Today is Sean Kuhn's last day at Defector. Sean has been our Head of Subscription Strategy for the last four years, and in that time he has become one of our favorite dudes. The only reason we're not furious at him is because he's leaving us for a dream job: doing fancy math crap for an MLB team's front office.
Below are our attempts to try and roast Sean on his way out the door, but as you will see, we all had trouble doing so. He's just too good of a dude!
Ray Ratto
We always suspected something might be slightly hinky about Sean—too decent, too agreeable, too competent in too many ways—but it wasn't until we roomed together three company retreats ago that his true nature revealed itself. He was also too considerate, too kind, and too thoughtful. Frankly, he was in many ways the ideal spy. But for which nefarious organization? The Athletic, where he used to work? Hell Gate? The New York Review Of Gibberish? And what secrets was he obtaining from the likes of ninnies like us? How to flail pathetically against the vagaries of new technologies?
Well, we can report that he got nothing of use from us, which we could have told him on Day One. Maybe he tried but he missed it. Maybe he took one look around and recognized no valuable information would be forthcoming or found. Or maybe, as he claims now, something equally fulfilling in a different field came along, which would be the first time that's been said about Major League Baseball in some time.
When a person has dreams, they must be chased, and baseball is not irredeemable by any means. If it was, he wouldn't be going there, and his skill set is such that he could work on anything from the new balls-and-strikes technology to the analytics department of the Montreal Expos. Well, not the Expos. More's the pity there; the Expos always had the coolest swag.
That said, he will not be missed since we will continue to bother him on any number of subjects, because someone with his abilities should be used even when he's working somewhere else. He cannot escape us. He is too good a fellow, and we are too needy.
Dave McKenna
Not to go all inside baseball on you mofos, but Defector’s masthead has an unreal Good Dude batting average (present typist excluded), and Sean more than blended. A total Good Dude all-star. He’s nice to everybody. He’s a genius. He vacations in Ireland. He knows every Guided by Voices tune. C’mon, man! Speaking of batting averages: I’m told Sean’s leaving us for MLB. Of course he is. Nobody leaves Defector unless they have no choice, and when baseball came callin’, Sean had to answer. I mean, I’ve seen Sean work a batting cage at a Defector social event and give analytic breakdowns of our subscriber base at work meetings. Trust me: The guy’s a big leaguer. And he’s the only guy I know who’s had Tommy John surgery. Here’s a song he wrote both to mock me and pay tribute to a band we both love:
Talk about hitting it out of the park! Congratulations Sean, and thanks for it all. Be well!
Lauren Theisen
Before Sean joined Defector, I didn’t have any idea what someone with his job description was really meant to do. I guess he was supposed to look at some data and tell us which numbers were good and which numbers were bad, or something like that. But it took all of one meeting to realize what we’d been missing from this company without him. He was someone who knew how to look for useful information in places we didn’t even know existed, could share the conclusions he drew in ways that actually got us excited about business analysis, and was eager to chip in on all the areas where a small business needs attention.
Sean’s intelligence has made me infinitely smarter about this company I co-own. His versatility has made the day-to-day of my job significantly easier. And on top of that, he’s also been someone with whom I can have a not-even-stressful conversation about my long-term goals. I admire the way he brings empathy and humor to a job that traditionally would not demand it, and in doing so, he’s completely redefined my understanding of what a “media numbers guy” can be. I’d long braced myself for a day when Sean would leave us to run a brand-new company that understood what they were getting by putting him at the helm, and I wish this “MLB” start-up all the best as they try to get off the ground. The first year is always the hardest!
Jasper Wang
Sean joined Defector in the spring of 2022, and one of his first weeks of work coincided with that year's company retreat in New York. I have very few recollections of that particular week—my camera roll from those days is limited to blurry photos of various people doing karaoke, blurry photos of the pitch clock (still a minor-league novelty then) at the Brooklyn Cyclones game, and a screenshot of Dave McKenna Slacking me in the middle of the night that he was at the hospital for kidney stones, plural—but one of my most distinct memories is how horrible I felt about Sean's hellish travel back to his home in Ohio. Despite early summer thunderstorms, every other out-of-town staffer was able to make their Friday morning flights fine; somehow, only Sean's itinerary was disrupted. He went to LaGuardia again on Saturday and Sunday, boarded flights repeatedly that were meant to leave town yet never took off, and eventually gave up and took an overnight Greyhound bus out of Port Authority to Pittsburgh, where I believe his wife picked him up on Monday and drove him the rest of the way home.
