Jim Spanfeller has 2 current jobs as Founder at The Daily Meal and Chief Executive Officer at G/O Media. Steve Riley on February 14, 2013: Just right off the bat. Jim has a different recollection of the facts, McAvoy reiterated. As I said in the article, some of the celebs I mentioned could have changed their political leanings. This former staffer said the team wished to add Black creatives to help create more representative branded content to meet the demand, but it was not given additional resources. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. Former Daily News Editor in Chief Is Tapped to Run Deadspin Sole dedication to revenue, getting it the cheapest, quickest way possible. ), Spanfeller described the situation differently. G/O Media sites generated about 45.7 million unique visitors in October, according to Comscore, down from 47.8 million in October 2020 and 101.6 million in October 2019, right before the Deadspin exodus. Most recently, after the latest edict that Deadspin stick to sports, its writers revolted, and Spanfeller retaliated by firing the top-ranking employee, Petchesky (Deadspins latest editor-in-chief, Megan Greenwell quit in August for many of the reasons described above). When I followed up about the meeting the next day with Spanfeller, I was told it was canceled. Or as Carmichael explained, If you dont know what a herb is, youre probably a herb.. These men, and others who now hold C-suite positions at the company, were each hired without a public recruitment process, and several were installed over high-ranking women who had been successfully performing those jobs at the company for years. Mr. Rich, who will report to G/O Media Chief Executive Jim Spanfeller, . Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. [6] Just under two years later, Spanfeller was replaced as publisher by Scott Kauffmann and became the national sales manager of Newsweek magazine in 1986. Ultimately, the issue of building a wall has raised political risk, Cramer said. Im kind of a tipsy at a bar in Paris, she added. In early April, Great Hill Partners, a private-equity firm, acquired Gizmodo Media Groupa collection of sites, formed from the assets of the old Gawker, that included Jezebel, Lifehacker, and Deadspinas well as The Onion, a satirical news site, reportedly at a fire-sale price.The company, renamed G/O Media, installed Jim Spanfeller, formerly of Forbes.com, Playboy, and Ziff Davis, as CEO. Gizmodo and The Onion's New Owner Lays Off 25, Including - TheWrap In an email read to Deadspin, McAvoy agreed that she was qualified for the role and said he would talk with Spanfeller to ensure she was interviewed for the new opportunity, which had not been posted publicly. In the meantime, Carmichael had her own message for Spanfeller: Congratulations on confirming your herb-ishness.. In April, the tech team was told to move the companys video operations off of MCP, which Univision paid for to host video content, and onto JW Player, a cheaper video system. Katie then refused to assume the HR lead role around other wider layoffs at the company. DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION are core to our culture, and we expect all staff to advance and promote that. Heartened, the SVP emailed Spanfeller to remind him of their meeting in April and express her hope that women, people of color, and people who identify as LGBTQ would be considered as he hired his leadership team, and to say that she looked forward to discussing her role in the organization. Who even told you you were allowed to think about audience?, My management was straight-up scared of him, said a staffer who worked at the site for two years and had responsibilities on both the editorial and marketing sides of the company. I was disappointed. The post, published Tuesday evening, proved wildly popular on Twitter. Email us. I think the general sentiment coming out of that meeting, at least for some of the senior sales people, was like, these guys are going to lead our sales team? Never mind the flood of negative stories about staff blowback over the company's editorial direction. No one has been named interim editor, and there is no succession plan in place. The VP, who said she now reports to Thompson, said all of her previous reviews from her managers have exceeded expectations, and that she was able to more than double revenue for my region in less than a year. 4. When Rogers was hired less than a week after McAvoy told the SVP that she would be able to interview for the job, she said, she realized that he must have been chosen well before. These actions are clearly management attempting to target, and even intimidate, staff into changing their editorial stance in spite of our contract-protected independence, especially as it comes on the heels of managements repeated attempts to kill this story as it was being reported about the company. In other words, G/O media had effectively broken the redirect at Deadspin2.com, so that the site now redirected to a dead link. I expect to be treated the way I treat people., This pattern played out three more times in Spanfellers first few months as CEO. Spanfeller admitted he contacted Maidment in June after receiving my initial email requesting an interview. In two cases, women asked for and were promised the opportunity to interview for executive-level positions for which they were qualified, only to see Spanfeller hire one of his former colleagues before they were given a chance to interview. Deadspin Is ZombifiedBut Gawker's Content Warriors Fight On Over the last few weeks, during their attempts to hinder or prevent the publication of this story, Maidment and Spanfeller invoked concerns about Deadspins credibility in covering G/O Media. "We were a leftist site, not a liberal one, which gives you a sense of how closely Spanfeller followed our work," he