Text. View details on more than 95 Million registered voters across the United States. This sites credibility is not dependent on who and what it reports on, but on its ability to report forcefully and accurately. Ex-Deadspin EIC Jim Rich resigns in latest turmoil at G/O Media 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). 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. The four women who Spanfeller counts as major hires include two he hired (head of talent and deputy counsel); one he promoted from within to executive managing editor; and a yet-to-be-filled position he says he plans to offer to a woman. 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. So Out of Touch: Gen Z Congressman-Elect Mocks RNC Tweet Criticizing Him For His Housing Woes. 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. You wrote a 'story,'" Spanfeller recalled telling staff. Or as Carmichael explained, If you dont know what a herb is, youre probably a herb.. Email him here: caleb@mediaite.com This particular set of troubles all started when private equity firm Great Hill Partners purchased GMG and hired Spanfeller, a former Forbes.com CEO, to guide the ship. Club executive editor Laura M. Browning and former A.V. We had to move fast because the company was losing money at a rapid pace, Spanfeller wrote in a statement. 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. Gizmodo Media Staff Enraged at New CEO's 'Insane' Direction 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. Naturally, we were dismayed to discover one more problemthe survey placed on Deadspin. Spanfellers cronies now fill the G/O Media positions of chief financial officer, editorial director, senior VP of marketing, VP of west coast sales, VP of east coast sales, and VP of southern sales. Well keep fighting for whats right. Since Spanfeller took over G/O Media in April, more than a dozen people have left the company voluntarily, in addition to the 25 people who were laid off. (The other woman on the executive leadership team, general counsel Lynn Oberlander, left the company this week.) We shall have a discussion on the policy at the next EiCs leads meeting. At least have everybody well briefed on this is what were doing and this is what wed like to learn from it, Reibstein said. The key journalistic properties descended from . Internet Life, a joint publication of Ziff-Davis and Yahoo!. View Jim Spanfeller's professional profile on LinkedIn. And as the only woman on the previous revenue leadership team, I started to wonder if women were being considered for leadership roles. Indeed, Spanfeller told Deadspin that he first contacted Rogers about the job on June 11. Having done it at Forbes, I simply knew it could be done quickly and with incremental value to the company.. In reality, this story started with a tip the site received about Spanfellers hiring practices, and grew from there thanks to sources accounts. Made up mostly of the former Gawker Media sites, G/O Media has been in a near constant state of turmoil for the past few years. Spanfeller said that he wasnt preventing, just delaying analytics from being implemented, on the grounds that its not particularly useful information at the moment. (The day after Deadspin contacted Spanfeller for comment, the tech team was given the green light to roll out video analytics. Nearly two dozen current G/O Media employees spoke to Deadspin for this story. Two are now successfully navigating careers in the digital advertising space. "We were a leftist site, not a liberal one, which gives you a sense of how closely Spanfeller followed our work," he said. That distinction quickly sparked backlash in late 2019, when the staff of Deadspin resigned over the firing of a top editor and the company's mandate that the site stick to covering sports. Spanfeller declined to answer a question about whether he expressed these sentiments to Klancnik. Spanfeller said the goal was to find out what the key points of attraction are for our visitors.. Fuck Jim Spanfeller and Paul Maidment. The person hired was Bruce Rogers, who most recently ran the institute arm of SITO Mobile, a mobile data company. The G/O Media union sent the following statement regarding the survey: The GMG Union has made repeated good-faith efforts to cooperate with management in resolving the many outstanding issues currently facing the company, from workplace accessibility to a video player that lacks viable metrics. James J. Spanfeller Jr. is an American media executive best known for running Forbes.com from 20012009. This conversation inspired her to write a post on the personal account she still holds on G/Os publishing platform, Kinja, titled Jim Spanfeller Is a Herb., Pronounced with a hard h, herbs are difficult to define, but typified by the individuals seen in this earlier Carmichael post about herbitude. Never mind that employees called for his resignation last year. Jim Spanfeller the beleaguered boss of G/O Media, which owns The Onion and Deadspin is being sued by two former executives who claim in separate lawsuits that he discriminated against . He credited The Root for its journalism on the Black Lives Matter movement. The union said that it wants the money to translate into higher salary minimums, trans-inclusive healthcare, and a focus on talent retention. "We want to do it in a way that's a little more buttoned up," he said. Voting precincts and districts. Other top employees who have left the company since the start of Spanfellers reign include former A.V. Cramer finally reveals whether he is pro-Trump or anti-Trump - CNBC [2][3], Spanfeller graduated from Union College with a B.A. 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. In other words, G/O media had effectively broken the redirect at Deadspin2.com, so that the site now redirected to a dead link. "The fact that we could acquire it at a price that would make it one of our smallest investments is that good or bad? The mess at G/O Media - Columbia Journalism Review Mr. Rich, who will report to G/O Media Chief Executive Jim Spanfeller, . Club managing editor Caitlin PenzeyMoog, who both resigned on July 12. I am and will continue to be a very strong advocate for my team.. Ultimately, the issue of building a wall has raised political risk, Cramer said. 