I checked in with him each of his stranded days and really tried to impress upon him that we could spend extra company resources to get him home, or at least make the interim period in New York more comfortable, and any number of us would happily help him look for other itineraries or wait on hold with American Airlines on his behalf. Each time, he matter-of-factly thanked me and stoically said he would figure it out. After he finally got home to Ohio, he was offline for no more than the length of a long nap before I saw him back online, answering emails. At the time, I was deeply concerned that Sean was too worried about making a good impression at his new job and was irrationally refusing to inconvenience his new colleagues. But soon I came to understand that he was just like that: unflappable and never one to complain, easygoing yet hardworking, willing and able to work through whatever problems were tossed his way.
There was another figure from that awful travel story who I think about sometimes. After Sean's original long-delayed flight eventually got canceled, I remember speaking to him briefly on the phone, but he had to go because he was busy translating for a fellow weary traveler who didn't speak any English. As far as I know, Sean does not speak and has never spoken any language other than English. But he was able to help that person get rebooked and out of New York, presumably many days sooner than Sean himself was able to leave. I wondered, then, how this person became attached to Sean during their travel tribulations. After only a few weeks of working together, I could tell that gregariousness toward strangers at the airport was not at all among Sean's personality traits. But perhaps, in the chaos at the gate, they frantically looked around and understood Sean's true character at just a glance. Here was a kind, exceedingly competent man who you'd want on your team, whatever the circumstances.
Patrick Redford
When I helped interview Sean for this role all those years ago, I remember being mildly concerned that he was too smart and would probably be too good at his job to last very long with us. Clearly he could have been making 10x what he was set to make at Defector without even having to go Be Evil somewhere, and I'm simultaneously honored and saddened to have been proven half-right: Sean is going to apply his considerable skills to the matter of winning baseball games, a far easier but perhaps more fulfilling pursuit than selling a subscription product. Your mileage will vary on the moral weight of such a pursuit, but I am not worried about whether or not Sean will do a good job. I'm just happy we had him for four years.
Something I have always found fascinating about Sean is that he fashioned himself into a dedicated Orlando Magic fan, despite having basically nothing to do with the Orlando area. Our basketball Slack channel was constantly enlivened by Sean complaining in harrowing detail about Paolo Banchero's lack of court vision, praising Noah Penda for his achievements in cubic-ness, or breaking down why Anthony Black was having a great year. As an analyst, I felt twinned admiration and jealousy. As a friend, I felt mild concern. This guy was choosing to watch one of the more frustrating yet cool teams in the NBA and coming out of the experience with a nuanced understanding of the team and the dynamics that animated them, for no other reason than to have some fun and expand his casually impressive ball knowledge. Sean was never fully allowed to write for us, but I always wanted him to write about the Magic, because I relished the idea of our Deputy Business Guy also being able to bust out a better basketblog than I was capable of writing, on something as maddening and funny as Jalen Suggs's headband situation vis-a-vis his on-court performance (this is a real thing he tracked). Whenever I watch Tristan da Silva blow a switch, I will think, "Thank you, Sean."
This morning, I asked Sean why he chose to root for the Magic. In response, he sent me the following YouTube video, and explained that he and his brothers once drove three hours through a snowstorm to watch Magic-Cavs, a game in which Wendell Carter Jr. was mistreated. That was somehow enough.
Two other things to know about Sean: He has insanely esoteric music taste, and he is fast as hell. I once tried to go on a run with him and he smoked my ass.
Tom Ley
One of the most gratifying things about working at Defector is that it has become the kind of sustainable business that makes it possible to acquire new, interesting colleagues. Don't get me wrong: I love hanging out with all the people I've been hanging out with for more than a decade now, but I also love to meet a new guy.
