We may earn a commission from links on this page. I think the thing thats most strange about it is that they didnt coordinate with the editorial side of the business. A spokesperson for G/O has yet to respond to a request for clarification, but we will update this post if and when that changes. In all of those cases Jim listened to my arguments and in many cases agreed with me and the issue was settled, he wrote in response to one question. , in respect of a candidate, means the name of the political party that has endorsed him or her or the word "independent", as the case may be, included in the nomination paper in accordance with subparagraph 66 (1) (a) (v). Internet Life, a joint publication of Ziff-Davis and Yahoo!. [10] Spanfeller was also responsible for advertising sales on the magazine's website and that of Yahoo! If I had known, I would have been happy to interview her and consider her for the role., On June 20, the next time Spanfeller was in Chicago, the SVP met with him to ask why she had been overlooked. In an email, Flanagan disagreed with those assessments: Simply not true. As for the content of the survey, Reibstein said it is possible to read it as innocent, a way to attempt to gauge customer satisfaction, as its known in the marketing industry. 12-Year-Old Prankster Throws Dead Snake on Woman's Car and Gets Flattened by Husband 15,743. Opinion | A clash of values at former Gawker Media sites As for why that move was never announced, Spanfeller told Deadspin he believed Mike McAvoy would announce Rogers arrival, even though Spanfeller hired Rogers and he has announced other hires across the company since taking over. [9], In 1996, Spanfeller left his job at Inc., where he had become publisher, to become publisher of Yahoo! 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. Gizmodo and The Onion's New Owner Lays Off 25, Including - TheWrap Or to keep it anonymous, click here. 1. Justice announced he was switching his party affiliation . Im kind of a tipsy at a bar in Paris, she added. Views. We shall have a discussion on the policy at the next EiCs leads meeting. 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. Its Extremely Revealing. A week after Spanfeller insisted to Variety that 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. 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. A G/O Media spokesperson said the company plans to grow the 174-person editorial headcount to 200 by the end of the first quarter next year. Ultimately, the issue of building a wall has raised political risk, Cramer said. 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. Never mind the flood of negative stories about staff blowback over the company's editorial direction. They include: (Spanfeller declined to be interviewed in person but answered emailed questions. "I think that most media company CEOs probably are as involved as I am," Spanfeller said. Multiple employees on the tech team say the chief technology officer, Jesse Knight, has repeatedly shown himself unable or unwilling to stand up to Spanfeller and advocate for his team and best practice standards. Former Daily News Editor in Chief Is Tapped to Run Deadspin Additionally, Jim Spanfeller has had 6 past jobs including CEO at Forbes. [2][3], Spanfeller graduated from Union College with a B.A. There are regions that were within my scope of responsibilities and within my role that I cannot call on and neither can my team.. Spanfeller said he asked for the survey; Rogers said he wrote it; and editorial director Paul Maidment said he didnt approve it, but he told Deadspin editor-in-chief Megan Greenwell that he did not attempt to stop it from running on the site when he was filled in shortly before it was scheduled to go up. Spanfellers executive assistant set up a time for us to meet. "People are scared of him. Where people are registered to vote. This has led to some protest among employees, as one staffer told Deadspin, It definitely feels like its the old boys club. A second employee told the site, This guy just seems like he doesnt like women.. In one case, sources say Spanfeller did offer to promote a woman to run human resources, but on the condition she fire another woman at the company as her first order of business. It is ridiculous to launch a management survey questioning the editorial value of the site. Senior vice president of marketing Bruce Rogers, who worked with Spanfeller at Forbes. He previously served as President & Chief Executive Officer of Forbes.com, a leading media Internet company, and as Executive Vice President . Details may include related records, political party, location, and more. "Jim Spanfeller Is a Herb": The rise and fall of a blog post. 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. tips@mediaite.com, Caleb Ecarma was a reporter at Mediaite. As with any reporting process, we asked questions intending to incorporate the answers. The person hired was Bruce Rogers, who most recently ran the institute arm of SITO Mobile, a mobile data company. The job, however, came with a condition, they said: Pontiuss first order of business would be to fire newsroom editorial director Susie Banikarim. (10 is very satisfied, 1 is very unsatisfied); What do you like MOST about Deadspin? Voting precincts and districts. 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. Other top employees who have left the company since the start of Spanfellers reign include former A.V. View details on more than 95 Million registered voters across the United States. "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. Asked for a response to the latter allegation, Spanfeller responded, That is absurd. 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. Which he would do by turning Deadspin into a sports-only website. Initially, we had to move fast because the company was losing money at a rapid pace, he said. Deadspin Is ZombifiedBut Gawker's Content Warriors Fight On Another former Daily Meal staffer said that management was straight-up scared of Spanfeller, adding, I can see why. Follow him on Twitter here: @calebecarma. Spanfeller Media is working to redefine content for the digital era. Multiple people who worked for him at The Daily Meal (part of Spanfeller Media Group) told Deadspin that Spanfeller couldnt cede any control. Have a tip or story idea? G/O Media Workers Call on Owners to Replace CEO - WSJ The differences were as granular as whether to call published pieces "blogs" or "stories." 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? View Jim Spanfeller's professional profile on LinkedIn. That management did not respond to our request for an explanation is only another of the many ways the workers at GMG have been ignored and put on the back burner in the name of a profitability mirage that is clearly more attractive to the big decision-makers than a functioning workplace. Jim Spanfeller Biography | Booking Info for Speaking Engagements Jim Spanfeller - Wikipedia It also wasnt communicated to me as a promotion until the day it was emailed out to the company.. Whats left of that company is currently called G/O Media. Vacillating Wildly From Dispiriting to Exhilarating. Spanfeller told Insider that G/O Media plans to reinvest the profits into the business. Jim Justice speaks during President Donald Trump's political rally inside the Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington on Thursday. Clashes between the Gawker Media editorial culture and the company's new private equity owner seemed inevitable from the start. 