jim spanfeller political affiliation jim spanfeller political affiliation

I never changed my mind. 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. It also wasnt communicated to me as a promotion until the day it was emailed out to the company.. That is clearly evident when you note the poor syntax and galling bias of the questions. 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. In reality, this story started with a tip the site received about Spanfellers hiring practices, and grew from there thanks to sources accounts. 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. Senior vice president of marketing Bruce Rogers, who worked with Spanfeller at Forbes. Gov. In other words, G/O media had effectively broken the redirect at Deadspin2.com, so that the site now redirected to a dead link. I thought she was going to be great, and it didnt work out by her own assessment., In response to follow-up questions, Spanfeller clarified that there was never a signed offer between Pontius and the company. Its motivation is simply to publish true and interesting stories, and to make sure the things powerful people would rather stay in the dark end up in the light of day. The tech team managed to execute the move in about a month, but before they had finished, Spanfeller changed course and decided that the developers should build an entirely new video platform and player from scratch, explaining the decision by saying that that was what he did at Forbes, according to employees involved. Ultimately, the issue of building a wall has raised political risk, Cramer said. Or as Carmichael explained, If you dont know what a herb is, youre probably a herb.. (check all that apply); and What do you like LEAST about Deadspin? No media company does. I intend to continue supervising the reporting process, including legal review, and then publish a thorough and fair story, which of course would include responses from people we spoke to. "We want to do it in a way that's a little more buttoned up," he said. 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. When Spanfeller Offered to Promote a Woman to a Top Position, He Insisted She Fire a Female Editorial Director Should She Accept the Job. G/O Media, the company which ran Deadspin, was acquired by the private equity group Great Hill Partners, which installed Spanfeller as CEO and gave him one mission: Make them richer. This conversation inspired her to write a post on the personal account she still holds on G/Os publishing platform, Kinja, titled Jim Spanfeller Is a Herb., Pronounced with a hard h, herbs are difficult to define, but typified by the individuals seen in this earlier Carmichael post about herbitude. At the time of publication, Carmichaels original tweet has been retweeted more than 300 times. He said the company was just profitable before the pandemic hit its business, and is now comfortably back in the black. We could have video analytics today. That is absurd. Im not building a club, we are working to build a successful companyand that depends on great women and men.. Have a tip or story idea? 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. In this specific case, I have committed to the current story being fully reported and submitted for external review and, if it passes that review, it will be published. ), Spanfeller described the situation differently. Details may include related records, political party, location, and more. She said Spanfeller didnt have many questions for her, describing him as apathetic. Spanfeller seemed not to recall this interaction, telling Deadspin that the sales team was not covering direct clients.. 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. Jeremy Gordon Oct292019 03:41PM EST. "We were a leftist site, not a liberal one, which gives you a sense of how closely Spanfeller followed our work," he said. "People are scared of him. As Spanfeller increasingly insisted on directing editorial coverage in what he believed to be more advertiser-friendly directions, clashes between him and the companys writers and editors have escalated. Answering a similar one, he seemed to contradict himself: This concern was expressed to me and I take it very seriously. Never mind that employees called for his resignation last year. Multiple sources say Pontius declined to go along with the plan, angering Spanfeller. He would stop into peoples offices with the doors open and scream at them, so everyone knew what was going on., 5. This former staffer said the team wished to add Black creatives to help create more representative branded content to meet the demand, but it was not given additional resources. But as Spanfeller began to implement his vision, that hope was replaced by employee frustration and skepticism over his hiring practices and interference with the companys journalism. As for the content of the survey, Reibstein said it is possible to read it as innocent, a way to attempt to gauge customer satisfaction, as its known in the marketing industry. 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. [9], In 1996, Spanfeller left his job at Inc., where he had become publisher, to become publisher of Yahoo! Vacillating Wildly From Dispiriting to Exhilarating. []. It became clear that she was not a good fit for this position and we both agreed on this. The former staff of Splinter later launched the worker-owned Discourse Blog. (The people I work for and the people who report to me know what I do, Rogers, 63, told Deadspin in an email.). Club managing editor Caitlin PenzeyMoog, who both resigned on July 12. In one instance in which Spanfeller tried to promote a woman within the company, his offer came with strings attached. Never mind the flood of negative stories about staff blowback over the company's editorial direction. After Gawker's high-profile legal battle with Hulk Hogan, Univision in 2016 purchased its other media properties out of bankruptcy for $135 million, but struggled and sold the assets, including add-ons like The Onion, to Great Hill Partners in 2019. 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. The post was so popular, in fact, that it apparently gained the attention and ire of Spanfeller himself (perhaps partially due to the fact that someone registered Deadspin2.com and set it to redirect to Carmichaels post). 12-Year-Old Prankster Throws Dead Snake on Woman's Car and Gets Flattened by Husband 15,743. He sits on the Board of Directors of The New York Chapter of The National Foundation for Teaching . 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. (Spanfeller told Deadspin that he and Callahan had only been in a single meeting that I recall.). He is currently the CEO of G/O Media which consists primarily of sites that were previously part of Gawker Media. It wasnt collaborative.. 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. (Pontius left the company.) 15 Life Hacks That Are Actually Pretty Good 17,580. Spanfeller said that he wasnt preventing, just delaying analytics from being implemented, on the grounds that its not particularly useful information at the moment. (The day after Deadspin contacted Spanfeller for comment, the tech team was given the green light to roll out video analytics. It definitely feels like its the old boys club, a G/O Media employee told Deadspin. 