No "new guy" has graduated to "prized pal" quicker than Sean. He's essentially the ideal coworker: a person you know nothing about upon first meeting, but whose esteem rises after every interaction. Sean was never given a task he wasn't up to, and improved every professional interaction with his presence. Receiving a DM from Sean, hearing him speak in a meeting, or getting to shoot the shit with him at one of our staff retreats always felt like receiving a soothing treat. Hey! It's Sean! my brain would say in each of these instances. Love that guy.
I'll really miss him. Sean, if you absolutely suck at your new job for some reason, let us know so you can come back.
David Roth
As a rule, I afford people who know how to do math and use database software in expert ways a great deal of grace, and approach them with a certain awe. A good part of growing up in any job is realizing what you're actually good at and sticking to it. For me, that is mostly getting upset, but other people are good at other things. There are people at Defector who are knowledgeable about hockey, if you can imagine, to the point where they are confidently typing the most outrageous Finnish names you can imagine without ever once worrying that those names have too many A's in them.
Every job I've ever had is like this, but this bit of personal growth also requires an honest assessment of what you cannot do. Within that reckoning is coming to grips with the sort of shit that you cannot even imagine yourself doing. When I worked at media companies where there were whole floors of people who did all that, I did not worry about it; when those media companies decided they were no longer interested in doing any of that and we set out to start one of our own, I started to worry about it. I quite literally do not know how to do anything but worry about it.
Sean's legacy at Defector is vast, and I don't want to diminish it by shrinking it to the size of my own anxieties and incapacities. The man can sure do math and use database software, but he also helped facilitate and execute a number of complicated and essential Defector things during his years at the website: conceptualizing and producing various goofy videos, sweepstakes, and campaigns that were not any less complex for being so goofy; building out our subscriber retention and acquisition programs, and writing extremely good copy for them; explaining important business things to a bunch of bloggers on Zoom calls; bringing enough backup binoculars to our company retreats that we could all get our turn looking at various birds on our dinky little nature walks; cheerfully answering me when I asked which of his hometown team's dudes he had remembered in a given day's Immaculate Grid. (You would surely identify this vibe instantly if you'd met him yourself in real life, but he's an Arquimedes Caminero guy.)
I find it very difficult to imagine what Defector would be like or what it might be without all the things he's done, but also he is responsible for so much of what I understand about what we're doing here, and how it works. This is a good legacy to leave, too—everyone here loves him because he is so generous and competent and patient and kind and funny, but also we all know so much more about what we do because of him. He taught all of us a lot, and was a delightful hang for all of his time here; I just loved talking to him. As with anyone you admire and think is cool, his friendship and approval made me feel more admirable and cooler in turn. I learned a lot from him, and I'm very glad to have learned it, but that someone like him believed in this thing as much as he did made me believe in it more, too. I'm so grateful for all of it.
Chris Thompson
If Sean set aside his math thing, retuned his résumé, and applied under an alias for a staff writer position at Defector, he would get the job. Not only is he very naturally skilled at talking and writing about numbers, he is also unsettlingly fantastic at writing about baseball, birds, and music. This well-rounded PIECE of CRAP is a better blogger than I am. This absolutely will not stand.
It's comforting to the insecure blogger to note that Sean is weird in one key way: He had his choice of NBA teams and selected, all on his own, as an adult of ostensibly sound mind, to root for the Orlando Magic. The last time anyone did that was in like 1994. You would think a person of his caliber would have the instincts of psychological self-preservation to choose a team like the Warriors or Spurs. Maybe it's an inferiority complex.
I sincerely believe that Sean is one of the best things ever to have happened to our company. It's shocking, the degree to which my day-to-day emotional stability has relied upon the luxury of being able to remind myself, sometimes hourly, that Sean is over there watching The Numbers. He's a great dude and I would trust him to carry my child across a bridge spanning the mouth of a roaring volcano, and he is one zillion times smarter than I am, and so when he says encouraging stuff about how Defector "could not be on more solid footing," literally as he is announcing his departure, I am forced to ignore the possible negative interpretations of the statement and extend it the faith it is intended to inspire. I'm sure he's going to kick turbo ass out there in pro sports. It seems like a dream gig. Our guy deserves it!
