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The Deadspin takedown covered numerous issues that have arisen since Univisions sale of the company to Great Hill, ranging from accounts of Spanfeller screaming at past employees, to allegations that the new G/O Media boss is on-boarding his old media buddies over highly qualified women who have worked at the company for years, along with numerous other accusations of mismanagement. The Onion Union, which represents AV Club staffers, told Insider in a statement that it hoped "this period of prosperity creates tangible benefits for all of our members especially those whose jobs are being moved to Los Angeles, one of the most expensive cities in the world.". Clubs executive editor and managing editor, respectively, stepped down on July 12. Political party affiliation trends based on location. We had to move fast because the company was losing money at a rapid pace, Spanfeller wrote in a statement. Think Youre Smarter Than a What Next Producer? While G/O Media has often placed importance on diversity among their staff and in their coverage, these executive-level jobs went to white males. On Glassdoor, a website where current and former employees can submit anonymous reviews of their workplaces, reviews of The Daily Meal are overwhelmingly negative. That union also opposes G/O Media's recent requirement to return to in-person work. It is ridiculous to launch a management survey questioning the editorial value of the site. Im not building a club, we are working to build a successful companyand that depends on great women and men.. Other top employees who have left the company since the start of Spanfellers reign include former A.V. This is normal in situations like these where a new group is coming in and is facing a near term challenge.. [He] wasnt interested in hearing what someone with 20 years of experience would say.. We could have video analytics today. According to multiple sources familiar with the situation, in April Spanfeller offered the job of head of talent to Katie Pontius, who until recently was the chief of staff for The Onion, Inc. Endnotes [1] Statement from G/O Media: "Some reports have miscast Jim Spanfeller as a private equity businessman when, in fact, he has spent his entire career in editorial-driven businesses. 1. During Jim Spanfeller's younger years, he lived in Pennsylvania and recieved his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1952 from the Philladelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. Three and a half hours later, Maidment sent an email to Greenwell and me with the subject line, Reporting on ourselves. The body of the message read: This is a tradition that makes no sense. The fourth known instance of Spanfeller overlooking a woman at the company in favor of a white male former colleague also happened on the sales team. My territory has been cut in half. Text. Jim Spanfeller . At least have everybody well briefed on this is what were doing and this is what wed like to learn from it, Reibstein said. Sign up for notifications from Insider! 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. When Rogers was hired less than a week after McAvoy told the SVP that she would be able to interview for the job, she said, she realized that he must have been chosen well before. The two former staffers described Spanfeller as a micromanager who insists on approving minor budget items and sitting in on meetings far beneath his level, like editorial audience meetings with. When asked if she stood by the content of the since-disappeared post, Carmichael remained steadfast: I did really careful, thorough research, and the evidence is there. Once it became clear that the sales department was being restructured in Kurt Muellers absence, another female vice president, who had been at the company for four years, asked McAvoy in early June for the opportunity to be considered for an expanded sales role, providing examples to show her success at the company. In the culmination of a dayslong struggle to suppress a post that repeatedly referred to its CEO, Jim Spanfeller, as a herb, G/O Media has taken the drastic step of removing the article from its Kinja platform entirely. It will post an eight-figure operating profit this year, he told Insider, and hunt for acquisitions in 2022. (10 is very satisfied, 1 is very unsatisfied); What do you like MOST about Deadspin? On July 30, the day after I emailed reporting questions to Spanfeller, Maidment, Rogers, Jesse Knight, and Sean Flanagan, Spanfeller sent a company-wide email under the subject line Reporting on Ourselves; Deadspin Reporting On The Company and Our Executives. In the email, excerpts of which were published by media reporters from the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, Spanfeller voiced his opinion on how coverage of the company should work: I believe the solution is to have that reporting reviewed by an impartial outside editor a Public Editor, if you will [] and not just for these situations but for any situation where someone within or without the company has issues with our coverage or reporting. [12], Spanfeller took over as CEO of G/O Media when Great Hill Partners purchased the company, formerly known as Gizmodo Media Group, and The Onion from Univision on April 8, 2019, and combined the companies. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. Jim Spanfeller @JimSpanfeller Founder of http://TheDailyMeal.comand http://TheActiveTimes.com. According to multiple sources inside the company, the post even joined the leading posts from official G/O sites on the big board, a large screen in the companys New York headquarters that displays that moments most highly trafficked storiesan unusual feat for a user-generated post. In April, the tech team was told to move the companys video operations off of MCP, which Univision paid for to host video content, and onto JW Player, a cheaper video system. Sole dedication to revenue, getting it the cheapest, quickest way possible. He previously served as President & Chief Executive Officer of Forbes.com, a leading media Internet company, and as Executive Vice President . They are parti pris, which is why the overwhelming majority do not do so and many will not even report on rivals for the same reason. 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. He did not answer a question about whether he was aware that a female VP was already leading west coast sales or that he installed a man (who also carries a VP title) above her. These vacant roles have yet to be filled and Spanfeller has not announced an interim editor. This is normal in situations like these where a new group is coming in and is facing a near term challenge. 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. Political affiliation means the state of belonging to or endorsing any political party. But Spanfeller said that he wants G/O Media to keep the voice and mission that made Gawker Media sites singular in the digital media industry. (The other woman on the executive leadership team, general counsel Lynn Oberlander, left the company this week.) As with any reporting process, we asked questions intending to incorporate the answers. in English Literature in 1979 and went to work as a reporter for the SoHo Weekly News. "We closed Splinter because it was a liberal political site that was losing audience in the middle of a liberal moment," he said. That is absurd. The four women who Spanfeller counts as major hires include two he hired (head of talent and deputy counsel); one he promoted from within to executive managing editor; and a yet-to-be-filled position he says he plans to offer to a woman. Mr. Spanfeller has a BA in English Literature from Union College, Schenectady, New York. Holle Abee (author) from Georgia on February 14, 2013: Duff performed at W's inauguration. As I said in the article, some of the celebs I mentioned could have changed their political leanings. I think the biggest problem was the leadership wouldnt get out of the way of everyone, one former employee told Deadspin. "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. 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.. Spanfeller Hired Media Friends/Former Colleagues to Fill G/O Media Roles Just After Claiming He Had No Plans for Major Turnover. Sean Flanagan, 55, who was hired to lead east coast sales, was also installed over a female senior sales employee, who had been at the company for four years before she left in July. James J. Spanfeller Jr. is an American media executive best known for running Forbes.com from 2001-2009. Find Out With This Weeks News Quiz. Just two weeks after Spanfeller and Great Hill acquired the company, and less than a week after he said in an interview with Variety that he didnt expect any layoffs, Spanfeller fired 25 people across the 400-person company, including Susie Banikarim, GMGs widely respected editorial director, and the only person of color on the executive leadership team at the time. I have definitely given positive feedback to numerous women, including senior executives in edit, sales, and marketing, he offered instead. It's a culture of fear," said the first former employee, who added that staffers sometimes likened meetings with Spanfeller to the "boar on the floor" scene in HBO's "Succession," where media mogul Logan Roy orders his underlings to crawl and oink like pigs. 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. But those efforts did not go very far, the people said, and the company has yet to mount a takeover. While Carmichael was on a plane to Paris, I discovered that G/O had changed her accounts URL from emma.kinja.com to lajskhclsahkchkad.kinja.com, while going to emma.kinja.com now redirects to the new URL, at the time of the change, it simply showed a broken page. When asked by Deadspin why he wouldnt name an interim editor while that search took place in order to stabilize the site and ensure that the people filling in were properly compensated for their work, Spanfeller said that the Onion union demanded that we immediately promote two people into those roles. The JW Player was an interim step, Spanfeller said. Use this information as you see fit. [11], Spanfeller ran Forbes.com for 8 years from 2001 to 2009, when digital and print operations were run separately. Ad revenue