Ex-Editor of Daily News to Resuscitate Deadspin

The publisher of irreverent sports website Deadspin tapped a former editor-in-chief of the Daily News on Thursday to lead rebuilding efforts, nearly three months after a staff exodus over what employees characterized as editorial meddling.

Admirers credit Jim Rich, the site’s new editor-in-chief, with revitalizing the Daily News as a sharp liberal counterpoint to its conservative rival, the New York Post. At the Daily News, Rich also presided over an investigation into police evictions that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

G/O Media, Deadspin’s owner, said Rich would work in Chicago, where Deadspin recently moved after 15 years in New York.

Deadspin, which promises “Sports News Without Access, Favor or Discretion,” occupies a distinctive place in sports media. It earned acclaim for a 2013 investigation that exposed as a hoax the death of college football star Manti Te’o’s long-distance girlfriend. (Te’o was fooled into thinking she was real.) The article epitomized the site’s sardonic yet rigorous coverage of the sports world, which it defined broadly.

“One of the things that we will continue to do is take on the issues and the stories that other sites traditionally shy away from, even if they make people a little uncomfortable,” Rich said in an interview.

Jim Spanfeller, G/O Media’s chief executive, said Rich’s “extensive experience as a reporter and editor will enable him to rebuild and lead Deadspin into the future.”

That ability is also likely to depend on Spanfeller, who has been running G/O Media since April, when Boston private equity firm Great Hill Partners bought Deadspin along with several other sites that Gawker Media once owned — including Jezebel, Gizmodo and Lifehacker.

Spanfeller’s firing in October of Deadspin’s interim editor-in-chief, Barry Petchesky, who had refused to obey an editorial directive to stick to sports, prompted more than a dozen staff members to head for the doors. Deadspin has not published anything since Nov. 4.

This month, 97% of the G/O Media editorial staff members who are represented by the GMG Union supported a vote of no confidence in Spanfeller, the union said. In a statement posted to Twitter on Thursday, the union said it objected to the decision to move the editor-in-chief position away from New York without negotiating.

A spokesman for G/O Media declined to make Spanfeller available for further comment Thursday.

G/O Media was profitable in its previous two quarters, for the first time since the sites were combined in 2015, the company said last month in an emailed news release.

Rich, who was ousted as the Daily News editor in 2018 when its owner halved the newsroom staff, said he sympathized with the former writers and editors.

“It’s not a decision you make lightly when you’re weighing your livelihood against your journalistic principles,” said Rich, who has edited sports at both the Daily News and the Post and was a Huffington Post executive editor.

He said that G/O Media had approached him and given him assurances that “led me to believe that I was not going to be constrained as far as my editorial decision-making and that I was going to be able to go after whatever story I felt we needed to.”

His next task is to build a staff, and he said he welcomed all applicants — including those who left the site in the fall.

Laura Wagner, a former Deadspin writer who covered media — and who posted a long Deadspin article in August about G/O Media’s management — said, “I understand media is a tough industry, and I’m sympathetic to the fact that people may be desperate for jobs.”

But she said she doubted that ex-Deadspinners would rejoin the site under current management: “That’s not going to happen.”