She suggested that Mr. Maidment was in a difficult position, serving as an emissary for G/O Media. But he failed to persuade the journalists that the company’s editorial direction was in their — and the site’s — best interests.

“He tried to paint it broadly but was not willing to be specific about what posts we had done that fell outside of that mandate,” said Chris Thompson, a staff writer who also resigned this week. “He resisted altogether the institutional knowledge of the people in the room.”

Soon after the meeting, Deadspin writers and editors began filing into his office to quit. Many of them posted the news of their resignations on Twitter, and Deadspin became a trending topic on social media into the night.

The company came into existence after Deadspin and its sibling publications were sold by Univision to the private equity firm Great Hill Partners in April. Univision had bought the sites when they were part of Gawker Media in a bankruptcy sale. Founded by Nick Denton, the company had been financially ruined when Terry G. Bollea, the former professional wrestler known as Hulk Hogan, won a $140 million judgment against Gawker for an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit backed by the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.

G/O Media installed Jim Spanfeller, a digital media executive who had previously run Forbes.com, as its head. Mr. Spanfeller promptly got rid of some top editors and made Mr. Maidment the editorial director.

Signs of tensions between the irreverent journalists and the management team came quickly. They were not helped by an Aug. 2 Deadspin article whose reporting was critical of G/O Media, Mr. Spanfeller and his executive team. The piece took issue with their “lack of knowledge about” the sites now in their portfolio and “their seeming unwillingness or inability to get up to speed.”

A few weeks later, Deadspin’s top editor, Megan Greenwell, resigned, saying in a farewell post that her job had become untenable, given management’s demands. (Ms. Greenwell recently completed a stint as a weekly advice columnist for The New York Times.) The next major event at G/O Media occurred on Oct. 10, with the shuttering of its politics site, Splinter.