Rest In Pieces, G/O Media

Say what you will. It increased shareholder value.

Photo by Jack Crosbie

I tried for quite a long time to get hired at Splinter. Sort of. At first, my friend Avery, who was then at Gizmodo, emailed me and said that the site was looking for a new night editor, and then I had a relatively short “coffee” (actually I don’t drink coffee and I think we both would have preferred Diet Coke) with Aleks, and then I got the gig and was basically handed the keys to the website something like 72 hours later.

I spent the next 18 months at Splinter as an independent contractor, about a year of which I was basically on staff but not actually on staff, which was a situation I was trying to correct because I wanted health insurance. Up until about September of 2019, this seemed like a good possibility: Aleks had sent Splinter’s new owners, a private equity conglomerate named Great Hill Partners, the paperwork to get me hired. And then, well, you probably know the rest. I never did get hired. Instead, Great Hill killed Splinter, laid the whole staff off, and attempted to institute editorial policies so offensive that everyone at our sister site Deadspin quit their jobs.

Now, G/O Media, the company that Great Hill created to package together its digital media holdings, is being killed off. Today, the company announced that it was “winding down operations,” per the Times, and selling off one of its two remaining websites, Kotaku. The only site it still owns is The Root, which it is also trying to sell.

In some ways, I’m grateful for my time working at G/O Media, because it was one of the purest encapsulations of how digital media died—or was murdered—in the late 2010s. Other sites have had messier deaths, but Great Hill was always very open about what they were doing. They bought Gizmodo Media Group from Univision, put in a hapless but completely unquestioning CEO, and then aggressively ramped up stuff they called “targets” or “KPIs” or whatever, but which really meant we had to write more blogs and get more clicks with fewer resources. We all did that! And then they changed the asks again, froze hiring, and eventually killed off anything they couldn’t sell, all the while blaming it on their employees. And look! In the end, it gave us this, one of the funniest things that Jim Spanfeller, the man who oversaw all of this, could have said about the situation—one final dorky blunder from a truly stupid and evil individual. Per the Times:

Mr. Spanfeller was quick to say Great Hill had been “a very good partner” and had “never weighed in on editorial direction.”

“This is in no way a suggestion that Great Hill was in some way acting like a rapacious private equity firm,” he said.

In April, G/O Media sold the business news site Quartz and The Inventory, a commerce site, to Redbrick, a Canadian software company. In recent years, it also sold off Jalopnik, The Onion, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Deadspin and the A.V. Club. Mr. Spanfeller said that he was still working to find a buyer for The Root, but that G/O Media “will exit having increased shareholder value.”

Incredible. The private equity firm that did one of the most open and transparent slash-and-burn jobs in an entire era of open slash-and-burn jobs was NOT, in any way, according to Jim Spanfeller, “acting like a rapacious private equity firm.”

Those comments are part of a very long statement from Spanfeller, in which he rails endlessly against “Unions” for sinking the company—“in many more ways the core methods that Unions work with (or rather against) companies working hard to change with the times is counterproductive to both their membership as well as the companies as a whole”—and goes on a weird rant about the perils of “the writer as activist.” The whole thing is like this—shoddy and spiteful, like everything the guy did, a vague imitation of what he thinks an “editor in chief” should do used as a facade in front of his cutthroat-capitalist agenda.

It’s all the same song and dance. They have been doing it, in G/O’s case, for the better part of a decade now. In fact, getting to this point, I’m not sure what else there is to say about G/O Media. One day in the depth of summer I wore shorts that were, in hindsight, probably far too short to wear in a professional setting, and shared the elevator with Spanfeller. The next day they tried to institute a dress code at the office. I continued wearing the shorts. New York is hot, and one could hardly call the remnants of the Gawker media empire a “professional setting” even if Spanfeller himself did wear an endless string of chinos belted at roughly mid-hip height underneath gingham shirts.

There was a pretty good one of those midtown mega-bodegas that has both a big salad bar/sandwich counter situation and a second counter that sold Korean bibimbap bowls and ramen and stuff. It was great. For a while during that summer, Diet Coke was doing the crazy like lime and citrus flavors in the tall skinny cans, and I remember I would treat myself to one of those in the morning even though they were inexplicably $3 for some reason at the place that sold them. And then at some point in between my second and third blog of the day I would go back out and get like three or four regular Diet Cokes and share them with Aleks and Kath, which is exactly the kind of sucking up move a guy who is trying to get hired would do, but by that point we were all more or less friends in a way and mostly just trying to get through each day without Spanfeller’s weird British lackey coming by and leaning over our cubicles to offer some feedback on our blogs.

Sometimes if I was feeling real crazy, I would go to the Cuban place on 47th I think and get a Cuban sandwich on the way into the office, like, way before lunch even, just because it was there and not too busy at that time. This was also the summer of the Popeyes’ chicken sandwich, and one day Kath and I walked like 10 blocks through Times Square to find a Popeyes that wasn’t sold out, and honestly it was worth it. I guess what I’m saying is that mostly I remember going to lunch at G/O Media.

We did some good work, of course, but there was something surreal about clocking in each day in an office that still had the faded outline of the BET logo on the wall from the prior tenants, who had downsized and moved offices before G/O took over the lease. All of this, it seemed, was temporary. Our job in the meantime was to increase shareholder value. In the end, according to Jim, that’s what we all did. It’s the kind of quote that an enterprising reporter at a puckish online blog may have followed up on, at some point, just to see if Great Hill actually did make money from putting the careers of a couple hundred journalists in the blender, but lucky for Jim, most of those websites no longer exist.