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 private equity firm was able to snap up the deal for only about $25 million, according to a person with direct knowledge of the figure. She asked McAvoy, then her immediate supervisor, for the opportunity to interview for the position, citing her leadership of the revenue division, her construction of a diverse team, and her renown in the industry. That union's collective bargaining agreement expires in February. [9], In 1996, Spanfeller left his job at Inc., where he had become publisher, to become publisher of Yahoo! Use this information as you see fit. 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. Though neither Spanfeller nor Knight provided the team a hard deadline, they made clear that they wanted the task, which should have taken months, completed in a matter of weeks. I am a father of three wonderful woman, Spanfeller wrote in a statement. 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. 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. Or knowledgeable writers?, Asked about the survey, Rogers said he thinks its responses will accurately and fully reflect Deadspin readers opinions of the site. In turn, Spanfeller hired a number of his old media friends and former colleagues from Forbes, Playboy, and other outlets to fill top roles at G/O Media, while also failing to make public job postings for many of these roles. Spanfeller said no one told him that a female VP was already successfully performing that job before he hired Thompson. Club, and Splinter, was purchased by the firm in April, along with the satirical news site The Onion, which led to a massive shift in the companys culture and considerable turnover in the top ranks or, as one G/O Media employee put it, Spanfeller has brought in a bunch of white dudes to change the company. That the story has been submitted for legal review without the benefit of our responses leads me to the conclusion that the piece is already fully written and that our responses to questions are mere window dressing. But Spanfellers expectation that the process would be done in the next week or so shocked the tech team. Before he started full time in early June, Flanagan was brought in as a consultant just after Spanfeller took over G/O Media. 3. 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. Indeed, two former G/O Media staffers blasted Spanfeller for being stingy with resources. The appropriate thing to do would be to talk to the editorial side of the business and have a clear objective for the survey.. Throughout his career he has recieved more than 60 awards for his work from such . The employees, nearly all of whom requested anonymity because of fears of retaliation from company management, are angered by a lack of communication regarding company goals, seeming disregard for promoting diversity within the top ranks of the company, and by repeated and egregious interference with editorial procedures. 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. 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. 15 Life Hacks That Are Actually Pretty Good 17,580. (Spanfeller told Deadspin that he and Callahan had only been in a single meeting that I recall.). Now that we are closer to stabilizing the companys finances, we can take even more time and be more deliberate in our hiring, which the SVP Talent is already doing.. (check all that apply); and What do you like LEAST about Deadspin? 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. I think it's all good," said Chris Gaffney, co-founder and managing partner at Great Hill. 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. 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. Gov. Naturally, we were dismayed to discover one more problemthe survey placed on Deadspin. Jim Spanfeller . He would stop into peoples offices with the doors open and scream at them, so everyone knew what was going on., A fourth source, a former senior staff member at The Daily Meal who worked with Spanfeller, confirmed his temper issues and the dysfunctional nature of the workplace. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. Shortly after the sale in April, she said, she met briefly with Spanfeller and explained to him her role and responsibilities in the company, which was primarily to work directly with clients to secure partnerships, instead of going through media ad agencies. At the same time we are still exploring all options to get this work done by August 15th.. 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 . 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). 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). pretty big scoop from me Jim Spanfeller is a herb https://t.co/gZDCs6mfhC. The anti-herb agenda is being suppressed.. Mad Money Twitter - Jim . For the life of me, I am not sure how you can have a legal review without a complete story and I cannot imagine how you can consider your work to be objective without reviewing the answers to the questions that you have asked. It will post an eight-figure operating profit this year, he told Insider, and hunt for acquisitions in 2022. DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION are core to our culture, and we expect all staff to advance and promote that. Heartened, the SVP emailed Spanfeller to remind him of their meeting in April and express her hope that women, people of color, and people who identify as LGBTQ would be considered as he hired his leadership team, and to say that she looked forward to discussing her role in the organization. 1. On July 9, he hired Faiza Javaid as deputy general counsel, a position that was posted publicly. He sits on the Board of Directors of The New York Chapter of The National Foundation for Teaching . They requested anonymity to speak candidly but their identities are known to Insider. As the former publisher of National Geographic, Mens Health & Maximmy successful presentation & leadership skills are evident.. I hired Katie who accepted the job, he wrote. Asked for a response to the latter allegation, Spanfeller responded, That is absurd. "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 . When asked if it was inaccurate, then, to say she had accepted the job, Spanfeller did not respond. 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. These vacant roles have yet to be filled and Spanfeller has not announced an interim editor. 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. "We closed Splinter because it was a liberal political site that was losing audience in the middle of a liberal moment," he said. Thats not reality, a tech staffer told Deadspin. In reality, this story started with a tip the site received about Spanfellers hiring practices, and grew from there thanks to sources accounts. 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. 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. I think it makes him a bad role model for the rest of his team.. The sales employee (who is not an SVP) wasnt surprised to hear that Spanfeller didnt know what she did. 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. 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. Its everything Ive wanted and more.. In that 30-minute meeting, the woman told Deadspin, Spanfeller told her that Univision had been a bad owner and that he saw an opportunity to make improvements and turn a profit. Spanfeller Hired Media Friends/Former Colleagues to Fill G/O Media Roles Just After Claiming He Had No Plans for Major Turnover. I was sorry and that is accurate, he said. 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. That is clearly evident when you note the poor syntax and galling bias of the questions. The job, however, came with a condition, they said: Pontiuss first order of business would be to fire newsroom editorial director Susie Banikarim. It wasnt collaborative.. in English Literature in 1979 and went to work as a reporter for the SoHo Weekly News. The CEO alleged. 