rebounded, Spanfeller told Insider last year. It was a welcome refrain for employees all too aware of how the company had languished under Univisions doomed ownership. Ive reached out to Spanfeller for comment multiple times over the past few days and have yet to hear back. View Jim Spanfeller's professional profile on LinkedIn. Spanfeller declined to answer a question about whether he expressed these sentiments to Klancnik. While the archived version of the post did not preserve the original images, you can view a PDF of the original post below. The sales employee (who is not an SVP) wasnt surprised to hear that Spanfeller didnt know what she did. "From the outset, CEO Jim Spanfeller has worked to undermine a successful site by curtailing its most well-read coverage because it makes him personally uncomfortable," the Gizmodo Media Group . 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. I have communicated our timeline concerns to Jim and he understands that development is not an exact science and that goals may not be hit, Knight told Deadspin. I found this troubling but was okay with it given the circumstances. These two highly talented HR executives then met with a number of people around our company including representatives of the unions., When asked why Spanfeller didnt follow this thorough search process before filling seven key positions with his former coworkers, he blamed his hiring practices on the financial shape of the company. "There's a fly and he's a swatter, and that's it," the former executive said. On July 25, a pop-up survey appeared on Deadspin asking three questions: How satisfied are you with Deadspin? Jim Justice speaks during President Donald Trump's political rally inside the Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington on Thursday. No one has been named interim editor, and there is no succession plan in place. ), Spanfeller described the situation differently. At the same time we are still exploring all options to get this work done by August 15th.. When Spanfeller Offered to Promote a Woman to a Top Position, He Insisted She Fire a Female Editorial Director Should She Accept the Job. [5], In 1984, Spanfeller was named publisher of Newsweek On Campus magazine. 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. The only person that I was aware of that was calling directly on clients was an SVP at The Onion and that was to sell creative services, he said. The next day she refused to join me in communicating our plans to Susie. It wasnt collaborative.. Six days after the SVPs exchange with McAvoy, Spanfeller sent an email to the entire staff announcing G/O Medias new company values. When she tried to edit the post, she was greeted by the following image: Attempts to create a new post were similarly thwarted. I realized that I wasnt communicating my advocacy for the department or our initiatives to upper management and other departments back to the team clearly enough. I think it makes him a bad role model for the rest of his team.. 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No media company does. Well keep fighting for whats right. Top Women at the Company Expressed Interest in Filling Executive Roles and Were Promised Interview Opportunities Prior to Spanfeller Hiring His Friends, Two G/O Media employees Deadspin spoke to, who are women who have an experienced track record with the company, say Spanfeller promised to give them a chance to interview for upper-level roles. "We want to do it in a way that's a little more buttoned up," he said. In addition to clichs like we are ambitious and be passionate and have fun, the fifth value on the list said, We will be at our best when we embrace many different perspectives and experiences. A source at the company familiar with the situation said Thompsons hire had been flagged to upper management as a potential problem. Mad Money Twitter - Jim . Multiple sources say that Spanfeller reached out to VP of media operations Brad Klancnik to tell him he was a valuable employee and that the new owners would like him to stay at the company, but female VPs say he did not relay such messages to them. That said, I and the management team received a list of questions from the reporter working this story for Deadspin and those questions left me greatly concerned about the objectivity and core intentions of this piece. Among the multiple Gawker and/or GMG and/or G/O websites I wrote for was, for a brief stint, Deadspin, which is currently without a staff after every single one of its writers quit en masse following the firing of beloved editor Barry Petchesky, who is another friend of mine. It is also worth noting that multiple internal candidates have expressed interest in the position of EIC of the A/V Club. The Onion union declined to comment, but a source with knowledge of the situation disputed that the union demanded promotions, saying its letter demanded action and used the words We ask for the following when addressing promotions. Im sorry that Mike didnt more clearly convey the information to me., McAvoy said, Jim has a different recollection of the facts., The SVP said she told Spanfeller that she wasnt the only person who