In addition to the annoying ads, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller also wants Kotaku to only write about video games. Stay up to date with what you want to know. One theory was that Spanfeller thought implementing analytics would take developer resources away from building the new video platform and player, though employees said implementing analytics is a relatively easy fix. The other is still in college., Four of nine major hires have been women, Spanfeller said. John Taggart for The Washington Post / Getty Images. Still, tensions between management and staff are high at the company as it prepares to enter negotiations with the G/O Media editorial union, one of the two unions representing editorial workers at the company. Gov. The rigorous and thorough reporting, editing, and legal review process that Greenwell promised to oversee has since been completed, which is why you are reading this story now. Legal review is often a lengthy process involving multiple reads, so talking to a lawyer is certainly not an indication that we would publish without completing the reporting process. He started screaming at me, Who told you you were allowed to speak about audience? He is currently the CEO of G/O Media which consists primarily of sites that were previously part of Gawker Media. I hold myself to a high regard and ensuring that Im respectful to others and create a community of camaraderie, hire for diversity, and that there is a work life balance, she told Deadspin. That evening, the woman received an email from McAvoy telling her that the SVP of marketing job had been filled with someone who worked with Spanfeller at Forbes. Its motivation is simply to publish true and interesting stories, and to make sure the things powerful people would rather stay in the dark end up in the light of day. 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. Im shocked he would call that a good presentation, said the employee who was in the meeting. G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller said the company would become "nicely profitable" by the end of the year, after it's been . In an email, Flanagan disagreed with those assessments: Simply not true. 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. Spanfeller said he did not recall the specific request. It is also worth noting that multiple internal candidates have expressed interest in the position of EIC of the A/V Club. The Onion union declined to comment, but a source with knowledge of the situation disputed that the union demanded promotions, saying its letter demanded action and used the words We ask for the following when addressing promotions. Having done it at Forbes, I simply knew it could be done quickly and with incremental value to the company.. Jim Rich, the former top editor of the New York Daily News, will start as editor-in-chief of Deadspin on Monday. G/O Media, the company which ran Deadspin, was acquired by the private equity group Great Hill Partners, which installed Spanfeller as CEO and gave him one mission: Make them richer. According to sources familiar with the situation, the Onions union sent a letter to Spanfeller asking that he help provide a plan for the site and fill the vacuum left by top leadership. Now that we are closer to stabilizing the companys finances, we can take even more time and be more deliberate in our hiring, which the SVP Talent is already doing.. We have no credibility in writing about ourselves. (Pontius left the company.) 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. On July 25, a pop-up survey appeared on Deadspin asking three questions: How satisfied are you with Deadspin? Computing. During those meetings, Maidments ideaswhich included commissioning an editor outside the company to review and approve stories written by about the companywere met with unanimous opposition. 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. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. It also wasnt communicated to me as a promotion until the day it was emailed out to the company.. Employees across editorial, sales, and tech have left, but many of these positions, even mission-critical ones, have not been filled. Vacillating Wildly From Dispiriting to Exhilarating. [9], In 1996, Spanfeller left his job at Inc., where he had become publisher, to become publisher of Yahoo! According to Dave Reibstein, past chairman of the Board of Directors of the American Marketing Association and a professor of marketing at University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School of Business (where he teaches a course on market research), there are several problems with the survey. She told Deadspin she was surprised that Spanfeller seemed to know little about her team, which last year won Digidays best content studio award.. 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. Spanfeller declined to answer a question about whether he expressed these sentiments to Klancnik. And he made sure to make it clear that I just didnt get it in his mind that I just didnt get this whole digital thing, she said. [14] A subsequent Deadspin post mocked Spanfeller as a "herb"; after being widely shared on social media, G/O Media removed the post. To hear G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller tell it, everything at his digital media company is going great. 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. [We] had a phone conversation, kind of confronting Jim about it, and he told Mike, I thought we talked about this. It was throwing Mike under the bus, and Mike told Jim that they had not talked about it. 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). John Taggart for The Washington Post via Getty Images, NOW WATCH: WATCH: How advertisers can navigate the death of third-party cookies, according to execs from Mars Petcare, R/GA, The Washington Post, and The Trade Desk, Clashes between the Gawker Media editorial culture. Just two weeks after Spanfeller and Great Hill acquired the company, and less than a week after he said in an interview with Variety that he didnt expect any layoffs, Spanfeller fired 25 people across the 400-person company, including Susie Banikarim, GMGs widely respected editorial director, and the only person of color on the executive leadership team at the time. Steve Riley on February 14, 2013: Just right off the bat. Greenwell told Maidment she was unwilling to shut down an ongoing reporting process in response to management demands, and Maidment continued to make his argument against the idea of reporting on G/O Mediaa hallmark of the company since its earliest days, as well as a tradition at other major publicationsin several meetings with the editors and writers he oversees. Senior vice president of marketing Bruce Rogers, who worked with Spanfeller at Forbes. Six of these hires were Spanfellers colleagues from his previous jobs at Forbes, Playboy, and Ziff Davis. 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.
