🔒The jobless heroes of a dead sports blog

Oct. 30, 2019 marked a profound and great day in the history of American ideals, which left the heroes at the center of this story jobless.

Rather than kowtow to the edicts of its private equity ownership to avoid controversial topics, the entire editorial staff of the sports blog Deadspin resigned from their jobs, essentially killing the website they and others had built up for the last 14 years.

I had been a regular reader of Deadspin, consuming 90% or more of its content, far more than any other website. Sure, I’m a sports fan, but that isn’t why I chose the site over dozens of others. What made Deadspin great was the virtue at the heart of the blog: Question everything.

This virtue should be at the heart of every journalism publication, but this unfortunately isn’t the case for most. Corporate interests, overworked staff, and the need to appear balanced to both sides have slowly eroded this basic tenant.

The mantra journalism schools used to teach was “If your mother tells you she loves you, get a second source.” Today, newsrooms have replaced that with “Get a statement from the opposing side, and copy & paste it into the article.”

This matters. Here is a reason why.

One of my all-time favorite baseball players is Ty Cobb, who played from 1905 to 1928. The all-time leader in batting average, Cobb was the antithesis to the praise Babe Ruth received for smashing home runs. Since I had always been one to go against the flow, Cobb was my perfect strong-willed sports idol. For years, though, I had to square my admiration with his reputation as an awful person – a racist who was hated by his teammates and opponents alike and who may have beaten a man to death. This reputation was memorialized in the movie “Cobb.”

However, this narrative took a hard turn when writer Charles Leerhsen began researching and found nearly all of the unsavory stories about Cobb were untrue and originally came from a writer who had a reputation for plagiarism. In Leerhsen’s book “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty” the author shows how this hateful representation of Cobb became considered as fact as other writers, journalists and documentarians never questioned conventional wisdom and simply repeated the claims.

Essentially, one of the pioneers of American sports had his reputation smeared for more than 50 years because no one bothered to question conventional wisdom.

Deadspin was founded in 2005 and earned its reputation and notoriety over time, but the blog took a big leap forward in the public consciousness in 2013. Early that year, a group of its reporters wrote how the inspirational and widely publicized story of the deceased girlfriend of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o had been a hoax. Te’o had been unknowingly catfished by someone online, but he knew about the hoax for weeks and only spoke about it publicly after the Deadspin story came out.

As much as the story was a feather in the cap of Deadspin, it was egg on the face for the mainstream sports media – like ESPN and CBS Sports – who repeated the untrue deceased girlfriend story over and over again in fawning articles and videos about Te’o’s inspirational backstory.

With its motto as “Sports News Without Access, Favor, Or Discretion,” Deadspin used a brazen style, as it challenged widely held beliefs and questioned authority at every turn – or as the site’s writers often said, spoke truth to power. When the NFL denied it had blacklisted quarterback Colin Kapernick because of his protests over police brutality, Deadspin wrote about every inferior quarterback who was playing in the NFL. When a student died while filming the Notre Dame football practice for the team, Deadspin asked what the team’s head coach knew and why he hadn’t moved the practice out of the dangerous conditions leading to the student’s death. When ESPN corporate issued edicts to its on-air personalities to avoid topics potentially harming its partnerships with sports leagues, Deadspin called the sports media giant out.

Yet, Deadspin was a lot of fun, too. The blog regularly posted videos of dogs doing funny things like snowboarding, and – in one of my favorite posts – said the true sports highlight of the day was from a nature documentary where a newborn lizard deftly escapes certain death at the clutches of dozens of sea snakes.

The demise of Deadspin was swift and brutal. It was bought in April by company controlled by Boston private equity firm Great Hill Partners. In October, the company’s executives told Deadspin to only write about sports, even though anyone who ever spent more than a day reading the blog could tell its appeal lied in its seemingly random but interconnected stories, picked by the whims of the wonderful collection of misfits who made up its editorial staff. On Oct. 29, after its staff refused to stick to sports, the interim editor-in-chief was fired. The next day, all 20 of the blog’s editorial staff quit.

In order to keep their jobs, the Deadspin writers and editors could have simply bowed to their owner’s demands, following in the paths of countless others who have compromised their morals and ideals to maintain a steady income. They even might have been able to carve out some resemblance of the site’s old brazen speak-truth-to-power, question-everything voice while still abiding by the stick-to-sports demand. But rather than let the blog limp on for years as a shell of its former self, the Deadspin staff decided to kill it outright.

That was a heroic decision.

Everywhere I look, I see diminished journalism. ESPN sold its journalism soul for broadcast rights deals with sports leagues. CNN and Fox News seemingly only exist to antagonize each other and drum up support on opposite sides of the political aisle. In Central Massachusetts, the parent company of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and the MetroWest Daily News – GateHouse Media – bought the owner of USA Today – Gannett – for $1.4 billion this month, creating the largest newspaper company in the country. Its values don’t put journalism at the forefront, since GateHouse has a history of laying off workers while simultaneously offering financial incentives to shareholders and already is touting the $300 million in cost savings the acquisition will create.

This is why I’m grateful for WBJ’s independent ownership. CEO and Co-owner Peter Stanton’s office is less than 40 steps from my own. I have a complete understanding of his priorities for the company, and if conflict ever arises, Peter is a conversation away. My own style isn’t as brazen as Deadspin’s, but Peter ultimately has backed WBJ editorial’s independence when we have spoken truth to power, like our coverage of the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions, the lack of people of color in the legal marijuana industry, and the questionable economics behind the Worcester Red Sox stadium deal. These days, I doubt most journalists have the kind of editorial freedom WBJ provides.

As a reader, the demise of Deadspin really bums me out, as reading the site every day was always the right combination of entertainment, inspiration and information. Yet, as a journalist, knowing a group of people stood up for what they believed to the point where it cost them their jobs gives me hope and motivation for the future of the American ideals of freedom and independence. Ten years from now, probably only a handful of people will care about the former sports blog Deadspin and how its journalists quit before they would compromise their values; but I will be among those who remember, and that’s all that matters to me.