noticed this pattern of hiring his former colleagues over women at the company, and that he should be prepared to address it. You wrote a 'story,'" Spanfeller recalled telling staff. The CEO alleged. Great Hill Partners did not disclose the financial terms of the private, all equity transaction but stated in a press release that Spanfeller is an investor. Never mind the recent exodus of company leadership under his tenure, including the editorial director, chief financial officer, and chief revenue officer. Both lawsuits detail discrimination personally faced or witnessed by the plaintiffs from Jim Spanfeller, who became CEO of G/O Media in April after private equity firm Great Hill acquired Gizmodo Media Group. ), The internal reaction to these hires has ranged from confusion to anger. He sent a message back about the importance of diversity and inclusion and a full hiring process. When asked if it was inaccurate, then, to say she had accepted the job, Spanfeller did not respond. Reverse Phone Search Tool And much more all for free! In addition to the annoying ads, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller also wants Kotaku to only write about video games. Spanfeller also said that he did not ask Katie to fire Susie, only to be in the room while I had the conversation about Susies future with the company., Spanfeller ended up firing Banikarim himself, and then, months later, hiring Angela Persaud for the chief talent officer job after a public search. During those meetings, Maidments ideaswhich included commissioning an editor outside the company to review and approve stories written by about the companywere met with unanimous opposition. G/O Media, the newly formed company comprised of the assets of the former Gizmodo Media, will lay off 25 employees, according to a memo that company CEO Jim Spanfeller sent to staffers on Tuesday. Its hard to imagine what one would not like on that list of items, Reibstein said of the third question. . A week after Spanfeller insisted to Varietythat 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 editorial director Susie Banikarim. This response, which Spanfeller emailed out along with the questions to and answers from every other executive to the entire company as an attempt to undermine this story, prompted this response from a third sales employee. There are regions that were within my scope of responsibilities and within my role that I cannot call on and neither can my team.. Naturally, we were dismayed to discover one more problemthe survey placed on Deadspin. 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. The confusion stems from a lack of communication. And I didnt know what Sean was doing. Who even told you you were allowed to think about audience?, My management was straight-up scared of him, said a staffer who worked at the site for two years and had responsibilities on both the editorial and marketing sides of the company. He credited The Root for its journalism on the Black Lives Matter movement. The survey on Deadspin, however, had some serious issues, he said. I never changed my mind. Meanwhile, many people who are still at the company feel their work is being hindered by new management. Spanfeller Has an Alleged History of Screaming at Women Employees. 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. Additionally, as you are reporting here, there are numerous outstanding people, both men and women who have worked for me on more than one occasion., By July, Spanfellers third full month at the company, questions about Spanfellers commitment to his journalists editorial independence began to dominate conversation in the office. I was sorry and that is accurate, he said. James J. Spanfeller Jr. is an American media executive best known for running Forbes.com from 20012009. ), This isnt the first time Spanfeller has been accused of micromanaging. That is clearly evident when you note the poor syntax and galling bias of the questions. 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. UPDATE: This article has been updated to remove an incorrect reference to former G/O Media Lynn Oberlander leaving her job shortly after the companys latest round of layoffs. The two former staffers described Spanfeller as a micromanager who insists on approving minor budget items and sitting in on meetings far beneath his level, like editorial audience meetings with each site. Spanfeller, who became head of the digital media company when GMG was purchased by private equity firm Great Hill Partners, told staff that he expected the site's direct advertising to "take the. Then, Thursday night, after Bernie Sanders tweeted in support of Deadspin, supporter collective People for Bernie tweeted the post at its new URL: After which, sometime today, the post disappeared, only to be replaced by this: Its not entirely clear which of Kinjas guidelines were violated, particularly considering that theres no agreed upon definition of what constitutes a herb. And Fake. Who doesnt like uncompromising commentary or sports stories you couldnt find anywhere else? After two years of mainly working from home, the company wants everyone back in the office four days a week. According to Dave Reibstein, past chairman of the Board of Directors of the American Marketing Association and a professor of marketing at University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School of Business (where he teaches a course on market research), there are several problems with the survey. During an internal sales summit meeting in New York on June 19, sales execs practiced pitching G/O Medias general presentation, a deck of about 15 slides that tells clients why they should do business with the company. 