What's Going on With 'Deadspin'? The Once Successful Sports Blog Was Sold Again

On March 11, 2024, Deadspin was sold from G/O Media to European firm Lineup Publishing, a new digital media company. They bought the name but do not want the people that make the product.

“Deadspin’s new owners have made the decision to not carry over any of the site’s existing staff and instead build a new team more in line with their editorial vision for the brand,” wrote Jim Spanfeller, chief executive of G/O Media, in a memo to staff. A G/O Media spokesperson confirmed to CNN that 11 Deadspin staffers were impacted by the sale.

If the story mentioned above sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Deadspin already went through something similar a few years ago. Rather than just go along with whatever management wanted, the people who actually make Deadspin decided to start Defector, aka “the last good website.”

After an edict to "stick to sports," the writers of Deadspin quit in the fall of 2019. In September 2020 they launched Defector. It’s still going strong and, ironically, you can learn most everything you need to know about what happened to this version of Deadspin by reading Defector.

In the March 2024 piece “Jim Spanfeller Is a Third-Rate Parasite” by Albert Burneko, the demise of Deadspin as we once knew it is summarized in a very old-school, Deadspin type way. It's full of language you probably won't be reading on the future Deadspin anytime soon.

“Deadspin was sold to a mysterious European start-up and stripped of its staff on Monday; some ghost-ship remnant of it is now floating across the seas to Malta,” Albert writes. “The site, along with its G/O Media sister publications, entered a death spiral at the very latest in 2018, when Univision put them up for sale; they were still called 'Gizmodo Media Group,' then. Or maybe it was two years earlier, when a Florida jury opted into Peter Thiel's scheme to bankrupt what was then Gawker Media.”

If you’re confused about what Gawker has to do with all this, Deadspin was brought into the Gawker Media empire in 2005. Gawker Media was sold off to Univision Communications in 2016 due to being found libel for $115 million in the lawsuit Bollea (better known as professional wrestler Hulk Hogan) v. Gawker, which was funded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

Univision Communications was bought by private equity firm Great Hill Partners in April 2019. Deadspin was combined with their other new purchases, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, The Root, The A.V. Club, The Takeout, and The Onion, to form G/O Media. Which brings us up to date.

Without knowing the exact details, Albert’s Defector piece does a fine job explaining what happened: “A once stable and profitable media shop becomes vulnerable; a series of leveraged buyouts pass it down a chain of progressively meaner and more radioactive owners, leaving it more grotesquely tumored with debt at each next stop; somebody finally liquidates it.”