[HN Gopher] Deadspin changed sports journalism
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Deadspin changed sports journalism
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 32 points
Date : 2022-07-22 10:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (globalsportmatters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (globalsportmatters.com)
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| If I struggle to remember what sports journalism was like before
| Deadspin, I can just look at ESPN or Sports Illustrated, and it
| all comes nauseatingly back to me.
|
| In print, the WSJ has some surprisingly good sports coverage,
| although not very much of it. And then they have Jason Gay, who
| seems to only glom onto meta-sports issues and niche sports like
| bike racing. But their other writers write about the actual
| games.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Bike racing is niche in the US, but for example in France it is
| huge, viewership rivals soccer
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I think the cycle repeats, as Jomboy Media seems to be the
| current "different" sports journalism outlet.
|
| Just through their breakdown videos, you see how much more
| entertaining sports can be (even some harder to understand
| sports) without the pomp and circumstance of the "official"
| (boring) commentators and league-affiliated highlight reels.
|
| I don't follow sports enough to care about their other ventures,
| but it seems having an outsider's view can lead to more honesty
| in reporting, and more interesting content.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| Even though it was kind of a harbinger for a lot of the garbage
| in contemporary sports media, I miss Deadspin.
| exogeny wrote:
| Great Hill, and specifically, Paul Maidment ruined Deadspin
| forever. His name should not be forgotten.
|
| That scumbag hypocrite Peter Thiel, for as loathsome and vampiric
| as he is, is only half guilty.
| astrange wrote:
| Killing Gawker was Thiel's only good act. They started out that
| trial by saying they'd publish a sex tape of a four-year-old in
| their deposition.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I must agree here. This article suggests that injecting some
| snark into sports journalism was somehow revolutionary. It
| isn't. It's easy to be snarky and negative. It's harder to be
| generous, balanced and thoughtful. Gawker and Deadspin were
| all about snark and, in retrospect, no one really misses
| them.
| spamuel wrote:
| Agree. I think the praise here is coming from the fringe
| "very online" demographic that are wrecking the media and
| entertainment environment.
|
| Few people read Deadspin. Few people read Defector. Few
| people watch SportCenter anymore because they try to
| emulate Deadspin. Professional sports broadly have lost
| significant viewership because they listened to the media
| noise around them.
|
| It seems like these things are only successes if your goal
| of success is reclaiming sport as a pass-time of the idle-
| handed elite. Because commercially this turn has been a
| profound failure.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I love that this article treats the current zombie Deadspin site
| as dead, which it very much is.
|
| As explained, Deadspin got killed effectively by the Hulk Hogan
| sex tape civil trial, a chilling and horrible verdict, but I have
| seen some reprehensible behavior by Deadspin and gawker style
| sites.
|
| As a good example, Markelle Fultz was a first overall pick but
| suffered what appears to be some sort of pinched nerve issue that
| greatly affected his ability to shoot. He finally is an effective
| NBA player for the Orlando Magic, but Deadspin was brutal and
| unrelenting in mocking his difficulties rehabbing and regaining
| form.
|
| This is not some attention-starved social media blusterer, it was
| just a garden variety lottery pick trying to make his way in the
| pro leagues.
|
| Basically, his "sin" was that video surfaced of him awkwardly
| trying to shoot free throws, and then the great bully brigade of
| the internet got going.
|
| One of the desperations of the gawker sites was that once a term
| or topic soared in "clickability", they would hammer that term
| over and over.
|
| Some people like Trump and Musk love this, any publicity is good
| publicity. But Fultz was always quiet.
|
| It also gets a bit hairy with players like Ben Simmons, who get
| publicly mocked and derided by armies of online sociopath/fans.
| Sure he's paid millions to "take it" to some degree, but there
| are clearly lines and gawker style sites push and cross them in
| desperation to gain relevancy (in an era when the relevancy of
| the old stalwarts like Sports Illustrated and local newspapers
| have evaporated).
|
| A couple of those discomfort points were counterbalanced by just
| heaploads of great funny stories. Deadspin was the only site I
| checked multiple times a day, alas defector hasn't risen to that
| yet.
