What the Deadspin battle means for all of us

The latest in the increasingly public tensions between G/O Media (the owners who took over all the ex-Gawker sites earlier this year) and the actual sites — most visibly, Deadspin — & staffers themselves has spilled over this week into an all-out war, and here’s everything you should read to get up to speed:

• From August: Former editor-in-chief Megan Greenwell chronicles in detail all the ways Great Hill Partners (the private equity firm behind G/O Media) mismanaged the hell out of the sites
  

• From Monday: The Daily Beast reports on a leaked memo from G/O Media to Deadspin staff to “stick to sports,” probably in an attempt to put a kibosh on all the coverage of the internal dysfunction, but also bc management seems stupidly hellbent on muscling all these ex-Gawker sites into becoming something they are just not???
  

• Also from Monday: GMG Union (officially Gizmodo Media Group Union, but for our purposes, it’s The Gawker Union) publishes “A Note To Our Readers” that rails against the new spammy autoplay ads (presumably forced on them by management) on all their sites and encourages their readers to literally email G/O Media management to complain. (The actual note appears to be unavailable now, but the tweet’s there^^).
  
  Apparently, so many readers did this that G/O management disabled forwarding for the email address within a day.
  

• Yesterday: Deadspin’s deputy editor, Barry Petchesky, gets fired for “not sticking to sports,” and the entire Deadspin homepage was found to rebelliously display some of their greatest non-sports hits: 

  

  The GMG Union tweeted out that “This will not stand,” and that they’ll have updates soon. You can follow ‘em @gmgunion. 

Naturally, Twitter has been aflutter, not in the least because these ex-Gawker sites still have massively loyal followings, staffers, and alums all deeply entrenched in digital media, but the significance of this ~Deadspin drama~ goes beyond just signaling your NY Media Insider status: This is a digital era labor dispute escalating to the likes of which we haven’t seen before.

On one side, you’ve got a crowd favorite who knows how to harness public sentiment / the power of (at least a very influential side of) the internet like none other. On the other: moneyed ownership with the power to, lest we all forget, shut it all down if they really felt like it. 

Notably, neither side has backed down (whereas even Vox Union’s walkout last summer eventually got results), and we’re deeply interested in how the GMG Union plans to further rebel. Factor in their historic status as the first digital media worker’s union ever….and we’ve got a preview of the kind of battle that we’ll probably all end up getting involved with someday.