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. Without posting the jobs publicly, Spanfeller hired a stable of white men to fill executive positions overseeing nearly every facet of the company., You also had no interest in meeting the only woman on the revenue leadership team who is an SVP who has been successful., As the only woman on the previous revenue leadership team, I started to wonder if women were being considered for leadership roles., What Spanfeller says is normal is, of course, a reflection of his own values, which evidently rank transparency, diversity, and inclusion as secondary concerns to financial success., The appropriate thing to do would be to talk to the editorial side of the business and have a clear objective for the survey., Chief financial officer Tom Callahan, who worked at Forbes while Spanfeller worked there. 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. Traffic has fallen across G/O Media's portfolio over the past two years, which Spanfeller pinned on industry-wide struggles to generate audience plus the loss of Deadspin and Splinter. A voter's representatives in government. [7], Spanfeller was named associate publisher and senior vice president of marketing of Playboy Enterprises in April 1989. I told Mike, verbally and in writing, that I would be interested in taking on new responsibilities and opportunities within the organization and I would like to interview for whatever position would be a part of that, she told Deadspin. It was placed there without consultation or even simple communication to anyone on Deadspins staff. The detection of possible errors in a person's voter record as well as instructions on how to update it. Vice president of sales for the south Lance Johnson, who worked with Spanfeller at Forbes (and most recently worked with Bruce Rogers at a company called SITO Mobile). Sources say that on the tech side of the company, Spanfeller has taken to micromanaging various aspects of developers work, holding meetings to ask what each one is working on, demanding detailed accounts of how they spend their working days, and mandating various projects based on his work at Forbes in the mid-2000s. [8] In June 1993, Spanfeller became associate publisher for advertising at Inc. magazine, replacing Kristin Norrgard, who left to become publisher of Working Woman magazine. Before we go any further, I feel compelled to acknowledge that nearly everything about this item is a conflict of interest. The other is still in college.. In late July, more than a month after the womans conversation with Spanfeller (and after the Daily Beast and New York Post published stories about his rocky early days at the company and he became aware of the reporting process for this story about his hiring practices), that same VP was given what management called a promotion, which Spanfeller noted in his responses to Deadspin, saying that she has been promoted to VP Marketing under Bruce Rogers with wider responsibilities., I am at the same level and performing the same duties now as I was before I got this supposed promotion, the VP said. Club managing editor Caitlin PenzeyMoog, who both resigned on July 12. 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. Clashes between the Gawker Media editorial culture and the company's new private equity owner seemed inevitable from the start. (Though the source spoke in great detail about her experience, she requested her name not be used because she didnt want it to affect her future employment opportunities.) I expect to be treated the way I treat people., This pattern played out three more times in Spanfellers first few months as CEO. Two are now successfully navigating careers in the digital advertising space. Computing. Internet Life, a joint publication of Ziff-Davis and Yahoo!. Have a tip we should know? The key journalistic properties descended from . Senior vice president of marketing Bruce Rogers, who worked with Spanfeller at Forbes. We have no credibility in writing about ourselves. View details on more than 95 Million registered voters across the United States. Details may include related records, political party, location, and more. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. (Spanfeller told Deadspin that he and Callahan had only been in a single meeting that I recall.). In the midst of the fallout, former Deadspin, Gawker, and Jezebel editor Emma Carmichael had a spirited discussion with [former Jezebel writer] Clio Chang on the overwhelming herbishness of Jim Spanfeller, she told me over the phone. Great Hill Partners is a growth equity company committed to building businesses.