G/Oing bad: Staff turmoil at media firm

G/O Media, the digital-media outfit that saw the entire editorial staff of Deadspin walk out in 2019, continues to grapple with staffing issues, Media Ink has learned.

As this columnist reported on Friday, G/O’s editorial director, Jim Rich, abruptly resigned in a move that caught the company’s CEO, James Spanfeller, off guard.

Now sources say Rich’s exit was just the tip of the iceberg at the media company as it suffers from editorial churn and fights an explosive discrimination and retaliation lawsuit by a former top executive.

Two G/O sites — The A.V. Club and the company’s flagship site,

Gizmodo — have both been without an editor-in-chief for more than a month, sources said. The high-ranking vacancies come as insiders estimate that G/O needs to fill at least 15 open editorial jobs out of about 150.

Meanwhile, G/O continues to battle a Manhattan federal-court

lawsuit filed late last year by laidoff company executive Katherine Pontius Ebel, who claims CEO Spanfeller “took control of creative, successful diverse brands like The Onion and transformed them

into a business run exclusively by a clique of his white male friends and colleagues.”

G/O counters that it is “outperforming our 2021 goals in terms of profitability and reader engagement,” and that it is hiring across all departments, including editorial. It also denies Pontius Ebel’s claims, which it is fighting in court. To this, Pontius Ebel says she had spent

eight years at the satirical Web site The Onion when Univision sold it along with a dozen other sites to G/O Media’s financial backers, private equity company Great Hill Partners, in April 2019.

After the sale to Great Hill,

Spanfeller offered Pontius Ebel a promotion from The Onion to chief talent officer of the entire company, the suit claims. But according to the lawsuit, the promotion was withdrawn after Pontius Ebel objected to Spanfeller’s move to let go of EVP and Gizmodo Media editorial director Susie Banikarim, one of the few female executives and the only woman of color at the company.

Banikarim was laid off as part of larger cuts at Gizmodo shortly after the acquisition and joined Vice Media as editorial director by the end of 2019.

Spanfeller then withdrew the chief-talent-officer job, leaving Pontius Ebel with a diminished roll at The Onion, the lawsuit said. A few months later she was fired.

“Sadly, former chief of staff and chief revenue officer of The Onion. . . could not join Spanfeller’s exclusive boys club leadership team because she is a woman and stood up against the discrimination that was beginning to pervade the organization she loved,” the suit claims.

Pontius Ebel is suing for lost wages, damages and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

G/O lobbed a countersuit at Pontius Ebel, claiming she breached her fiduciary duties and her employment agreement. A judge has tossed the company’s counterclaims, but the company said it plans to file an amended complaint against her this week.

“G/O is confident that its claims against Pontius will be substantiated and that her claims against the company will be dismissed,” the company said in a statement.

“G/O Media is extremely proud of its ongoing commitment to grow and foster diversity, equity and inclusion which is heavily supported by the company’s leadership,” G/O said, claiming “more than half of the company’s management positions are held by diverse incumbents, including women.”

Rich, a two-time editor in chief of the Daily News, joined G/O first as the editor-in-chief of Deadspin in November 2019 following a mass exodus of the site’s editorial staff due to top brass trying to keep writers from covering topics beyond the sports.

He did a good-enough job to get promoted to editorial director of the company’s remaining 11 sites.

A spokesman for the company attributed the split with Rich to a “clash of management style.”

Sources say it culminated in a shouting match between Rich and Spanfeller on a Friday afternoon. Rich resigned on the spot. Rich said, “I had ongoing disagreements with upper management and it made it impossible for me to do my job.”

He declined further comment.

One insider said Spanfeller “is an incredible spendthrift about everything . . . If you have someone nickel-and-diming critical headcount, [it is] impossible to get anything done.”

Another insider said Spanfeller is a “micromanager” who constantly bigfoots his top managers and executives in editorial and other areas of the company — even going so far as to question the cost of napkins and silverware at company-sponsored events.