Albert Burneko
I want to be able to roast Sean, but I can't. He's better at his job than anybody I have ever known is at theirs, and he's great at a couple others (blogging, sports analysis) too. Imagine Defector's core subscription business as a mechanical thing, with belts and gears and shit. In the beginning it was encased in brick, and we didn't even know it. Hiring Sean was like replacing the bricks with windows: Suddenly we could see into it, and could see how it worked, and whether it was working, and how well. Suddenly, and more vertiginously, we could see that we had not been seeing that before. Not at all!
Our growth committee meetings are psychedelic for me: Sean having thought to ask a question about our company's subscription business's performance that I would never have thought of, and a way of answering it that I couldn't ever have imagined, and then the reassuring but ever so slightly spooky feeling of seeing the business from a whole new angle, or with a suddenly and dramatically sharpened resolution ... and getting a sense of how little I'd known about it before then. Holy smokes, imagine if he can do that for a goddamn baseball team!
Anyway, I hate that he's leaving. Burn in hell, Sean!!!
Sabrina Imbler
When I learned that Sean was leaving for [redacted MLB team], I was away on book leave and had been pretty unplugged from work. But that night, Sean came to me in my dream. Here is what I remember: We were sitting at a nice restaurant, maybe something Italian, and I understood that I had invited Sean to dinner to attempt to thank him for all he had given to Defector. This made sense to dream-me, because it was what real-me was thinking all that day. Sean's presence at Defector was a gift. He gave far more to us than we asked of him. He became a newsletter whiz, a resident bird expert, an invaluable presence in culture committee. He quite literally became my champion when we implemented a new system of feedback.
In my dream, I didn't get a chance to tell Sean how much he meant to me because he kept interrupting my speech to tell me that we should order egg creams. "I don't want an egg cream," I said. "But they're so good here!" he countered, and he ordered two egg creams for us. When they arrived, I could not bring myself to sip the egg cream, because I felt somehow that it would mean that dinner was over and I would not have a chance to tell Sean what an immensely valuable part of Defector he has been, what an extraordinarily kind person he is, how much I enjoyed shooting the shit with him when we gathered in person, how I loved hearing about his cats and his birding excursions and his wife's Neopets obsession, how much his hard work made Defector a better company, how many times he made us laugh. But then I sipped the egg cream and realized Sean was right. They were good here! Sean was good here, too. We will all miss him!
Kelsey McKinney
One thing I have always believed is that it takes a very specific kind of child to choose to be a pitcher or a hockey goalie. There is very little glory in these positions, but plenty of blame. You are responsible for almost everything, and yet if you do your job, there is no big celebration. In your psyche, the fact that your teammates appreciate you is the reward in itself. You do not need the roar of a crowd chanting your name, or the glory of scoring. You just want, at the end of the game, all your buddies to line up and pat you on the head and say thank you, good job, and see you tomorrow.
Sean Kuhn is perhaps the best athlete Defector has ever employed. He was a pitcher in real life as a child and teen, but he was also an ace here. Every day, for the past four years of his employment here, he has gone out to the mound, pitched what feels like six hitless innings, then returned to the dugout and just sat there high-fiving the rest of us, cheering for other people more than anyone has cheered for him. Most (though not all) of the work he has done for this company, no one has recognized or applauded, because he plays it off as just part of his job.
The best example I can think of is from a few years ago, when I first realized how secret of a threat Sean was. Normal Gossip was still new, and we wanted to tour the show, but we had no evidence that there was any appetite for that. We did a small show at Caveat in NYC that sold out. The touring agents told us that this was not enough information to help us decide which venues to book, so we did what turned out to be two sold-out nights at Sixth & I in Washington, D.C. After that, Sean did what to him is data analytics and what to me was pure magic. He somehow used the zip codes of the people who had attended that show, the population of D.C., and the number of tickets sold to calculate some percentage, which he could then compare to a Google Sheet of people who had said they would like to see the show live. What he ended up with was a spreadsheet that predicted how many tickets we could sell in conservative, likely, and stretch limits in most major American cities. Not only had we never seen anything like it, our agents hadn't seen anything like it; the people who managed our eventual tours hadn't seen anything like it. He built a system that solved a problem everyone in a whole industry had, and then we used it. And it worked!