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. This is the same thing that has also happened to Deadspin. He is currently the CEO of G/O Media which consists primarily of sites that were previously part of Gawker Media. These men, and others who now hold C-suite positions at the company, were each hired without a public recruitment process, and several were installed over high-ranking women who had been successfully performing those jobs at the company for years. And Fake. Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise. Employees across editorial, sales, and tech have left, but many of these positions, even mission-critical ones, have not been filled. Political affiliation. Before we go any further, I feel compelled to acknowledge that nearly everything about this item is a conflict of interest. In a follow-up meeting with Spanfeller about the story, she suggested that hard financial data might not be their audiences central interest. G/O Media workers went on strike today in part to protect remote work. 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. Have a tip we should know? It was four days old. 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, but Spanfeller is perhaps best known for dramatically increasing Forbes.coms focus on digital advertising (Spanfeller also previously served as chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau). Ive reached out to Spanfeller for comment multiple times over the past few days and have yet to hear back. That distinction quickly sparked backlash in late 2019, when the staff of Deadspin resigned over the firing of a top editor and the company's mandate that the site stick to covering sports. But after the staff meeting, sources say, members of the tech team held a meeting with Knight to explain why the date was unrealistic. Jim Rich, the former Daily News editor charged with bringing Deadspin back to life following a mass staff exodus, has resigned after just 18 months on the job, The Post has learned. Club managing editor Caitlin PenzeyMoog, who both resigned on July 12. 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 . The Daily Meal was acquired by Tronc in 2016. Editorial director Paul Maidment, who worked with Spanfeller at Forbes and The Daily Meal. "We want to do it in a way that's a little more buttoned up," he said. Jim Justice speaks during President Donald Trump's political rally inside the Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington on Thursday. I was disappointed. Jim Spanfeller Biography. 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. 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. Emma Carmichael is a friend of mine, and we both worked at Gawker Media and, as it was later named after being purchased by Univision, Gizmodo Media Group, or GMG. Its hard to imagine what one would not like on that list of items, Reibstein said of the third question. 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. The post, published Tuesday evening, proved wildly popular on Twitter. Made up mostly of the former Gawker Media sites, G/O Media has been in a near constant state of turmoil for the past few years. Neither Sean nor Jim ever reached out to ask, Hey, what are you doing, how are you doing it, how is it working? There was never a conversation about my role, she told Deadspin. Spanfeller Media Group ( SMG ), a subsidiary of publishing company Tribune Publishing, is a digital media company based in New York City. We had to move fast because the company was losing money at a rapid pace, Spanfeller wrote in a statement. (check all that apply). These actions are clearly management attempting to target, and even intimidate, staff into changing their editorial stance in spite of our contract-protected independence, especially as it comes on the heels of managements repeated attempts to kill this story as it was being reported about the company. Jim Spanfeller the beleaguered boss of G/O Media, which owns The Onion and Deadspin is being sued by two former executives who claim in separate lawsuits that he discriminated against . 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. 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. 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. tips@mediaite.com, Caleb Ecarma was a reporter at Mediaite. He started screaming at me, Who told you you were allowed to speak about audience? 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. My management style has been widely reported on over the years and the picture you are painting does not comport with that. 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. 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. As with any reporting process, we asked questions intending to incorporate the answers. 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. Below are some of the biggest revelations outlined in Deadspins roughly 7,000 word report on their parent company and its new management, which they spoke to nearly two dozen G/O Media employees for. I am and will continue to be a very strong advocate for my team.. Six of these hires were Spanfellers colleagues from his previous jobs at Forbes, Playboy, and Ziff Davis. The VP had a call with McAvoy and Spanfeller to discuss the process, asking Spanfeller why he hadnt even reached out to her about the position. Katie then refused to assume the HR lead role around other wider layoffs at the company. At an all-staff meeting this week, Knight told Spanfeller that August 15 is the target completion date, which Spanfeller told Deadspin he believes is achievable. Jim Spanfeller, 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.. Steve Thompson, 55, was installed over a female vice president who had been running west coast sales for two and a half years. Multiple sources say Pontius declined to go along with the plan, angering Spanfeller. Gaffney and Spanfeller said that G/O Media is looking for acquisitions itself. 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. Who doesnt like uncompromising commentary or sports stories you couldnt find anywhere else? G/O Media, from a business perspective, has turned a corner, Spanfeller says. 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. Everyone can seeit on the pageor at least, everyone could see it before the censorship. In addition to the removal of the post itself, Carmichael also discovered that shes now unable to use her personal Kinja account at all. When pressed, Knight admitted the deadline may be unrealistic. View Jim Spanfeller's professional profile on LinkedIn. Why Ketanji Brown Jackson Split With the Courts Liberals in a 54 Decision, the firing of beloved editor Barry Petchesky, According to Great Hill Partners website, increasingly insisted on directing editorial coverage. 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. He would stop into peoples offices with the doors open and scream at them, so everyone knew what was going on., 5. 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. 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. He is currently the CEO of G/O Media which consists primarily of sites that were previously part of Gawker Media. This has led to some protest among employees, as one staffer told Deadspin, It definitely feels like its the old boys club. A second employee told the site, This guy just seems like he doesnt like women.. 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. Great Hill Partners and current CEO Jim Spanfeller, formerly of Forbes, bought these sites and the Onion from Univision Communications Inc. in April. While we were given a 3pm deadline today to respond to dozens of questions, I understand that the folks at Deadspin have already submitted their story for legal review and plan to publish it on Wednesday all without ever seeing any of the responses to the questions that they asked. Never mind the recent exodus of company leadership under his tenure, including the editorial director, chief financial officer, and chief revenue officer.