G/O Media announced Monday that it has sold the remnants of Deadspin and, as part of the sale, would be laying off the entire staff.
"So we just got half an hour's notice that Deadspin has been sold to a European startup and they're not taking any staff," senior writer Julie DiCaro posted on Twitter. "Already locked out a company slack and our laptops." In a note to staff republished by Axios reporter Sara Fischer, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller said that the website had been sold to "the European firm Lineup Publishing."
"I do want to make it clear that we were not actively shopping Deadspin," Spanfeller wrote in the note. "The rationale behind the decision to sell included a variety of important factors that include the buyer's editorial plans for the brand, tough competition in the sports journalism sector, and a valuation that reflected a sizable premium from our original purchase price for the site." Spanfeller also misspelled Deadspin as "Deadpin."
The editorial plans of Lineup Publishing, a company with a site that reveals very little beyond the possibility that it might be based in Malta, did not involve any of the existing staff. Coincidentally, the August 2019 post written by Megan Greenwell, titled "The Adults In The Room," seems to have been deleted from Deadspin some time in the past couple of weeks. Laura Wagner's article from that same month, "This Is How Things Work Now At G/O Media," also seems to have been scrubbed within the past month. One way to interpret Spanfeller's explanation of the sale is that the new buyers were willing to pay an avaricious moron to inherit the enormous mistake he committed four years ago. I don't know if there's a second interpretation.
Disclosure: The majority of the Defector staff worked at a previous version of Deadspin.
