Deadspin is Dead, Long Live Deadspin

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Deadspin – now under the Defector masthead – is back baby. It’s good again. Awoouu (wolf Howl). Run by the ex-Deadspin staffers who quit en masse in October 2019 to protest the firing of acting editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky, now fully own and operate Defector. For a more in-depth explanation of what happened, subscribe to Defector and read their version of the story here. If you don’t want to support employee owned media, other outlets covered the sotry and you can google those stories yourself.  

The launch of a new website does not excite most people, nor does it cause them to write an emergency newsletter for their hundreds – hah! – of adoring fans. Since the announcement of Defector in July, however, I’ve felt nothing but a building excitement. I’m probably more jazzed for the launch of Deadspin than my birthday. That website holds a very significant place in my heart. That sounds weird to say about a blog, an ephemeral thing, literally just lines of digital code, but I mean it. At this point it’s cliché to say, but deadspin.com was the only website I actually typed out. Despite visiting it multiple times a day for years I never bookmarked it. I always typed out the full name. I’m not the only one.  

I didn’t discover Deadspin, and the whole related Gawker-verse, until about mid-way through college. From time to time I ran across their articles when I still used the Stumbleupon toolbar, but I never visited the site. Very 2009 of me. I first started really reading Deadspin, along with io9, Kotaku, Jezebel, and Gawker after I graduated college. Between May 2013 and Feb 2014, I lived at my parents’ house, working maybe six hours a week folding women’s compression socks, desperately trying to find a real job. Those sites, and not much else, kept me going, providing a solace between writing increasingly more frantic cover letters. I’d constantly refresh them waiting for the newest article to populate, hoping for takedowns of some egotistical sports media personality, essay length discussions of Road Runner, or the weekly Funbag. The ability to read people smarter, more insightful, and funnier than me provided a space of solace that I badly needed. I even tried to apply to write there. Bigger pipe dreams have existed, but not many.

I eventually did move out of my parent’s house and got a job in Chicago. I still kept reading Deadspin though. My first job, a phone recruiter for market research groups blocked the sites from my work computer. But I found ways around that block. The mind-numbing dullness of asking 130 people the same twenty questions every day required that I find something to do that didn’t involve being a glorified telemarketer. Deadspin filled that role. After I got internally promoted I received access to a computer that my corporate masters forgot to fil with corporate “security” blocks. While this new job managed to take exactly one percent more brain power to complete, I still still something to do in between nasty emails from unsatisfied clients. Deadspin became the best and easiest way for me to waste company time, just as they wasted mine.

I’m not sure why Deadspin, of any website, sank it’s hooks into me the deepest. I didn’t interact with it on any deeper level than reading the posts. I didn’t comment all that much. I followed most of the writers on Twitter, but never got a response back any of them, the few times I replied. So it’s not like I was forming personal relationships with the site or the writers. But I still felt like part of a community. I got some of the inside jokes, the references that populated the articles and comment sections. Those things held a strong power over me. But it was also the humor, the politics, and the strength of the writing, and their view on sports that attracted me. While I don’t always agree with various writer’s political stances, in general I overlap politically with a lot of them. Their ability to convey complex ideas in accessible language with always a touch of humor appealed to me. When they got mean, it was mean with a purpose. They knew the evil side of sports, the big empty, Lovecraftian soulless hole of greed that undergirds the whole of professional sports. Deadspin looked into that vast pit and didn’t turn away. In many ways it opened my eyes to that gaping cavity underneath the veneer of respectable apolitical sports leagues. I had long been a sports fan, following along with the box scores, but never really thinking about the other parts of the game. Reading their take downs of awful stadium deals, horrible owners and the other depravities of professional sports in some ways radicalized me. Or at least made me interrogate my relationship with sports on a deeper level. All those reasons, and more I’m sure, kept me coming back to the site year after year, even as it evolved and changed. Writers came and went as did editors-in-chief. Even when new ownership was forced upon them they fought as hard as they could to keep Deadspin on track. While they eventually had to start a new site to do it, the ethos has stayed alive. That ethos kept me coming back.

Here’s an aside. I once got the chance to meet three Deadspin people. They were doing a podcast recording and Monday night football game watch in Chicago. I paid for tickets and dragged my friend along to Thalia Hall to watch Drew Magary, Dave Roth, and Megan Greenwell talk about Guys they remembered and watch the Bears lose. I had a blast. I was too shy to talk to any of them, though I did take a picture of Megan and her two friends so that was fun. I’m very weird around people I admire so it’s probably for the best that I didn’t chat with them. It’s certainly a little unhealthy to treat sports bloggers like celebrities, but I could have picked worse people I guess. Aside over.

I’m happy that Defector exists for other reasons as well. The fact that it’s running as an employee-owned site is awesome. I pray that it works out. So much of the current media-sphere is owned by a few billionaires. That needs to change. This is one way forward. Support them here if you’re able. I’m looking at their merch site and will probably buy a t-shirt I don’t need. Scratch that, I just bought a sweater I don’t need. But I do what I can to support the news.

It’s hard for me to end this. I don’t really know where I’m going. A thing that I like is back, and hopefully in a way that will make it better. That’s cool. I still want to write for Deadspin, but that will probably never happen. Maybe someday. Anyway, long live the posts.