| katamarimambo wrote:
| What Deadspin really hated was The Process, Fultz was just a
| huge symbol of that thing. I strongly agreed with then but
| thought the guy had no fault for being picked no.1 and thus was
| unfairly targeted. But seeing the whole stuff going bad gave me
| great joy.
| joegahona wrote:
| > Deadspin was the only site I checked multiple times a day,
| alas defector hasn't risen to that yet.
|
| Why do you think that is? Does Defector have a smaller staff
| than Deadspin did at its peak?
|
| Prime Deadspin was hit or miss for me. I didn't really care for
| the social-justice and "culture" content, with an increasing
| number of non-sports articles that felt like a college
| newspaper. When the PE came in and had the stick-to-sports
| decree, in theory I agreed, but obviously they executed that
| poorly, which accelerated all the departures.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Ironic (in the business sense) because the post-mass-quit
| Zombie Deadspin is so over the top with the identity politics
| takes on sports that it is eye rolling at times, almost an
| experiment in absurdism. And that happened ... right-o ... as
| soon as Defector launched, it was such a transparent revenge
| move by the private equity ghouls/goons.
|
| I welcome left-wing and anti-establishment takes on sports.
| Mainstream sports are hyper conservative (flags! anthem!
| flags! jet flyovers! flags! honor the military! flags! honor
| more military! uniforms! borderline eugenics!) with THE MOST
| RIDICULOUS corporate welfare with publicly financed stadiums,
| publicly financed training areas, massive tax breaks and
| favorable tax law, and a fawning bootlicker media/PR
| division.
|
| Left wing takes on sports are extremely important because
| there are many societal themes at play with sports. The
| manipulations by the right to fleece the taxpayers. The last
| functioning unions and debates about fair pay and revenue
| sharing. Health care and pensions. Race and discrimination.
| Homosexuality discrimination. Blind loyalty and jingoism vs
| loyalty to higher ideals and sportsmanship. So much sausage
| making that is too boring for regular enterprises to get
| attention becomes front page news in sports.
|
| Of course there's the corruption. Soooo much corruption,
| favorable non-prosecution, getting let off by the cops, fake
| "investigations", repugnant work conditions.
|
| And the comments on deadspin were pretty good. Any site with
| "pretty good" comments is a gem in the cesspool. The
| usernames were fantastic. HN users have disappointingly lame
| usernames by comparison.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > , a chilling and horrible verdict,
|
| Gawker executive testimonies did not help their case.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/09/gawker-media-t...
| JohnBooty wrote:
| It's important to note that the current "Deadspin" is (long story
| short) not the same group of people.
|
| A couple of years ago the Deadspin writers quit en masse and have
| since founded:
|
| https://defector.com/
|
| It's great! Costs a few bucks per month, which is awesome,
| because that lets them stay editorially independent and not rely
| on appeasing anybody but themselves.
| exogeny wrote:
| Spanfeller is the biggest fucking herb around.
| majormajor wrote:
| Several groups of people even throughout the story, really.
| Leitch left in 2008. Daulerio left a few years later, the
| Craggs, etc. Honestly, I think the Defector's version tells the
| history in a more complete way than this article since there
| were several eras: https://defector.com/how-we-got-here/ - a
| lot of prominent quotes from names in originally linked article
| that were out of the picture relatively early in terms of the
| Deadspin/Defector "changing sports journalism" story vs more of
| just a "controversial posts" story.
| robocat wrote:
| Quote from link: Lately I've been thinking of
| Deadspin as a strange machine. For more than a decade, the
| people charged with the maintenance of that machine were
| allowed to tinker with it according to their whims and
| idiosyncratic tastes. The result of all that tinkering was a
| machine which, for all its apparent wonkiness, worked
| brilliantly. The problem with a machine like that
| is that it's difficult for anyone who didn't build it, or
| doesn't respect those who did, to understand exactly how or
| why it works. When Deadspin's staffers and readers looked at
| the machine, they saw a wonderful and whirring contraption,
| but all Spanfeller and Great Hill saw was an odd collection
| of valves and pistons. They saw parts, but not the whole.
