, and it's curated.  And there's way too much for me to read:

• I get around 7-8 tech magazines that I like to look through
• 4-5 Video game magazines I occasionally read (always read Retro Gaming)
• Handful of Space-related magazines I read
• Several history magazines I read
• 7-8 outdoors/fishing/biking/etc. magazines I read
• A couple of photography magazines
• Shit-ton of stuff my wife reads
• Shit-ton of daily/newspaper/etc. type stuff that I don't have time to read
• Shit-ton of stuff my kids will look at.
• I can download all of the magazines, including a lot of back issues.  Great for trips/long drives.

And I probably don't even look at 10% of what's available.

[atomheartbevo 89777]

13 minutes ago, Blotto said:

1.) heavy on traditional print magazine, virtually no newspaper or internet content. 

Depends on what you set your filters for.  While I read a ton of magazines through the app, that's more of a "read while eating/killing time" kind  of thing.  What I have pushed to my phone/iPad is almost all internet/newspaper/daily content.   Hell, there's a bunch of stuff I read that is from individuals/groups that have no newspaper or magazine presence at all.

Google News used to scratch my itch, and I still have an RSS reader and subscribe to a bunch of feeds, but my tastes changed.

There's probably half-a-dozen magazines I read that, individually, would cost around $8-10 a month apiece.

Just needs new Patrick McManus stuff in Field and Stream, but he's dead, so that's not happening.

Edited July 28, 2020 by atomheartbevo

[Blotto 23568]

25 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

  For $10 a month with Apple News+, I get all but one of the magazines I would normally read, plus get a shit-ton of other content, and it's curated.  And there's way too much for me to read:

• I get around 7-8 tech magazines that I like to look through
• 4-5 Video game magazines I occasionally read (always read Retro Gaming)
• Handful of Space-related magazines I read
• Several history magazines I read
• 7-8 outdoors/fishing/biking/etc. magazines I read
• A couple of photography magazines
• Shit-ton of stuff my wife reads
• Shit-ton of daily/newspaper/etc. type stuff that I don't have time to read
• Shit-ton of stuff my kids will look at.
• I can download all of the magazines, including a lot of back issues.  Great for trips/long drives.

And I probably don't even look at 10% of what's available.

The list I found must have been limited to just the magazine portion of the content. Still Apple News is only available within the Apple ecosystem, so its a nonstarter for me. I did look at Amazon newstand (or something like that) a while ago, and it didn't seem like a product that was worth the money. I'm sure someone will figure it out at some point.

The biggest nuisance for me is local newspapers that throw up a paywall. Fuck no I don't want to subscribe to the Bumblefuck Gazette. I'm just checking to see if you have any good photos of some 23 year old teacher gash sleeping with her students. 

[HornOnTheBayou 8945]

9 minutes ago, Blotto said:

The list I found must have been limited to just the magazine portion of the content. Still Apple News is only available within the Apple ecosystem, so its a nonstarter for me. I did look at Amazon newstand (or something like that) a while ago, and it didn't seem like a product that was worth the money. I'm sure someone will figure it out at some point.

The biggest nuisance for me is local newspapers that throw up a paywall. Fuck no I don't want to subscribe to the Bumblefuck Gazette. I'm just checking to see if you have any good photos of some 23 year old teacher gash sleeping with her students. 

I don't know if you are aware, but you can find a lot of pictures and videos on this topic for free on the internet. Although you need to be careful, because some of the videos claim to show teachers who are horny for their students, but when you dig deeper, you find out that the woman in the video is not even a certified teacher. Very frustrating when you realize a lot of those videos are fake.

[RDCanecutter 26465]

I make my own news.

[MillerEP 30494]

It made it into my daily roll up aggregate email this morning, so some people are noticing:

['stache 21838]

I prefer meatspin

[Wanker Bob 379]

On 7/28/2020 at 1:48 PM, Dr. Beeper said:

 

I pay $200 for cable and $40 for internet. Included in my cable bill are premium channels like HBO. Until the internet provides content like The Wire, there is no way I’m paying any subscription for anything. 

You want the internet to provide content that was available almost 20 years ago before you'll pay for it?

If you're paying $200 for cable and it doesn't even include internet you're a stone cold sucker my friend. 

[Dbeasy 15084]

You want the internet to provide content that was available almost 20 years ago before you'll pay for it?
If you're paying $200 for cable and it doesn't even include internet you're a stone cold sucker my friend. 

He has 22 set top boxes.