All They Had To Do Was Nothing And They Couldn't Do It

G/O Media was even dumber than you think.

First off, let me assure you that the style of the letter that Jim Spanfeller wrote as he finally was able to burn down the last of G/O Media to explain himself--the mangled English, the complete lack of punctuation, the sentences that seemingly went on forever--were a constant feature of working there. Even when he had some 20+ editors working for him, he couldn't ever actually locate one to go through his company-wide missives that made little to no sense. What the public didn't get in this last letter was the size 7 font that we were usually treated to. You couldn't parse these things with the team from Arrival.

It's been a year since Deadspin, or Zombie Deadspin as it was labeled (fairly enough), was sold to some shady outfit and we were all put out to pasture. I haven't said much, and there hasn't been much to say. But now that Spanfeller has seemingly gone public for the last time in a while, now that every site save The Root has been sold off, I feel an urge.

In 2020, when I finally decided to take that job, I thought I knew the challenges. The thing is, when you've never had a real job, you can't really know the scope of idiocy you might find in corporate America. You might think you do, but you really have to be inside to fully comprehend. I had made a fist of it for 11 years on my own, this was my first foray with a real company and all that came with it.

I thought that after the noise died down after Deadspin relaunched, and I knew it would take a while, that the work I did would stand on its own, good or bad. I don't know if I rose to that challenge, or if it was too great, and I probably won't have those answers for a bit for a while anyway. But let me tell you, I had no idea the kind of morons we were going to work for. You think you know, but believe me, you don't.

The thing about Spanfeller, and all the cretins that were above our EICs at all the websites under that umbrella, that was so startling was how little they really needed to do, and they couldn't even manage that. This goes back to the original Deadspin. When G/O first took over, all they had to do was nothing. They already had a massively popular site with perhaps the most identifiable voice anywhere. That was true of AV Club, Jezebel, and the rest. It was as turnkey as anything could be.

I know the difference between profit and growth. I know that even if these sites were profitable, and I have no idea how profitable they were back in 2018 or 2019, that they would have to keep compounding that to satisfy the ghouls of Great Hill Partners. But I also know that should only have required some tweaks around the edges, and then put the thing on autopilot.

And they couldn't do that. I watched it all the time with every website we worked alongside as well at ours. I worked there four years, and I saw three pivots to video and back again. Spanfeller openly said he didn't know what editors did and didn't understand why they were necessary. How many posts we were supposed to put up every day changed monthly. When we did hit our monthly "quotas" of pageviews, they changed the next month. It was like the movie Gung Ho!, except it wasn't just one challenge. It was every month. And there was no Michael Keaton or George Wendt or John Turturro.

There was a time when Spanfeller was bitching that we didn't do much for fantasy sports. A writer was hired because of his expertise in fantasy sports and writing about it. Three months later, Spanfeller asked why we had fantasy sports coverage on the site. True story. This was the kind of scrambled leadership he provided every day. And whenever it didn't work, which was all the time, he yelled. Which is always the true sign of someone who has no idea what they're doing.

I know now that people like that just can't "do nothing." Even if something's working, they're so insecure about their own lacking skills that if they don't appear to be constantly tinkering and in charge. They have to look like they're constantly pulling levers. Otherwise, they're terrified someone might wonder what it is they do and get rid of them. Which I suppose is always a fair assumption with a company that's always looking for ways to do more with less.

This was the story with Spanfeller's insistence on us returning to the office after the pandemic. You guys know what I did, and you can probably figure out that it didn't matter from what location I did it. Same goes for everyone else. But making people show up to the office was something tangible, no matter how empty, that these execs could point to to show how they were in charge. It was an actual result, not just something on a spreadsheet. Which they couldn't produce.

Whenever we put together any kind of momentum, and there were actually a couple times when we did, Spanfeller and his cronies could find a way to fuck it up. Layoff a couple writers or editors, inundate what remaining editors we had with an impossible amount of work, make us write about something no one cared about, you name it. It was never more than a few weeks without some new, asinine directive. It was like that for everyone.

But then, I'm amazed at how many of our problems these days stem from people somehow refusing to do nothing. There are so many things that would be fine if most people just let them be, and they can't manage it. Spanfeller was put in charge of numerous sites that most people could identify easily and came with their own entrenched fanbases. Kick your feet up, go home at 2pm, and most everything would have been fine. It should have been a dream job. He couldn't even do that.