"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 . For the last two questions, the options were the same: Uncompromising commentary, sports stories I cant find anywhere else, knowledgeable writers, broad scope of coverage, political coverage and strong political point of view, and criticism and coverage of other media companies.. "We closed Splinter because it was a liberal political site that was losing audience in the middle of a liberal moment," he said. ), Spanfeller described the situation differently. . Emma Carmichael is a friend of mine, and we both worked at Gawker Media and, as it was later named after being purchased by Univision, Gizmodo Media Group, or GMG. Gaffney said the firm was prepared to hold onto the investment for a decade or more and that Spanfeller, a former Forbes and Playboy executive, does not have a time frame for preparing the company for a sale. G/O is still wracked with internal tensions ahead of contract negotiations with one of its editorial unions. Both lawsuits detail discrimination personally faced or witnessed by the plaintiffs from Jim Spanfeller, who became CEO of G/O Media in April after private equity firm Great Hill acquired Gizmodo . At the same time we are still exploring all options to get this work done by August 15th..
Jim Spanfeller - Big Think Endnotes [1] Statement from G/O Media: "Some reports have miscast Jim Spanfeller as a private equity businessman when, in fact, he has spent his entire career in editorial-driven businesses. 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. Spanfeller admitted he contacted Maidment in June after receiving my initial email requesting an interview.
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The mess at G/O Media - Columbia Journalism Review I thought she was going to be great, and it didnt work out by her own assessment., In response to follow-up questions, Spanfeller clarified that there was never a signed offer between Pontius and the company. The role was not posted nor was it communicated to me in time where I would have even been given equal opportunity to be considered, she said. Three and a half hours later, Maidment told us to put the story on ice, but both Spanfeller and Maidment maintain that Spanfeller never explicitly or implicitly directed the story to be killed. Below are some of the biggest revelations outlined in Deadspins roughly 7,000 word report on their parent company and its new management, which they spoke to nearly two dozen G/O Media employees for. I found this troubling but was okay with it given the circumstances. The union said that it wants the money to translate into higher salary minimums, trans-inclusive healthcare, and a focus on talent retention. When one reviews the actual questions one might feel even more uneasy. Spanfellers pushed back against these internal criticisms of his questionably ethical hiring process and management style by blaming G/O Media for losing money too fast. All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC. I realized that I wasnt communicating my advocacy for the department or our initiatives to upper management and other departments back to the team clearly enough. [10] Spanfeller was also responsible for advertising sales on the magazine's website and that of Yahoo! (The other woman on the executive leadership team, general counsel Lynn Oberlander, left the company this week.) So Out of Touch: Gen Z Congressman-Elect Mocks RNC Tweet Criticizing Him For His Housing Woes. Reverse Phone Search Tool And much more all for free! When Spanfeller Offered to Promote a Woman to a Top Position, He Insisted She Fire a Female Editorial Director Should She Accept the Job. It definitely feels like its the old boys club, a G/O Media employee told Deadspin. He previously served as President & Chief Executive Officer of Forbes.com, a leading media Internet company, and as Executive Vice President . Have a tip or story idea? Spanfellers all-staff email went on to accuse Deadspins staff of bias and cast doubt on the motives behind the story. In one instance in which Spanfeller tried to promote a woman within the company, his offer came with strings attached. Former CEO of http://Forbes.com, Chairman Emeritus, IAB, Sec OPA NYCJoined April 2009 266Following 1,878Followers Tweets Tweets & replies Media Likes Jim Spanfeller's Tweets Jim Spanfeller @JimSpanfeller Mar 13, 2020 Good News! Text. According to multiple sources inside the company, the post even joined the leading posts from official G/O sites on the big board, a large screen in the companys New York headquarters that displays that moments most highly trafficked storiesan unusual feat for a user-generated post. The only person that I was aware of that was calling directly on clients was an SVP at The Onion and that was to sell creative services, he said. These conversations reveal that Spanfellers biggest effect on the company since taking over has been a deflation of morale. The differences were as granular as whether to call published pieces "blogs" or "stories." In addition to poor planning and communication around the video player, multiple sources say Spanfeller wouldnt allow the tech team to implement video tracking analytics on JW Player, so no one had any idea how many views videos were getting. Initially, we had to move fast because the company was losing money at a rapid pace, he said. Spanfeller, who became head of the digital media company when GMG was purchased by private equity firm Great Hill Partners, told staff that he expected the site's direct advertising to "take the. The employees, nearly all of whom requested anonymity because of fears of retaliation from company management, are angered by a lack of communication regarding company goals, seeming disregard for promoting diversity within the top ranks of the company, and by repeated and egregious interference with editorial procedures. During Jim Spanfeller's younger years, he lived in Pennsylvania and recieved his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1952 from the Philladelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. Mr. McAvoy was clear to me on his opinion that he did not think she was the right choice at this time, Spanfeller said. In its brief life, the postwritten by Emma Carmichael, a former editor at a former version of the companywas viewed nearly 100,000 times and was tweeted out by the official People for Bernie Twitter account. As Spanfeller increasingly insisted on directing editorial coverage in what he believed to be more advertiser-friendly directions, clashes between him and the companys writers and editors have escalated. Multiple people who worked for him at The Daily Meal (part of Spanfeller Media Group) told Deadspin that Spanfeller couldnt cede any control. But Spanfeller said that he wants G/O Media to keep the voice and mission that made Gawker Media sites singular in the digital media industry. Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise. Holle Abee (author) from Georgia on February 14, 2013: Duff performed at W's inauguration. The private equity firm was able to snap up the deal for only about $25 million, according to a person with direct knowledge of the figure. 20 Employees Complained to Deadspin About Spanfellers Management, After interviewing nearly two dozen employees, Deadspin found that 20 people who work for G/O Media expressed frustration with Spanfellers approach to hiring and his new executives lack of knowledge about the company combined with their seeming unwillingness or inability to get up to speed.. (Spanfeller says this is inaccurate and that he did consider other candidates for the editorial director role, but Paul quickly rose to the top after he expressed an interest in the position.) Three of the men Spanfeller hired were installed over successful women who had been at the company for years. Heres The REAL Clip, Christian Walker GOES OFF on Predator Matt Schlapp for Allegedly Groping Male Campaign Staffer: Hes Done This Before, Im Sure!, LOL. But after the staff meeting, sources say, members of the tech team held a meeting with Knight to explain why the date was unrealistic. Political affiliation means the state of belonging to or endorsing any political party. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. A leading digital publisher producing category leaders The Daily Meal and The Active Times. The company is also on the hunt for acquisitions, according to Spanfeller. At least have everybody well briefed on this is what were doing and this is what wed like to learn from it, Reibstein said. in English Literature in 1979 and went to work as a reporter for the SoHo Weekly News. Spanfeller said the company hopes to expand into areas like travel, music, business, and news. Ive reached out to Spanfeller for comment multiple times over the past few days and have yet to hear back. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. At the same time, working with the EICs to set a general editorial direction is clearly in the purview of any owner.). Spanfeller accused writers and editors of acting in bad faith based on a list of questions submitted to him before publication and the fact that a draft of the article had been sent for legal.
Deadspin Editor Fired Amid Pushback Over 'Stick to Sports' Memo [5] Upon returning from Europe, Spanfeller took a position at AMP Marketing Systems. 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. That union also opposes G/O Media's recent requirement to return to in-person work. In the meantime, Carmichael had her own message for Spanfeller: Congratulations on confirming your herb-ishness.. I read that she's a registered Republican in Texas. Multiple sources say Pontius declined to go along with the plan, angering Spanfeller. Great Hill Partners is a growth equity company committed to building businesses. He would stop into peoples offices with the doors open and scream at them, so everyone knew what was going on., 5. Now that we are closer to stabilizing the company, there can be a more deliberate recruitment and hiring process. 3. The post, published Tuesday evening, proved wildly popular on Twitter.
Ex-Deadspin EIC Jim Rich resigns in latest turmoil at G/O Media G/O Media, owner of Gizmodo and The Onion, will post an eight-figure operating profit this year, CEO Jim Spanfeller says. 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. During an internal sales summit meeting in New York on June 19, sales execs practiced pitching G/O Medias general presentation, a deck of about 15 slides that tells clients why they should do business with the company. This guy just seems like he doesnt like women, another added. In conversations with Deadspin, more than 20 employees from across the business, tech, and editorial departments of G/O Media expressed frustration with Spanfellers approach to hiring and his new executives lack of knowledge about the company combined with their seeming unwillingness or inability to get up to speed. That is clearly evident when you note the poor syntax and galling bias of the questions. Neither Sean nor Jim ever reached out to ask, Hey, what are you doing, how are you doing it, how is it working? There was never a conversation about my role, she told Deadspin. pretty big scoop from me Jim Spanfeller is a herb https://t.co/gZDCs6mfhC. UPDATE: This article has been updated to remove an incorrect reference to former G/O Media Lynn Oberlander leaving her job shortly after the companys latest round of layoffs. . Multiple sources say that Spanfeller reached out to VP of media operations Brad Klancnik to tell him he was a valuable employee and that the new owners would like him to stay at the company, but female VPs say he did not relay such messages to them. We could have video analytics today.
Takeaways From Deadspin's Expos of G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller In turn, Spanfeller hired a number of his old media friends and former colleagues from Forbes, Playboy, and other outlets to fill top roles at G/O Media, while also failing to make public job postings for many of these roles. Use this information as you see fit. My management style has been widely reported on over the years and the picture you are painting does not comport with that. But as Spanfeller began to implement his vision, that hope was replaced by employee frustration and skepticism over his hiring practices and interference with the companys journalism. Spanfeller says Pontius accepted the job, but he decided she was not a good fit for this position after Pontius refused to join me in communicating our plans to fire Banikarim.
Gizmodo Media Staff Enraged at New CEO's 'Insane' Direction