The last staff member of the popular sports website Deadspin has quit following the resignation of more than twenty journalists during the week.
The shocking resignation of the members of Deadspin’s staff started on Tuesday when Barry Petchesky, the interim editor in chief was fired. According to reports, Petchesky was relieved of his duties because of his refusal to obey management order to post only sports-related subjects on the site. The next day, eight staff members turned in their resignation in protest of the decision to fire the chief editor. Other writers and editors did the same on Thursday, leaving Diana Moskovitz as the last standing staff of Deadspin.
Moskovitz had turned in her resignation two weeks ago and was supposed to stop work on Friday. During her stay in Deadspin, Moskovitz often worked from a Starbucks in Manhattan on most Fridays. On her last workday, Moskovitz
put up a post at 10:24 a.m. In the very short post, she said yes to a question she had asked about Deadspin being a good sports blog.
The post had more 110,000 page views before the day ended. However, Ms. Moskovitz was surprised that no one from G/O Media reached out to her on her last workday. “I really can’t tell if they just didn’t remember or simply do not care that I was there,” she said. Moskovitz added that sometime during the afternoon, she noticed that she could no longer access the site’s content management system.
The chief executive of G/O Media Jim Spanfeller said in an interview on Friday that they have already contacted some recruiters who are trying to find great people for the sports website. “We don’t just want to recruit any old person, we want to employ good people,” he said. G/O Media is the company that manages Deadspin for private equity firm Great Hill Partners.
Commenting on the swift collapse of Deadspin, one of its staff who resigned on Thursday days that he was not convinced that the site will ever be as good as it used to be.
