All staff sacked as sport blogging site sold

Staff at a controversial sports news site that had previously been embroiled in a blackface drama were sacked in dramatic circumstances with just 30 minutes notice.

Sports blogging site Deadspin was sold to a European start-up and the entire staff was reportedly fired with barely any notice on Monday — just months after the publication was forced to apologise for wrongly accusing a young Kansas City Chiefs fan of wearing “blackface”, The New York Post has reported.

Jim Spanfeller, the CEO of parent company G/O Media, broke the news of the lay-offs and Deadspin’s sale to Lineup Publishing in a memo to shocked staff — the latest piece of the company’s crumbling empire to be dumped amid a wave of job cuts roiling the entire industry.

Lineup will “not carry over any of the site’s existing staff and instead build a new team more in line with their editorial vision for the brand,” Mr Spanfeller wrote.

“While the new owners plan to be reverential to Deadspin’s unique voice, they plan to take a different content approach regarding the site’s overall sports coverage.”

A representative for Deadspin said 11 staffers — based in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago — were canned.

Sports blogging site Deadspin has been sold to a European start-up and the entire staff sacked with barely any notice.

Among those was senior writer Carron Phillips, who penned an incendiary column last November that accused nine-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan Holden Armenta of racism against Native Americans and black people for wearing “blackface” and headdress to a football game.

The site ran a photo of Holden showing just the right side of his face that was painted brown under a headline that blared: “The NFL needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in Black face, Native Headdress.”

However, a photo of his full face showed it was painted both brown and red.

Phillips failed to mention that Holden is of Native American descent, and he was wearing war paint, with one colour covering each side of his face.

Holden’s grandfather, Raul Armenta, sits on the board of the Chumash Tribe in Santa Ynez, CA, according to The Post Millennial.

Deadspin, which had been owned by G/O since 2019, quietly tweaked the article amid a firestorm of criticism, as well as legal threats from Holden’s parents, and added an editor’s note, saying the publication “regret[s] any suggestion that we were attacking” Holden.

Last month, the family filed a defamation lawsuit seeking unspecified damages.

Among those out of work is controversial writer Carron Phillips who an accused nine-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan of racism against Native Americans and black people.

“Journalism — and the country as a whole — is better today now that Carron Phillips no longer has a platform to target innocent kids with his agenda-driven writing,” Libby Locke, the lawyer representing the family, told The New York Post.

“We are also grateful to G/O Media for infusing the company with cash that can be used to pay the judgment the Armenta family is going to win against it.”

The New York Post reached out to Mr Phillips for comment.

Mr Phillips, a former New York Daily News columnist, had ripped Holden’s Native American headdress and his “Tomahawk Chop” gesture, claiming the boy “found a way to hate Black people and Native Americans at the same time”.

“It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once,” Mr Phillips wrote in the article, which has since been tagged with a community note on X branding it “purposely deceiving”.

“This is what happens when you ban books, stand against Critical Race Theory, and try to erase centuries of hate,” he wrote.

“You give future generations the ammunition they need to evolve and recreate racism better than before.”

The boy’s outraged mother, Shannon Armenta, shared numerous images of her son getting a warm reception at the game.

“This has nothing to do with the NFL,” she wrote, suggesting the photo was picked by the Deadspin scribe purely “to create division”.

But Mr Phillips reportedly doubled down on his claim in a since-deleted X post.

“For the idiots in my mentions who are treating this as some harmless act because the other side of his face was painted red, I could make the argument that it makes it even worse,” he wrote in the post, according to The Post Millennial.

“Y’all are the ones who hate Mexicans but wear sombreros on Cinco [de Mayo].”

G/O Media’s website still lists Deadspin as one of its brands.

Shortly after the imbroglio, the boy’s father, Raul Armenta, spoke to Fox News’ Jesse Watters, saying “it’s too late for an apology” from the site and the reporter.

“The damage is already done. It’s, you know, worldwide. Now there’s comments all over, there’s, you know, disrespect towards Native Americans and towards my family.”

“We never in any way, shape or form meant to disrespect any Native Americans or any tribes,” he said.

Mr Spanfeller avoided the controversy in letting staffers know he wasn’t shopping the sports site before getting the offer from Lineup.

Deadspin’s writers and editors were given just 30 minutes notice that they would be losing their jobs before being locked out of their company laptops, citing a private post on X from senior editor Julie DiCaro, according to The Daily Mail.

G/O — which owns Gizmodo, AV Club and The Onion — has been offloading sites and cutting staff over the past year in a bid to become more efficient.

Despite a number of masthead sales and title closures, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller said the company wasn’t “strapped for cash”.

In November, it shut down female-focused website Jezebel, laying off the site’s staff.

Later that month, Paste Magazine bought Jezebel.com from G/O.

The company also sold its lifestyle website Lifehacker to Ziff Davis last March and laid off its staff.

“We’re not strapped for cash,” Mr Spanfeller claimed to Axios in January.

But he added that the “use by” date for private equity companies tends to be around six to 10 years.

“So we’re coming up on that,” he said.

The media industry has been rocked by lay-offs amid shrinking ad revenue linked to declines in web traffic related to changes in search algorithms from Google and Facebook.

This year alone, Buzzfeed, Vice Media, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, NBC News, MSNBC, Sports Illustrated and CBS News have all cut jobs.

This article has been reproduced with permission from The New York Post.