There are at least a dozen anecdotes like this to tell about Sean as a colleague and professional—he has a damn reporting credit on the site!—but he is also just a joy to have on the staff. He's good at karaoke and remembering things about his peers. He has an extra pair of binoculars that he will let you use on a bird walk. I once asked him to help me explain pitching to my friend, and he told me that question was like "asking a fish to explain water," then provided one of the best explanations of modern pitching I've ever read. He is my ally in never restarting my computer, making calendar events for stupid shit like updating our fantasy teams, and using emoji reacts in Slack. I will miss him very much, and will do everything in my power to sabotage the team he is going to work for in the hopes that he will one day return.
Samer Kalaf
The ways in which Sean applied his knowledge and quant skills to Defector's preexisting values made for a mutually beneficial result: We learned new methods to consider how a blog can turn into new subscriptions, and he learned how to think like a blogger—two things of equal value, if you ask me.
More seriously, Sean's a brilliant guy who Gets It. He was adept at simplifying his data in ways that would make us smarter without infringing upon our editorial approach. I sincerely looked forward to growth meetings. In this world there are not a lot of business-side people who actually understand the value of writing, and Defector has been lucky enough to have two of them. I will miss him dearly. One time, I played catch with him on the beach, and it ruled. If I were to lodge any criticisms of Sean, I guess it'd be the following: I feel like he makes up 75 percent of the musical acts he listens to, and I still don't fully understand why he cares about the Orlando Magic.
Maitreyi Anantharaman
We’ll miss you, Sean! Do you get access to data for every team’s prospects now? When you’re settled at the new job, would you be able to look up Max Clark’s two-strike chase rate and Jordan Yost’s SwStr% against >95mph for me? Thanks!
Kathryn Xu
I have learned so much from Sean ever since I was an intern, and Sean and I were the relative newcomers to the company. His primary role was to teach a pack of staffers about subscription strategy, a task he took on with patience and aplomb, and executed with about as much success as could be possible. Then there's the rest of it: It's unfair that someone so smart and capable in his own field would prove so adaptable outside of it as well.
I have been able to mine Sean's expertise in the obvious ways: admiring his impeccable Slack formatting, using that knowledge to send him paragraphs of questions for dumb baseball statistics blogs (despite our fundamental schism, wherein I use Python and Sean uses R), going birding in Atlantic City and getting roasted for asking if the sandpipers(?) on his hat were plovers. But I have also envied and tried to imitate how Sean approaches things that are new to him. Perhaps the most impressive example of this was Sean deciding that he was going to become an Orlando Magic fan, and then succeeding.
Clearly the site has cornered the market on business guys who are cool. I don't really know where else to put this, but it was sick as fuck watching Sean's swing in the batting cages in Ocean City. Also, he's still the only person I know who has ever gotten Tommy John surgery!
Sean, I will miss you in Slack and in meetings, and trying to identify which of your black cats is featuring in the photo you posted by analyzing whether his mien appears boyish enough to be Harry. Be well!
Justin Ellis
It's a rare thing to find someone who works in the operations side of a media company and does not have some small stain, just a trace of evil within them. The temptation that comes from standing so close to the money faucet. Understanding all the levers to pull to manipulate humans into the needs of your business. Surviving an MBA program untouched. And along comes Sean, pure and somehow genuine in his love of the game and curiosity for making the science of running a business (and making money) into something better, more human. He made a mark on Defector not just because he made the company sharper in how to respond to challenges, but in recognizing that how you deal with adversity and the needs of your readers is as important as anything else. All of this alone would make Sean definitionally a "good dude," as outlined in the Defector company handbook.
