Nick Denton, in the last post published by Gawker before it was shuttered in 2016, laid out the structural reasons for his website’s ruin: a new oligarchic, “techlord” class that was more than willing to destroy an independent media outlet over a personal grudge. “They are as sensitive to criticism as any other ruling class,” Denton wrote, “but with the confidence that they can transform and disrupt anything, from government to the press.” Denton titled his post “How Things Work,” in homage to a tag for Gawker stories that revealed the hidden machinations that govern our lives. “And so Gawker’s demise turns out to be the ultimate Gawker story,” he said. “It shows how things work.”

The empire Denton created, which in addition to Gawker included the sites Jezebel and Gizmodo and Deadspin, has been in limbo ever since, passing through an uneasy period at Univision before landing in the arms of the private equity firm Great Hill Partners earlier this year, which rebranded the conglomerate G/O Media. Now Deadspin, too, is effectively dead, after Great Hill demanded that its writers “stick to sports” and fired interim editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky for refusing to abide by that dictum. A group of Deadspin staffers quit en masse in solidarity, all but hollowing out a site that had not only been a beloved destination for literally millions of readers, but was also a cash cow for its owners.



It is tempting to see the demise of Deadspin as another depressing instance of how things work: a private equity firm full of almost comically idiotic media bros blunders into a successful media property and destroys it because the only thing it knows how to do is juice ad impressions. But the collapse of Deadspin is so spectacularly stupid, so clearly self-inflicted, that it has an epochal quality. If there were any justice in the world, the site’s absurd decline, which could not better contrast the integrity and talent of Deadspin’s staffers on one side and the craven shit-eating of their corporate masters on the other, would serve as a wake-up call to the powers that be. Since there isn’t, it’s almost certainly a harbinger of much worse to come.

A lot has been written over the last few years about just how terrible private equity has been for the media. Newsrooms in cities across the country have been decimated by draconian cuts, while fat cats load up newspapers with debt and profit handsomely. G/O Media is the latest and best example of private equity’s catastrophic influence on journalism.

Over more than a decade, Deadspin has built an audience with hilarious and incisive coverage that is focused on sports but drifts into a number of other areas—politics, film, dogs. Its coverage of President Trump has been particularly excellent (and consistently well-read), but the site has also featured a number of other popular non-sports features, from its pop culture coverage in The Concourse to Drew Magary’s annual hate-reading of the Williams-Sonoma catalog.