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. [7], Spanfeller was named associate publisher and senior vice president of marketing of Playboy Enterprises in April 1989. For instance, Rogers, who sits in a corner office in New York, still hasnt been formally announced as a new employee internally or externally, and sources who work in sales say its unclear what his job description is, though he evidently has plenty of time to contribute to Forbes, where he posted 14 articles in July. "There's been a lot of pain in this, but it's worth it to get properties that are as great as these properties are," Spanfeller said of G/O's 11 publications, which include Gizmodo, Jezebel, The Onion, Lifehacker, The Root, and Kotaku. "You're not a 'blogger,' you're a professional journalist. The survey on Deadspin, however, had some serious issues, he said. So Out of Touch: Gen Z Congressman-Elect Mocks RNC Tweet Criticizing Him For His Housing Woes. Jim Spanfeller - Big Think They requested anonymity to speak candidly but their identities are known to Insider. "We closed Splinter because it was a liberal political site that was losing audience in the middle of a liberal moment," he said. About their hires, he wrote, I introduced Steve and Lance to Mike McAvoy, but I did not make the hires. That union also opposes G/O Media's recent requirement to return to in-person work. Jeremy Gordon Oct292019 03:41PM EST. In addition to the removal of the post itself, Carmichael also discovered that shes now unable to use her personal Kinja account at all. Clubs executive editor and managing editor, respectively, stepped down on July 12. Email him here: caleb@mediaite.com Jim Spanfeller Biography & Works of Art | Qart.com [15][16] In January 2020 the GMG union, which represents the staff of G/O media, announced a vote of no confidence in CEO Jim Spanfeller citing, among other issues, a lack of willingness to negotiate for "functional editorial independence protections. McAvoy told her she would be able to interview for a bigger role, she said, only to follow up a few weeks later and say that Rogers had been hired. The appropriate thing to do would be to talk to the editorial side of the business and have a clear objective for the survey.. Youre not qualified. It laid off 14 staffers in the summer of 2020. "We were a leftist site, not a liberal one, which gives you a sense of how closely Spanfeller followed our work," he said. 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. Mr. Rich, who will report to G/O Media Chief Executive Jim Spanfeller, . 20 Employees Complained to Deadspin About Spanfellers Management, After interviewing nearly two dozen employees, Deadspin found that 20 people who work for 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.. Mad Money Twitter - Jim . Neither Sean nor Jim ever reached out to ask, Hey, what are you doing, how are you doing it, how is it working? There was never a conversation about my role, she told Deadspin. Spanfeller Media Group ( SMG ), a subsidiary of publishing company Tribune Publishing, is a digital media company based in New York City. The SVP shared her teams revenue goals and their success in meeting those goals, staying focused on numbers and her teams value because she knew her work would be key to profit margins. Or as Carmichael explained, If you dont know what a herb is, youre probably a herb.. G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller: Company Will Be Profitable by - Insider He sits on the Board of Directors of The New York Chapter of The National Foundation for Teaching . "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. Spanfeller accused writers and editors of acting in bad faith based on a list of questions submitted to him before publication and the fact that a draft of the article had been sent for legal. 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The Daily Meal was acquired by Tronc in 2016. Jack Crosbie, a former Splinter contractor and co-owner of Discourse, said that traffic declined at Splinter because G/O did not refill lost positions. While these high-ranking women were being overlooked and bypassed, Spanfeller evidently was concerned about retaining at least one other VP on the sales side. When confronted with this negative feedback, Spanfeller insisted that he cannot be sexist because he has daughters. New York(CNN Business) Two former executives are suing G/O Media, the parent company of sites including Gizmodo, Deadspin and The Onion, alleging discrimination and negligence. The anger stems from Spanfellers apparent disregard for his own stated company values, which include a commitment to diversity and inclusion. I read that she's a registered Republican in Texas. The tech team managed to execute the move in about a month, but before they had finished, Spanfeller changed course and decided that the developers should build an entirely new video platform and player from scratch, explaining the decision by saying that that was what he did at Forbes, according to employees involved. Asked about the meeting, Knight initially didnt answer. The role was not posted nor was it communicated to me in time where I would have even been given equal opportunity to be considered, she said. Spanfeller Has an Alleged History of Screaming at Women Employees. []. Jim Spanfeller has 2 current jobs as Founder at The Daily Meal and Chief Executive Officer at G/O Media. John Taggart for The Washington Post via Getty Images, NOW WATCH: WATCH: How advertisers can navigate the death of third-party cookies, according to execs from Mars Petcare, R/GA, The Washington Post, and The Trade Desk, Clashes between the Gawker Media editorial culture. (Pontius left the company.) Jim has a different recollection of the facts, McAvoy reiterated. 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. He also claimed to have hired four women for major roles though, one of these jobs has not been filled yet, as Spanfeller instead claims he plans to give it to a woman. Still, tensions between management and staff are high at the company as it prepares to enter negotiations with the G/O Media editorial union, one of the two unions representing editorial workers at the company. Jim Rich, the former Daily News editor charged with bringing Deadspin back to life following a mass staff exodus, has resigned after just 18 months on the job, The Post has learned. Deadspin Editor Quits, Rails Against Bosses: 'I've Been Repeatedly Lied [5] Upon returning from Europe, Spanfeller took a position at AMP Marketing Systems. Legal review is often a lengthy process involving multiple reads, so talking to a lawyer is certainly not an indication that we would publish without completing the reporting process. 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.