Sports blogging site Deadspin was sold to a European publisher and the entire staff was reportedly fired with barely any notice Monday — just months after the publication was forced to apologize for accusing a young Kansas City Chiefs fan of wearing “blackface.”
Jim Spanfeller, the CEO of parent G/O Media, broke the news of the sale and the layoffs in a memo to staff as the media company sold off another site in its crumbling empire.
“Recently we were approached by the European firm Lineup Publishing expressing interest in purchasing Deadspin to add to their growing media holdings,” Spanfeller said. “Lineup Publishing is a newly formed digital media company described in their words as ‘dedicated to creating, acquiring and managing high quality media brands across a variety of sectors.’”
Lineup Publishing 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,” the CEO added. “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. This unfortunately means that we will be parting ways with those impacted staff members.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
A rep for Deadspin said 11 staffers were impacted.
In the memo, Spanfeller emphasized that he wasn’t shopping the sports site when the offer came in.
The Daily Mail reported that Deadspin’s writers and editors were given just 30 minutes notice of losing their jobs before being locked out of their company laptops, citing a private post on X from senior editor Julie DiCaro.
The sports site’s staffers were based in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Deadspin, which had been owned by G/O since 2019, made headlines last month when it was slapped with a lawsuit by the family of the 9-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan accused by the site of wearing “blackface” in a story it penned last November.
Holden Armenta’s parents, Shannon and Raul, alleged that Deadspin intentionally published a defamatory article, exposing “the family to a barrage of hate, including death threats.”
Deadspin tweaked the article amid a firestorm of criticism and added an editor’s note, saying the publication “regret[s] any suggestion that we were attacking” Armenta.
The family filed the defamation lawsuit for unspecified damages. It is still winding through the courts.
Despite Spanfeller’s suggestion to Axios in January that G/O Media, owner of Gizmodo, AV Club and The Onion, wasn’t selling, a recent report from AdWeek suggested that certain titles were on the block.
“We’re not strapped for cash,” Spanfeller told Axios at the time. But he added that the “use by” date for private equity companies tends to be around six to 10 years. “So we’re coming up on that,” he said.
G/O shut down female-focused website Jezebel in November, laying off the site’s staff. Later that month, Paste Magazine bought Jezebel.com from G/O.
The company has been offloading sites and cutting staff gradually over the past year as it streamlines its focus to become more efficient.
G/O also sold its lifestyle website Lifehacker to Ziff Davis last March and laid off 13 staffers last June.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
