One of the biggest staff rebellions in online media took place last year, when all of the journalists working at the irreverent, sports-centric website Deadspin resigned in protest after clashing with their bosses.
Now Deadspin’s former writers and editors — 18 of the roughly 20 who quit last year — have reunited to start a digital media company, Defector Media, that they will own and operate themselves.
Defector Media is scheduled to start a podcast next month and roll out its website in September, its founders said. Tom Ley, a former features editor at Deadspin, will be the editor in chief. The business side will be led by Jasper Wang, a former Bain & Company employee who said he had been an avid Deadspin reader since age 19.
Defector’s founders said the company had no outside investors, and each employee has taken a stake of roughly 5 percent in the venture. Unlike Deadspin, a free site that relies on ads, Defector will offer subscriptions at $8 a month, with an annual subscription available at a discount.
The 19 staff members will be paid as the money comes in, and they can vote out the editor in chief with a two-thirds majority. They will also own their own intellectual property, meaning they will get the money if Hollywood shows an interest in their work for Defector.
“If you’re going to take a moonshot, you may as well do it exactly the way you want to,” said Kelsey McKinney, a former Deadspin writer who has joined the new company.
The dispute at Deadspin became heated about a year ago, when journalists at the site published an investigative piece that was critical of Deadspin’s own parent company, G/O Media, as well as of Great Hill Partners, the private equity firm that had taken control of G/O Media in April 2019.
In October, Paul Maidment, then the editorial director of G/O Media, which also operates The Onion, Jezebel, The Root and other websites, sent a memo to the Deadspin staff, telling them to stick to publishing articles that had something to do with sports.
Staff members pushed back against what they saw as management’s crossing a line by getting involved in the editorial process. After they published articles on a pumpkin thief and how to dress for a wedding, the top editor, Barry Petchesky, was fired. Within a week, the rest of the site’s reporters and editors had quit in protest.
Since the exodus, Deadspin itself has carried on under G/O Media, moving to Chicago from New York and hiring Jim Rich, a former editor in chief of The Daily News, as its newsroom leader. (He is now G/O Media’s editorial director.)
While the people who left Deadspin plan to write on sports for the new site, they will be free to go off-topic when the mood strikes them.
After their departures last year, they created a Twitter feed, @UnDeadspin, to highlight articles by former Deadspin journalists published by other outlets. They also reprised the distinctive Deadspin voice in pop-up blogs around the time of the Super Bowl and again in April.
“A lot of us felt adrift,” Mr. Ley said. “If we felt that way, it’s likely there are pretty significant numbers of former readers who felt that way and would be willing to pay money to have that kind of publication come back.”
The former Deadspin staff members also received emails from fans of the site, which had started in 2005 under the publisher Gawker Media. One came from Mr. Wang, of Bain & Company. Before the pandemic, he met with former Deadspin people at the Gold Star Beer Counter in Brooklyn. Now he finds himself taking on the challenge of starting a moderately staffed digital outlet as its vice president of revenue and operations.
“The hardest part is still the hard part,” Mr. Wang said, “which is having writers with talent and followings, and having these writers willing to hold hands and jump together. Once they decided to do that, building the scaffolding of the business is easier than it’s ever been.”
He said he was optimistic because readers have become accustomed to paying for online content, noting the sports fans who subscribe to The Athletic. He added that vendors like Pico, Stripe and MailChimp have made it easier for media companies to outsource business functions. In addition, he said, the thinning of newspaper sports sections, the dissolution of ESPN the Magazine and layoffs at Sports Illustrated may have created a vacuum.
Defector staff members said they did not expect the kind of growth coveted by the venture capitalists who have increasingly dominated online journalism. Rather, they said, they hoped to be able to pay themselves competitive salaries while developing a sustainable media business that produces content they are interested in.
“It would be cool to show that this could be successful,” said Samer Kalaf, a former Deadspin managing editor who has joined Defector. “If we tried it and it doesn’t work, at least we can say we tried it.”
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