said. Well keep fighting for whats right. The JW Player was an interim step, Spanfeller said. In a follow-up meeting with Spanfeller about the story, she suggested that hard financial data might not be their audiences central interest. Spanfellers executive assistant set up a time for us to meet. It has introduced real uncertainty in to stocks, and Trump's agenda has become shaky. Elsewhere in the company, G/O Media has pushed staffers at its site the AV Club to relocate to Los Angeles from Chicago, according to a recent report in Gawker, which is now owned by Bustle Digital Group. As you know, one reason that I dont believe that publications should write about themselves is because I fear it damages perceived external credibility in editorial independence, which, if anything, makes keeping advertisers at bay harder, not easier. Jim Justice speaks during President Donald Trump's political rally inside the Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington on Thursday. There are regions that were within my scope of responsibilities and within my role that I cannot call on and neither can my team.. I was also hiring a good portion of these jobs before I actually took over day to day control of the company. Jim characterized that as a misunderstanding, she said. From a womans perspective, I did feel very belittled. G/O Media lawsuits: Two former exec allege discrimination - CNN I told Mike, verbally and in writing, that I would be interested in taking on new responsibilities and opportunities within the organization and I would like to interview for whatever position would be a part of that, she told Deadspin. It was placed there without consultation or even simple communication to anyone on Deadspins staff. I am and will continue to be a very strong advocate for my team.. The key journalistic properties descended from . G/O Media, the newly formed company comprised of the assets of the former Gizmodo Media, will lay off 25 employees, according to a memo that company CEO Jim Spanfeller sent to staffers on Tuesday. I have stood up for and advocated for my team since the day I started at G/O. Two are now successfully navigating careers in the digital advertising space. Sources say he was retained to consult on sales and how the department could work more directly with clients, which the now-former employee says was her job. A leading digital publisher producing category leaders The Daily Meal and The Active Times. Sources say the meeting concluded with an agreement that the best course of action would be to explain to Spanfeller why the player would not be finished by August 15. The digital media and blogging network, which oversees websites like Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jezebel, A.V. We may earn a commission from links on this page. Vice president of sales for the south Lance Johnson, who worked with Spanfeller at Forbes (and most recently worked with Bruce Rogers at a company called SITO Mobile). These two highly talented HR executives then met with a number of people around our company including representatives of the unions., When asked why Spanfeller didnt follow this thorough search process before filling seven key positions with his former coworkers, he blamed his hiring practices on the financial shape of the company. Without posting the jobs publicly, Spanfeller hired a stable of white men to fill executive positions overseeing nearly every facet of the company., You also had no interest in meeting the only woman on the revenue leadership team who is an SVP who has been successful., As the only woman on the previous revenue leadership team, I started to wonder if women were being considered for leadership roles., What Spanfeller says is normal is, of course, a reflection of his own values, which evidently rank transparency, diversity, and inclusion as secondary concerns to financial success., The appropriate thing to do would be to talk to the editorial side of the business and have a clear objective for the survey., Chief financial officer Tom Callahan, who worked at Forbes while Spanfeller worked there. Why Ketanji Brown Jackson Split With the Courts Liberals in a 54 Decision, the firing of beloved editor Barry Petchesky, According to Great Hill Partners website, increasingly insisted on directing editorial coverage. He started screaming at me, Who told you you were allowed to speak about audience? Ive reached out to Spanfeller for comment multiple times over the past few days and have yet to hear back. Mr. McAvoy was clear to me on his opinion that he did not think she was the right choice at this time, Spanfeller said. It's a culture of fear," said the first former employee, who added that staffers sometimes likened meetings with Spanfeller to the "boar on the floor" scene in HBO's "Succession," where media mogul Logan Roy orders his underlings to crawl and oink like pigs. They are parti pris, which is why the overwhelming majority do not do so and many will not even report on rivals for the same reason. Answering a similar one, he seemed to contradict himself: This concern was expressed to me and I take it very seriously. 3. "From the outset, CEO Jim Spanfeller has worked to undermine a successful site by curtailing its most well-read coverage because it makes him personally uncomfortable," the Gizmodo Media Group . According to his LinkedIn, Thompson is the founder of Mediacentric Inc., a multi-media representation company., A man was hired with my same title [vice president for west coast sales] to be my boss, the VP told Deadspin. Employees in G/O Media's editorial union urged the company's private-equity owners to replace G/O Chief Executive Jim Spanfeller in a letter Monday, saying a change in leadership was . Employees across editorial, sales, and tech have left, but many of these positions, even mission-critical ones, have not been filled.