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. It will post an eight-figure operating profit this year, he told Insider, and hunt for acquisitions in 2022. Employees in G/O Media's editorial union urged the company's private-equity owners to replace G/O Chief Executive Jim Spanfeller in a letter Monday, saying a change in leadership was . [1] From a womans perspective, I did feel very belittled. . (10 is very satisfied, 1 is very unsatisfied); What do you like MOST about Deadspin? But those efforts did not go very far, the people said, and the company has yet to mount a takeover. Deadspin cited an account from a former writer at The Daily Meal, a food and beverage site that Spanfeller founded in 2015, who claims her former boss once started screaming at her because she voiced concerns about writing a story on the websites earning figures, which she felt she was not qualified for. The rigorous and thorough reporting, editing, and legal review process that Greenwell promised to oversee has since been completed, which is why you are reading this story now. The takeover of G/O Media, previosuly known as Gizmodo Media Group and Gawker Media, by former Forbes executive Jim Spanfellercontinues to throttle downhill, as one of the companys news sites, Deadspin, published a scathing expos on Friday detailing a litany of problems employees have faced since investment firm Great Hill purchased Gizmodo and placed Spanfeller in control. We have no credibility in writing about ourselves. So Out of Touch: Gen Z Congressman-Elect Mocks RNC Tweet Criticizing Him For His Housing Woes. 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. It was a welcome refrain for employees all too aware of how the company had languished under Univisions doomed ownership. (Spanfeller denies this claim.). [He] wasnt interested in hearing what someone with 20 years of experience would say.. A senior vice president who has worked for what is now G/O Media for four and a half years met with Spanfeller in the companys Chicago office shortly after he purchased the company in April. I hired Katie who accepted the job, he wrote. Whenever a publication shuts down, as has happened more and more over the last few years, it undergoes a public eulogizing by its employees, the friends of its employees, the people who wanted to work there, and most importantly the readers, whose tributes are . I am and will continue to be a very strong advocate for my team.. "We are happy to hear that the company is profitable and financially stable enough for Jim Spanfeller to consider further acquisitions, and look forward to welcoming more workers into our union," the G/O Media union said in a statement. Its something that Im working to improve. I was going on the input I had been given by Mike McAvoy that he had discussed the position with her and laid out why she was not ready for the larger role. Asked for a response to the latter allegation, Spanfeller responded, That is absurd. Three and a half hours later, Maidment told us to put the story on ice, but both Spanfeller and Maidment maintain that Spanfeller never explicitly or implicitly directed the story to be killed. 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. Hes trying to micromanage, the tech employee said last week. Im shocked he would call that a good presentation, said the employee who was in the meeting. 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. . It is ridiculous to launch a management survey questioning the editorial value of the site. A spokesperson for G/O has yet to respond to a request for clarification, but we will update this post if and when that changes. Spanfellers all-staff email went on to accuse Deadspins staff of bias and cast doubt on the motives behind the story. These conversations reveal that Spanfellers biggest effect on the company since taking over has been a deflation of morale. Announcing Persauds hire on July 10, Spanfeller wrote this of the process: After a very fulsome search where we interviewed dozens of qualified candidates we identified two finalists. The other is still in college.. I was sorry and that is accurate, he said. I had experience and confidence in the people who were hired. According to Great Hill Partners' website, Spanfeller "has led comparable media platforms and positioned them for successful strategic exit," which probably means something to someone, somewhere,. 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. [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. But Spanfellers expectation that the process would be done in the next week or so shocked the tech team. When asked why he didnt consider the SVP, Spanfeller told Deadspin, I was unaware of her interest in the role and that Mike had made that commitment and Im sorry. Voting precincts and districts. [] While it is what we did at Forbes that has nothing to do with the reason to do it here. The detection of possible errors in a person's voter record as well as instructions on how to update it. They cant even pitch effectively, said another employee who was present. (G/O Medias Collective Bargaining Agreement contains a clause that explicitly states that editorial decisions can only be made by editorial staff members, which Spanfeller is not. 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. The G/O Media union sent the following statement regarding the survey: The GMG Union has made repeated good-faith efforts to cooperate with management in resolving the many outstanding issues currently facing the company, from workplace accessibility to a video player that lacks viable metrics. No one has been named interim editor, and there is no succession plan in place. "You can write a blog, just don't publish them here.". A source at the company familiar with the situation said Thompsons hire had been flagged to upper management as a potential problem. 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. Steve Thompson, 55, was installed over a female vice president who had been running west coast sales for two and a half years. The post, published Tuesday evening, proved wildly popular on Twitter. G/O Media shuttered its politics site, Splinter, in 2019. A leading digital publisher producing category leaders The Daily Meal and The Active Times. It has introduced real uncertainty in to stocks, and Trump's agenda has become shaky. In conversations with Deadspin, more than 20 employees from across the business, tech, and editorial departments of 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, a man who is regularly and perhaps euphemistically referred to in press accounts as a digital media "veteran," has so far hired a slew of his former colleagues at Forbes.comwhere he. McAvoy described the SVP of marketing job as a combination of sales strategy, account management, and managing creative teamsall responsibilities that fell under the SVPs purview. (Spanfeller says this is inaccurate and that he did consider other candidates for the editorial director role, but Paul quickly rose to the top after he expressed an interest in the position.) Three of the men Spanfeller hired were installed over successful women who had been at the company for years. Spanfeller Hired Media Friends/Former Colleagues to Fill G/O Media Roles Just After Claiming He Had No Plans for Major Turnover. Find Out With This Weeks News Quiz. 3. Who doesnt like uncompromising commentary or sports stories you couldnt find anywhere else? Former SVP of sales and operations Kurt Mueller had left the company, and McAvoy told the woman Spanfeller was hiring his replacement. Its Extremely Revealing. Asked about the former employees accounts, Spanfeller said he has no idea what this refers to and it is not my recollection of working at The Daily Meal, adding that he doesnt recall screaming at anyone.