But the part that truly makes me upset? I will never forget the time when someone dropped in an image of a pickup basketball jersey that was clearly some LinkedIn company swag relegated to the local Goodwill. No sooner was this posted than Sean got off a shot with Day of the Jackal-like precision, a pickup basketball riff along the lines of: "Looking for work? Come get this work." This motherfucking Sean Kuhn was also funny as hell! Disgusting! Unbelievable! Truly he can do it all.
Brandy Jensen
As a rule, I do not respect Spreadsheet Guys. For most of my professional life, they had delivered unto me nothing but suffering and humiliation. The Spreadsheet Guy was the one who showed up on Zoom to explain why I could no longer the publish the things I liked and must instead try to publish stupid bullshit I hated. The Spreadsheet Guy did astrology for the C-suite. His appearance augured doom.
By all rights, I should loathe Sean Kuhn, who is remarkably good with spreadsheets (at least I think he is, I don’t really understand them). And yet he managed to earn my undying admiration. He is genuinely cool and helpful, and cares about good writing. He proved me wrong. At least until recently, when he decided to leave us, which is exactly the kind of perfidy I expect from these people. Fuck you, Sean, for making me trust and adore anyone who can do that kind of stuff with columns and rows.
Drew Magary
I ran the numbers on Sean:
Alex Sujong Laughlin
It's hard to quantify the impact Sean's had on this company, in part because he's the quant guy we always look to when the numbers got confusing. In our regular all-staff meetings, when it was time for Sean's Analytics Minute to present traffic, revenue, or subscriber numbers, I was always amazed at how he was able to pull coherent stories and even lessons out of what looked like masses of incomprehensible data. His research is responsible for so many important decisions made at this company, ranging from scheduling to live show booking to the number of blogs we aim to publish on an ideal day.
He's really fucking good at numbers, but my favorite thing about Sean is that he's an enthusiast. In company meetings, he talks about how he was a fan of Defector first, and you can feel the affection he has for this project we're all working on. That sincere enthusiasm is contagious, and more than once it has buoyed me in moments of instability or doubt. In his time here, he's made this place immeasurably better by being himself, and I will miss him.
I would also like to shout out the time he sang Soulja Boy's "Kiss Me Thru the Phone" at karaoke. Iconic. Congrats on your new job; I will never forgive the sport of baseball.
Diana Moskovitz
The best thing I can say about Sean is that it seems as if he's always been here. He feels as baked into the place as the logo or name itself. I cannot fathom Defector without him, even though, of course, it will go on after he leaves. That’s just life. Everything and everyone moves on. But the most worthwhile of us leave behind an impression that never goes away. They stay with us, long after they leave this realm, which for our purposes means getting deactivated from Slack.
What will disappear into the ether when Sean’s Slack closes down is a lot of DMs from me that began with some version: This is gonna sound insane or irrelevant but go with me on it … Or, another classic: Sean, can this feature I want be added to the website or do I have a better chance of winning the lottery? Or, the dreaded: I'd say a better headline would be ... To put it politely, as part of being a worker at a place where everyone is a co-owner, Sean had to navigate many cooks in his kitchen—even if most of his fellow cooks can barely write a basic Excel formula. He has handled it all with patience, grace, and aplomb, before quietly showing us up at the Ocean City batting cages.
Wishing Sean well in his new adventure feels akin to wishing Albert Einstein good luck on his physics test. Of course he will succeed beyond his own wildest expectations. He might not know that, but I feel it with certainty in my bones. And there, like here, his colleagues will wonder how they ever got by without him. Hopefully he shows them up in the batting cages, too.
Barry Petchesky
I would say that being a numbers guy for a bunch of bloggers is like herding cats, but it's really more like trying to teach cats to use pivot tables. Good luck, buddy! But Sean has endless patience for our blinkered, humanities-swollen brains, and a capacity for explaining technical things to us in terms we actually understand. This is a very real form of bilingualism, and Sean is fluent.
He's also a better and funnier writer than many of us, which is annoying. People should only get to be good at one thing. He's also athletic, and he knows a lot about birds, which both make him enviably cool. Thankfully the universe has compensated by making him a fan of historically sorry teams in multiple sports. I sleep better at night knowing he suffers.
