Never mind the flood of negative stories about staff blowback over the company's editorial direction. G/O Media, the newly formed company comprised of the assets of the former Gizmodo Media, will lay off 25 employees, according to a memo that company CEO Jim Spanfeller sent to staffers on Tuesday. 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. Multiple sources say Pontius declined to go along with the plan, angering Spanfeller. Naturally, we were dismayed to discover one more problemthe survey placed on Deadspin. Spanfeller said he would go into negotiations "with an open mind and good faith," but a former executive at the company predicted conflict at the negotiating table between the union and the CEO, given their view of Spanfeller's heavy-handed leadership style. Great Hill Partners is a growth equity company committed to building businesses. 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. I was also hiring a good portion of these jobs before I actually took over day to day control of the company. "We remain optimistic that our labor will be taken into consideration as this period of financial promise collides with a time that has been particularly rough on morale," the Onion Union statement said. Spanfeller Hired Media Friends/Former Colleagues to Fill G/O Media Roles Just After Claiming He Had No Plans for Major Turnover. McAvoy described the SVP of marketing job as a combination of sales strategy, account management, and managing creative teamsall responsibilities that fell under the SVPs purview. This is the same thing that has also happened to Deadspin. Clubs executive editor and managing editor, respectively, stepped down on July 12. I hired Katie who accepted the job, he wrote. John Taggart for The Washington Post / Getty Images. 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. A source at the company familiar with the situation said Thompsons hire had been flagged to upper management as a potential problem. Sources say the meeting concluded with an agreement that the best course of action would be to explain to Spanfeller why the player would not be finished by August 15. (The other woman on the executive leadership team, general counsel Lynn Oberlander, left the company this week.) 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. [11], Spanfeller ran Forbes.com for 8 years from 2001 to 2009, when digital and print operations were run separately. ), This isnt the first time Spanfeller has been accused of micromanaging. It was four days old. Mr. McAvoy was clear to me on his opinion that he did not think she was the right choice at this time, Spanfeller said. That is clearly evident when you note the poor syntax and galling bias of the questions. Club, and Splinter, was purchased by the firm in April, along with the satirical news site The Onion, which led to a massive shift in the companys culture and considerable turnover in the top ranks or, as one G/O Media employee put it, Spanfeller has brought in a bunch of white dudes to change the company. But those efforts did not go very far, the people said, and the company has yet to mount a takeover. Thats not reality, a tech staffer told Deadspin. Deadspin cited an account from a former writer at The Daily Meal, a food and beverage site that Spanfeller founded in 2015, who claims her former boss once started screaming at her because she voiced concerns about writing a story on the websites earning figures, which she felt she was not qualified for. Youre not qualified. In early April, Great Hill Partners, a private-equity firm, acquired Gizmodo Media Groupa collection of sites, formed from the assets of the old Gawker, that included Jezebel, Lifehacker, and Deadspinas well as The Onion, a satirical news site, reportedly at a fire-sale price.The company, renamed G/O Media, installed Jim Spanfeller, formerly of Forbes.com, Playboy, and Ziff Davis, as CEO. They cant even pitch effectively, said another employee who was present. Page 1 of 9,554,641. 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. Why Ketanji Brown Jackson Split With the Courts Liberals in a 54 Decision, the firing of beloved editor Barry Petchesky, According to Great Hill Partners website, increasingly insisted on directing editorial coverage. The Daily Meal was acquired by Tronc in 2016. Well keep fighting for whats right. Combined with more data-driven metrics like unique views, how long a reader spends on a story, and how many times a story is shared, reader feedback can provide useful information. 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.. I think the general sentiment coming out of that meeting, at least for some of the senior sales people, was like, these guys are going to lead our sales team? Announcing Persauds hire on July 10, Spanfeller wrote this of the process: After a very fulsome search where we interviewed dozens of qualified candidates we identified two finalists. (check all that apply); and What do you like LEAST about Deadspin? Steve Riley on February 14, 2013: Just right off the bat. Spanfeller said no one told him that a female VP was already successfully performing that job before he hired Thompson. 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. A source said Spanfeller told editors-in-chief of the companys websites that he had chosen Maidment, 68, for the job before the sale was completed and did not interview other candidates, including Banikarim. 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. 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. Vice president for west coast sales Steve Thompson, who worked with Spanfeller at, Vice president for east coast sales Sean Flanagan, who worked with Spanfeller at. He sits on the Board of Directors of The New York Chapter of The National Foundation for Teaching . 