Earlier this month, private equity killed another news outlet. Splinter, a news and politics website where I’d previously worked, was shut down by its owners. Seven people lost their jobs—a comparatively small culling compared to the hardships some other media outlets have recently endured. Nevertheless, Splinter’s fate points in the direction of bloodlettings to come.

It was a long and tortuous road that led to Splinter ending up in the hands of private equity masters, beginning when Gawker Media was hounded into bankruptcy by Peter Thiel, who backstopped Hulk Hogan’s defamation case against the site. Denied the opportunity to appeal the judgment against them, the media properties that resided under Gawker’s banner were rebranded as Gizmodo Media Group (GMG) and sold to Univision. It was an ill-fitting arrangement: Univision was a normal, cautious media company mostly focused on Spanish-language TV, and GMG was a small-ish network of irreverent websites that regularly published the musings of a dog and Ashley Feinberg. The unwieldy partnership was exacerbated by corporate mismanagement which saddled the profitable GMG with debts from Univision’s disastrous experiment in millennial-focused content, Fusion. Fusion’s website was rebranded and relaunched as Splinter in the summer of 2017; GMG was eventually sold to the private equity firm Great Hill Partners, who renamed the company G/O Media.



Given all that history, it was never a guarantee that Splinter was going to succeed, the Hogan lawsuit having transformed the uniquely profitable media venture of which it became a part into a troubled property overnight. But Great Hill Partners, a firm with no previous experience in building a successful media brand, quickly demonstrated that they were bent on proving that they could be the worst stewards of the company. They interfered with G/O Media’s editorial independence, stuffed the sites’ layout with eyesore ads, and pushed out competent managers, such as Deadspin editor-in-chief Megan Greenwell, who laid out a searing indictment of Great Hill’s mismanagement on her way out the door.



It feels increasingly like the terms of journalism—which kinds of outlets get to do it, who gets paid enough to live doing it, which communities get coverage—are set by the rich.

This is not to further pan for lamentations over the demise of a website. Splinter and its parent company was already something of a distressed asset—its status as such, in fact, likely played no small role in attracting the attention of Great Hill in the first place. But the wider world of mass media is filled with other such distressed assets, from the websites spawned in the heyday of venture capital media mavens, to long-standing local and regional newspapers, straining to balance their journalistic mission with an ever decreasing supply of capital. It feels increasingly like the terms of journalism—which kinds of outlets get to do it, who gets paid enough to live doing it, which communities get coverage—are set by the rich. The best case scenario is that journalists become part of a billionaire’s patronage network. For the unlucky, vultures lurk. The rich have killed before, and they will kill again.

The story of private equity gutting and destroying local media is familiar and already well-told. Over and over again, journalists have documented the atrocity, including some whose jobs were lost over their work. Though the ultimate goal of journalism is to create change, change in this area has been slow to emerge. Private equity keeps buying and destroying.