Eat shit, Sean! At your new job, when you're surrounded by smart people all capable of doing math or whatever, and you suddenly have a pang of nostalgia and wish someone would message you in a panic because they "can't open PowerPoint" or "don't understand what the ÷ sign means," we won't be there to indulge you.
Luis Paez-Pumar
I would like to properly roast Sean here, as is tradition, but I simply can't. He was just too great a coworker. I could talk about how Sean was a business genius. I could talk about how he managed to make idiot bloggers understand numbers, graphs, and trends. I could even talk about how much fun it was to have him talk about his dreaded Orlando Magic in Slack.
Instead, I will shout out Sean as Defector trivia host. Between his encyclopedic knowledge of baseball statistics, to his masterful GarageBand covers of songs from a frankly astounding number of genres, I always enjoyed Sean's trivia boards the most of anyone on staff. (No offense meant to everyone else; your boards are all good!) I like that trivia allowed him to translate his most sicko tendencies into a fun hang for both us and the demented Twitch chat. I am hopeful that wherever he goes professionally from here, he will bring that same sense of whimsy and true derangement with him. Eat shit, Sean; I truly mean that in the most Defector way possible.
Billy Haisley
They say that the best cure for belief in cinematic auteur theory is to work on a movie. There, deep in the weeds of creation and production, where the innumerable contributions from dozens of participants leave fingerprints that prove fundamental to the final work's impact, it is evident that a thing like movie-making is an irreducibly collective practice. The idea that the director is some singular author to whom a movie's every choice can be attributed, though an effective analytical lens, is ultimately a gross simplification.
A blog is somewhat similar. It tends to be the long, ambitious, widely read articles, and those articles' authors, that get the most attention and praise—and rightly so, for the most part. However, for those of us on the inside, deep in the weeds of creation and production, it is glaringly evident that there are far more people directly and indirectly responsible for those high-profile articles than appear in the byline.
Some of these unnamed contributions are more obvious than others. For instance, presumably everyone knows that an editor runs their comb through every article on this website before it is published, sometimes only catching a few typos, other times intervening more significantly, helping the writer shape and hone the argument in a way that would've only been possible through the tandem working together. What someone on the outside could also probably guess is that lots of articles emerge directly from the conversations we're having all day with one another, where ideas, angles, and jokes are collectively presented, bandied about, and then claimed by an individual writer, who then fleshes out the best of those ideas into a full post. Less directly, all of the long, ambitious, widely read articles that earn us new readers and subscribers are inextricably tied to the shorter, newsier posts which make up the bulk of what makes the daily experience of reading Defector. In a real sense, every one of us is responsible in some way for everything that appears on the site that we all make together and own together.
Sean is one of those people at Defector whose fingerprints aren't quite as visible to the uninitiated, but if you know what you're looking for, you'll spot them everywhere. If you're reading this site at all, there's a good chance you are a subscriber, which means there's a good chance you were brought here by Sean himself, maybe through a discount sale offer or a subscription appeal email, both of which Sean is in charge of planning, executing, and tracking. If you like the look of the site and the ease of the user interface, some of the aspects you appreciate are undoubtedly things Sean himself helped bring about, seeing as he is the one who most often brings the staff's CMS suggestions and our readers' issues to Alley, the team that designed and maintains the site. If you're happy Defector exists at all, then you should thank Sean for it, since the savvy, dedication, and care he brings to his role as Head of Subscription Strategy is one of the main reasons the website is doing as well as it is. And his impact isn't even relegated to behind-the-scenes stuff: If you've liked any of my Brazilian funk blogs, there's a good chance you've read ideas that only emerged though me and Sean, the site's two most dedicated funkophiles, DMing each other in awe about some crazy shit we'd listened to.
As the thousands of words my colleagues have written here attest, all of us will miss Sean dearly. We will miss his intelligence, sense of humor, fundamental goodness, and passion for the website, its mission, and, most especially, for the people who make it. But what you probably didn't know before you read all of our words, and what you may not have noticed if we hadn't explained just how crucial he has been to Defector, is that you will miss him too.