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. 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. 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. A senior vice president who has worked for what is now G/O Media for four and a half years met with Spanfeller in the companys Chicago office shortly after he purchased the company in April. The union said that it wants the money to translate into higher salary minimums, trans-inclusive healthcare, and a focus on talent retention. James J. Spanfeller Jr. is an American media executive best known for running Forbes.com from 2001-2009. 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. This is normal in situations like these where a new group is coming in and is facing a near term challenge.. 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. [12][13], In 2011, Spanfeller launched The Daily Meal with an estimated $2 million investment. Gov. [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. Great Hill Partners did not disclose the financial terms of the private, all equity transaction but stated in a press release that Spanfeller is an investor. "[17], "Great Hill Partners Agrees to Acquire Gizmodo Media Group", "Great Hill Partners Acquires Gizmodo Media Group", "President & CEO, Jim Spanfeller Named as IAB Chairman", "Alumni Album: Helping Us Connect to the Web", "Advertising; 4 Young Executives On Move at Newsweek", "Playboy Hires 2 New Execs; Title of Publisher Goes to 1", "New Gizmodo boss Jim Spanfeller is an old school digital media vet", "After Days Of Resignations, The Last Of The Deadspin Staff Has Quit", "Deadspin Is ZombifiedBut Gawker's Content Warriors Fight On", "The Media-Sensational Rise and Fall of "Jim Spanfeller Is a Herb", "GMG Union votes no confidence in G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jim_Spanfeller&oldid=1074755870, This page was last edited on 2 March 2022, at 00:52. Views. 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. Clashes between the Gawker Media editorial culture and the company's new private equity owner seemed inevitable from the start. In 1964, Spanfeller recieved the title of Artist of the Year from the Artists Guild of New York. In a follow-up meeting with Spanfeller about the story, she suggested that hard financial data might not be their audiences central interest. Jim Justice speaks during President Donald Trump's political rally inside the Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington on Thursday. While the archived version of the post did not preserve the original images, you can view a PDF of the original post below. I was sorry and that is accurate, he said. It was a welcome refrain for employees all too aware of how the company had languished under Univisions doomed ownership. 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. 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. We have also learned the tech team has been asked to post the survey again. 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. Two are now successfully navigating careers in the digital advertising space. Jim Spanfeller has 2 current jobs as Founder at The Daily Meal and Chief Executive Officer at G/O Media. He previously served as President & Chief Executive Officer of Forbes.com, a leading media Internet company, and as Executive Vice President . "We were a leftist site, not a liberal one, which gives you a sense of how closely Spanfeller followed our work," he said. 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. I have definitely given positive feedback to numerous women, including senior executives in edit, sales, and marketing, he offered instead. Spanfeller responded that he would be happy to get together, but did not say anything about open roles. These actions are clearly management attempting to target, and even intimidate, staff into changing their editorial stance in spite of our contract-protected independence, especially as it comes on the heels of managements repeated attempts to kill this story as it was being reported about the company. Youre not qualified. Elsewhere in the company, G/O Media has pushed staffers at its site the AV Club to relocate to Los Angeles from Chicago, according to a recent report in Gawker, which is now owned by Bustle Digital Group. 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. I told Mike, verbally and in writing, that I would be interested in taking on new responsibilities and opportunities within the organization and I would like to interview for whatever position would be a part of that, she told Deadspin. "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 . 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. I was going on the input I had been given by Mike McAvoy that he had discussed the position with her and laid out why she was not ready for the larger role. My territory has been cut in half. I read that she's a registered Republican in Texas. The other is still in college., Four of nine major hires have been women, Spanfeller said. Asked about the former employees accounts, Spanfeller said he has no idea what this refers to and it is not my recollection of working at The Daily Meal, adding that he doesnt recall screaming at anyone. 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. Lastly, I firmly believe, personally, that Jim Spanfeller is a herb. Then, in early June, former Onion CEO Mike McAvoy, whountil he was separated from the company on July 11had been leading sales across all the sites, told the SVP that Spanfeller had hired two new sales leaders, Flanagan and Thompson. Everything theyve done in reaction to it is the herbiest shit I could possibly imagine. 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.
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