IT’S SUDDEN DEATH
Shocker ax hits whole staff in Deadspin sell-off
Sports blogging site Deadspin was sold to a European startup and the entire staff was reportedly fired with barely any notice Monday — just months after the publication was forced to apologize for wrongly accusing a young Kansas City Chiefs fan of wearing “blackface.”
Jim Spanfeller, the CEO of parent G/O Media, broke the news of the layoffs and Deadspin’s sale to Lineup Publishing in a memo to shocked staff — the latest piece of the company’s crumbling empire to be dumped amid a wave of job cuts roiling the entire industry.
Lineup will “not carry over any of the site’s existing staff and instead build a new team more in line with their editorial vision for the brand,” Spanfeller wrote.
“While the new owners plan to be reverential to Deadpin’s unique voice, they plan to take a different content approach regarding the site’s overall sports coverage.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
A rep for Deadspin said 11 staffers — based in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago — were canned.
Black eye for site
Among them was senior writer Carron Phillips, who penned an incendiary column last November that accused 9-year-old Chiefs fan Holden Armenta of racism against Native Americans and black people for wearing “blackface” and headdress to a football game.
The site ran a photo of Holden showing just the right side of his face, which was painted brown, under a headline that blared, “The NFL needs to speak out against the
Kansas City Chiefs fan in Black face, Native Headdress.”
However, a photo of his full face showed it was painted both brown and red.
Phillips failed to mention that Holden is of Native American descent and he was wearing war paint, with one color covering each side of his face.
Holden’s grandfather, Raul Armenta, sits on the board of the Chumash Tribe in Santa Ynez, Calif., according to the Post Millennial.
Deadspin quietly tweaked the article amid a firestorm of criticism, as well as legal threats from Holden’s parents, and added an editor’s note, saying the publication “regret[s] any suggestion that we were attacking” Holden.
Last month, the family filed a defamation lawsuit seeking unspecified damages.
“Journalism — and the country as a whole — is better today now that Carron Phillips no longer has a platform to target innocent kids with his agenda-driven writing,” Libby Locke, the lawyer representing the family, told The Post on Monday.
Spanfeller avoided the controversy in letting staffers know he wasn’t shopping the sports site before getting the offer from Lineup.
Deadspin’s writers and editors were given just 30 minutes’ notice that they would be losing their jobs before being locked out of their company laptops, said a private post on X from senior editor Julie DiCaro, according to the Daily Mail.
G/O — which owns Gizmodo, AV Club and The Onion — has been offloading sites and cutting staff over the past year in a bid to become more efficient. In November, it shut down female-focused website Jezebel, laying off the site’s staff. Later that month, Paste Magazine bought Jezebel.com from G/O.
The company also sold its lifestyle website Lifehacker to Ziff Davis last March and laid off its staff.