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. Ive reached out to Spanfeller for comment multiple times over the past few days and have yet to hear back. The takeover of G/O Media, previosuly known as Gizmodo Media Group and Gawker Media, by former Forbes executive Jim Spanfellercontinues to throttle downhill, as one of the companys news sites, Deadspin, published a scathing expos on Friday detailing a litany of problems employees have faced since investment firm Great Hill purchased Gizmodo and placed Spanfeller in control. Sean Flanagan, 55, who was hired to lead east coast sales, was also installed over a female senior sales employee, who had been at the company for four years before she left in July. Head of The Onion, Deadspin sued for sex discrimination - New York Post Jim Spanfeller has 2 current jobs as Founder at The Daily Meal and Chief Executive Officer at G/O Media. My management style has been widely reported on over the years and the picture you are painting does not comport with that. In his email to the staff, Spanfeller described this story as one that had been commissioned by the site, and attempted to paint the reporting process behind it as haphazard and unfair. Senior vice president of marketing Bruce Rogers, who worked with Spanfeller at Forbes. 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. On Glassdoor, a website where current and former employees can submit anonymous reviews of their workplaces, reviews of The Daily Meal are overwhelmingly negative. 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. He did not answer a question about whether he was aware that a female VP was already leading west coast sales or that he installed a man (who also carries a VP title) above her. That union's collective bargaining agreement expires in February. That is absurd. Among the multiple Gawker and/or GMG and/or G/O websites I wrote for was, for a brief stint, Deadspin, which is currently without a staff after every single one of its writers quit en masse following the firing of beloved editor Barry Petchesky, who is another friend of mine. Spanfeller, a man who is regularly and perhaps euphemistically referred to in press accounts as a digital media "veteran," has so far hired a slew of his former colleagues at Forbes.comwhere he. 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. 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. . [14] A subsequent Deadspin post mocked Spanfeller as a "herb"; after being widely shared on social media, G/O Media removed the post. "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 . It definitely feels like its the old boys club, a G/O Media employee told Deadspin. [10] Spanfeller was also responsible for advertising sales on the magazine's website and that of Yahoo! According to Great Hill Partners website, Spanfeller has led comparable media platforms and positioned them for successful strategic exit, which probably means something to someone, somewhere, but Spanfeller is perhaps best known for dramatically increasing Forbes.coms focus on digital advertising (Spanfeller also previously served as chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau). 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. Its Extremely Revealing. A leading digital publisher producing category leaders The Daily Meal and The Active Times. The post, published Tuesday evening, proved wildly popular on Twitter. Who even told you you were allowed to think about audience? the woman alleged. 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. 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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). Find Out With This Weeks News Quiz. 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. 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. After Gawker's high-profile legal battle with Hulk Hogan, Univision in 2016 purchased its other media properties out of bankruptcy for $135 million, but struggled and sold the assets, including add-ons like The Onion, to Great Hill Partners in 2019. But after the staff meeting, sources say, members of the tech team held a meeting with Knight to explain why the date was unrealistic. 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. These conversations reveal that Spanfellers biggest effect on the company since taking over has been a deflation of morale. The next day she refused to join me in communicating our plans to Susie. Spanfeller Media is working to redefine content for the digital era. Oberlander actually left last week. One of the former staffers said that as companies sought to double down on diversity and inclusion during the summer of 2020, the branded content team received incoming requests from companies hoping to fund content for The Root, G/O Media's Black news publication. For the life of me, I am not sure how you can have a legal review without a complete story and I cannot imagine how you can consider your work to be objective without reviewing the answers to the questions that you have asked. . "We have billions of dollars available to go out and buy and make this a bigger company, and that would really be our desire," Gaffney said. That said, I and the management team received a list of questions from the reporter working this story for Deadspin and those questions left me greatly concerned about the objectivity and core intentions of this piece. A week after Spanfeller insisted to Varietythat he did not plan to cut our way to growth, the CEO fired 25 employees, including in top positions, such as axing former Gizmodo Media Group editorial director Susie Banikarim. Jim Spanfeller - CEO - G/O Media | LinkedIn Mr. Spanfeller has a BA in English Literature from Union College, Schenectady, New York. Never mind the flood of negative stories about staff blowback over the company's editorial direction. It also wasnt communicated to me as a promotion until the day it was emailed out to the company.. When asked if she stood by the content of the since-disappeared post, Carmichael remained steadfast: I did really careful, thorough research, and the evidence is there. 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. When asked if it was inaccurate, then, to say she had accepted the job, Spanfeller did not respond. I was also hiring a good portion of these jobs before I actually took over day to day control of the company. When asked why he didnt consider the SVP, Spanfeller told Deadspin, I was unaware of her interest in the role and that Mike had made that commitment and Im sorry. Im not building a club, we are working to build a successful companyand that depends on great women and men.. 2. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. We sent a request for an explanation and did not receive a response. He previously served as President & Chief Executive Officer of Forbes.com, a leading media Internet company, and as Executive Vice President . (The people I work for and the people who report to me know what I do, Rogers, 63, told Deadspin in an email.). So put this piece on ice. Views. Soon after Flanagan started, other members of the sales team began to question his ability to do the job he was hired forspecifically, his ability to represent the websites and the company mission. In addition to clichs like we are ambitious and be passionate and have fun, the fifth value on the list said, We will be at our best when we embrace many different perspectives and experiences. A voter's representatives in government. Political party affiliation trends based on location. Spanfeller admitted he contacted Maidment in June after receiving my initial email requesting an interview. 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. Before we go any further, I feel compelled to acknowledge that nearly everything about this item is a conflict of interest. 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. Once it became clear that the sales department was being restructured in Kurt Muellers absence, another female vice president, who had been at the company for four years, asked McAvoy in early June for the opportunity to be considered for an expanded sales role, providing examples to show her success at the company. He started screaming at me, Who told you you were allowed to speak about audience? Jun 8, 2020, 7:03 AM. He sits on the Board of Directors of The New York Chapter of The National Foundation for Teaching . In addition to the removal of the post itself, Carmichael also discovered that shes now unable to use her personal Kinja account at all. 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. Answering a similar one, he seemed to contradict himself: This concern was expressed to me and I take it very seriously. It wasnt collaborative.. Deadspin Editor Quits, Rails Against Bosses: 'I've Been Repeatedly Lied The digital media and blogging network, which oversees websites like Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jezebel, A.V. In 1964, Spanfeller recieved the title of Artist of the Year from the Artists Guild of New York. I found this troubling but was okay with it given the circumstances. Which he would do by turning Deadspin into a sports-only website. ), The internal reaction to these hires has ranged from confusion to anger. Its everything Ive wanted and more.. Sources say that on the tech side of the company, Spanfeller has taken to micromanaging various aspects of developers work, holding meetings to ask what each one is working on, demanding detailed accounts of how they spend their working days, and mandating various projects based on his work at Forbes in the mid-2000s. In the email, Spanfeller said he was "greatly concerned about the objectivity and core intentions of this piece," and questioned the editorial standards of Deadspin's editors. 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. 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. Jim characterized that as a misunderstanding, she said. In one instance in which Spanfeller tried to promote a woman within the company, his offer came with strings attached. In the months that followed, without posting the jobs publicly, Spanfeller, 62, hired a stable of white men to fill executive positions overseeing nearly every facet of the company. He said the company was just profitable before the pandemic hit its business, and is now comfortably back in the black. They requested anonymity to speak candidly but their identities are known to Insider. At the same time, working with the EICs to set a general editorial direction is clearly in the purview of any owner.). ), Spanfeller described the situation differently. 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. 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. 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. G/O Media workers went on strike today in part to protect remote work. 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. Hes trying to micromanage, the tech employee said last week. Celebrities Who Are Republicans/Conservatives - HubPages 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.. The differences were as granular as whether to call published pieces "blogs" or "stories." While the archived version of the post did not preserve the original images, you can view a PDF of the original post below. 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. 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 confusion stems from a lack of communication. Meanwhile, many people who are still at the company feel their work is being hindered by new management. No media company does. Jim Spanfeller . The sales employee (who is not an SVP) wasnt surprised to hear that Spanfeller didnt know what she did. No one has been named interim editor, and there is no succession plan in place. Whats left of that company is currently called G/O Media. The detection of possible errors in a person's voter record as well as instructions on how to update it. Top Women at the Company Expressed Interest in Filling Executive Roles and Were Promised Interview Opportunities Prior to Spanfeller Hiring His Friends, Two G/O Media employees Deadspin spoke to, who are women who have an experienced track record with the company, say Spanfeller promised to give them a chance to interview for upper-level roles. Great Hill Partners and current CEO Jim Spanfeller, formerly of Forbes, bought these sites and the Onion from Univision Communications Inc. in April. (Deadspin reached out to 10 former Spanfeller employees at The Daily Meal; four consented to be interviewed, though all declined to be named because they fear retribution from Spanfeller or their current companies.) At an all-staff meeting this week, Knight told Spanfeller that August 15 is the target completion date, which Spanfeller told Deadspin he believes is achievable. That the story has been submitted for legal review without the benefit of our responses leads me to the conclusion that the piece is already fully written and that our responses to questions are mere window dressing. When pressed, Knight admitted the deadline may be unrealistic. Laura M. Browning and Caitlin PenzeyMoog, the A.V.
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