| Spanfeller's disdain for his own newsroom, the "stick to
| sports" memo, Petchesky being fired, and the cascade of
| oppressive ads--they were all signaling the same thing:
| Spanfeller and Great Hill weren't really interested in
| preserving what we had spent the last decade building. Maybe
| a few components would remain to keep up appearances, but
| Deadspin's demolition was coming, and we couldn't stop it.
| What we could do was refuse to participate in its
| destruction.
| lesstyzing wrote:
| I read a lot of sports news (and pay for some of it) and I've
| never heard of Deadspin. After reading the article I'm also
| struggling to figure out what they changed. Is anyone more
| familiar able to explain more clearly?
| manbackharry wrote:
| Deadspin's motto was "Sports news without access, favor or
| discretion". Unlike traditional media that essentially acts as
| mouthpieces for the teams that they cover (think of any press
| conference and the kinds of questions being asked, and the
| types of response they're designed to elicit), they used their
| status as outsiders to look at sports with a critical lens, and
| hold people in power in sports to account.
|
| This didn't mean they hated sports though - you could tell from
| most of their reporting, especially by the OGs(Will Leitch,
| Drew Magary, Tim Burke etc), that they LOVED sports and wanted
| the people and teams involved to just be better. They also
| broke a lot of bonkers stories like the Manti Te'o scandal
| (highly recommend reading their report on it)[1] that no one in
| traditional media did a good job of interrograting or digging
| into.
|
| The site still exists, but if you read it now you won't see
| this kind of reporting. It all changed about two years when
| they were bought by private equity (G/O I wanna say) who
| attempted to exercise control over their editorial, resulting
| in a mass resignation. Many of the old writers started Defector
| (https://defector.com/), which writes in the same spirit.
|
| [1] https://deadspin.com/manti-teos-dead-girlfriend-the-most-
| hea...
| slg wrote:
| > It all changed about two years when they were bought by
| private equity (G/O I wanna say) who attempted to exercise
| control over their editorial, resulting in a mass
| resignation. Many of the old writers started Defector
| (https://defector.com/), which writes in the same spirit.
|
| This really was one of the most fascinating journalism
| stories in recent years. There was this well respected and
| financially successful media company, in an industry in which
| most outlets are struggling. But management had no idea what
| made that company successful and was seemingly on a mission
| to kill what made it unique. Eventually management got so bad
| that the entire staff resigned over the course of a few days.
| Dozens of people quit their job in a shrinking industry in
| which any journalism job can be your last. Then after a year
| of many of the journalists bouncing between freelancing gigs,
| most of that staff is able to band together to create a new
| company. This time it is a workers collective in which the
| journalists are not just employees, but also owners. The new
| company is almost immediately a success, continues to grow in
| size, and build on the legacy of the original site. I have
| never seen anything like that before.
| blamazon wrote:
| A similar story played out in Jalopnik, an automotive blog
| with a similar irreverent outsider ethos under the same
| Gawker Media Group umbrella as Deadspin. Many writers came
| and went, including a group that started The Autopian
| (https://www.theautopian.com/) which reminds me of a Jalopnik
| before the buyout.
| smiddereens wrote:
| gerad wrote:
| I mostly appreciate deadspin for its snark [1], it's usually
| more entertainment than reporting (or even much about the
| actual games for that matter).
|
| [1] https://deadspin.com/thankfully-the-internet-captured-
| klay-t...
| allenu wrote:
| Snark was what attracted me to Gawker (the sister site to
| Deadspin). The general tone was something like "these elites
| and celebrities aren't as great as they think they are" which
| made it a guilty pleasure read. Reading it (and I assume
| Deadspin is similar) was like hanging out with a cool friend
| who was aware of everything hip going on and had all the
| right quips.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| You know how when you're watching a sporting event and some
| deranged fan runs out onto the field, the broadcaster, knowing
| that the team and league wants to discourage such behavior,
| switches to a distant aerial view while the commentators tut
| tut about it?
|
| Deadspin would instead gleefully post videos of the madness.
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