In April, Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm, purchased Gizmodo Media Group, the collection of websites formerly known as Gawker Media, from Univision. Great Hill’s leaders also acquired The Onion, changed the parent company’s name to G/O Media, installed a bunch of the CEO’s washed-up cronies in executive positions, and spent most of the next few months alienating nearly all of the most talented veteran employees of the sites they purchased.

In October, they abruptly shuttered Splinter, the left-leaning news and commentary site that had grown out of Univision’s fantastically expensive and doomed experiment in millennial-focused media, Fusion. (Disclosure: I was an editor at Splinter until last year, and worked at GMG and Gawker Media for a number of years.) They proceeded to blow up the widely beloved sports (and culture and commentary) site Deadspin, first by instructing the staff to restrict their coverage solely to sports, and then by firing the site’s longest tenured employee, deputy editor Barry Petchesky, triggering mass resignations of the entire staff.



This is not a story about the private equity vampires ruining this specific company. It is about the implications of the fact that Splinter was not allowed to live, and Deadspin is not allowed to be political. Rude media, for lack of a better term, is dying.



Deadspin was rude. This was almost its defining characteristic. It was rude, by and large, to people who deserved it: amoral and venal team owners, predatory sports media personalities, bandwagon Warriors fans. Splinter was notoriously rude, just as Gawker was rude before it, to figures at the towering summit of influence and craven strivers who wished to join their ranks. In an earlier era of digital publishing, Suck was rude (just look at the name the site’s founders chose for themselves, back when online magazines called themselves high-minded things like Salon). Rudeness in media was not invented alongside the the web browser. The Village Voice in its heyday was rude as hell. Rolling Stone was often rude, except to Jann Wenner’s friends. Mad was so rude that it only survived comic book censors by becoming a magazine. Some of America’s greatest journalists and critics, from Ambrose Bierce to H.L. Mencken to Dorothy Parker, were decidedly rude.



Rudeness is not merely a tone. It is an attitude. The defining quality of rude media is skepticism about power, and a refusal to respect the niceties that power depends on to disguise itself and maintain its dominance. It’s often hard for me to imagine that anyone can grow up in this era and not end up doubting the competence and motives of nearly everyone in charge of nearly every American institution, but some of us grow up instead to be Bari Weiss.

