The last meeting for many of Deadspin’s journalists took place on Wednesday in a conference room adorned with fake black cobwebs, a large spider and bloody handprints beside the words: “HELP US.”
The plea, it seemed, went unanswered.
By Thursday, almost the entire staff — nearly 20 writers and editors — had resigned.
The journalists at the site, founded as a sports blog in 2005, had chafed against an instruction handed down Monday in the form of a memo from management to confine themselves to sports-related posts.
While largely focused on sports, Deadspin for years had delved into a broad range of topics in a voice that was sometimes rude, often funny and always conversational. On Tuesday, the site’s top editor, Barry Petchesky, was fired after refusing to go along with the order.
The departures shocked fans of the site, which put a new spin on sports coverage for a generation of digital natives. But they were the result of a long buildup of resentment between the journalists and their new bosses, according to interviews with 13 current and former employees of Deadspin and G/O Media.
The main topic of discussion at the Wednesday meeting was the stick-to-sports memo, which was signed by Paul Maidment, the editorial director of G/O Media, the company that became the owner of Deadspin and sibling sites like Jezebel and Gizmodo six months ago.
Stories that showed the intersection of sports and other topics were fair game, Mr. Maidment wrote in the memo. He said at the meeting that he had enjoyed a recent post about President Trump getting booed at a World Series game. But purely non-sports content was forbidden.
Deadspin writers and editors considered that to be meddling.
Mr. Maidment, a British veteran of The Financial Times and Forbes who was brought in as the editorial director of G/O Media this year, called the staff meeting on Wednesday. And as it unfolded, he appeared eager to listen.
“Paul was very reasonable, and nothing he said was so inflammatory that I was like, ‘I’m going to quit right now,’” said Kelsey McKinney, a staff writer who resigned later that day.
She suggested that Mr. Maidment was in a difficult position, serving as an emissary for G/O Media. But he failed to persuade the journalists that the company’s editorial direction was in their — and the site’s — best interests.
“He tried to paint it broadly but was not willing to be specific about what posts we had done that fell outside of that mandate,” said Chris Thompson, a staff writer who also resigned this week. “He resisted altogether the institutional knowledge of the people in the room.”
Soon after the meeting, Deadspin writers and editors began filing into his office to quit. Many of them posted the news of their resignations on Twitter, and Deadspin became a trending topic on social media into the night.
The company came into existence after Deadspin and its sibling publications were sold by Univision to the private equity firm Great Hill Partners in April. Univision had bought the sites when they were part of Gawker Media in a bankruptcy sale. Founded by Nick Denton, the company had been financially ruined when Terry G. Bollea, the former professional wrestler known as Hulk Hogan, won a $140 million judgment against Gawker for an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit backed by the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.
G/O Media installed Jim Spanfeller, a digital media executive who had previously run Forbes.com, as its head. Mr. Spanfeller promptly got rid of some top editors and made Mr. Maidment the editorial director.
Signs of tensions between the irreverent journalists and the management team came quickly. They were not helped by an Aug. 2 Deadspin article whose reporting was critical of G/O Media, Mr. Spanfeller and his executive team. The piece took issue with their “lack of knowledge about” the sites now in their portfolio and “their seeming unwillingness or inability to get up to speed.”
A few weeks later, Deadspin’s top editor, Megan Greenwell, resigned, saying in a farewell post that her job had become untenable, given management’s demands. (Ms. Greenwell recently completed a stint as a weekly advice columnist for The New York Times.) The next major event at G/O Media occurred on Oct. 10, with the shuttering of its politics site, Splinter.
On Monday, the day of the “stick to sports” memo, all of the G/O Media websites published posts that decried the new video ads on their home pages. The ads were offensive to readers, the articles argued, because they were set to play automatically, with sound. Such ads are broadly understood to lift advertiser impressions while annoying readers. The posts were swiftly removed without a warning from G/O Media to the sites’ editors.
“We were existentially angry about a post being taken off our website — a red line we thought was uncrossable,” said Tom Ley, Deadspin’s features editor, who resigned Wednesday.
Staff members, members of the Writers Guild of America East union, discussed how to respond on a private Slack channel. Their collective-bargaining agreement included a no-strike clause, so a strike seemed out of the question. And quitting seemed drastic.
“It’s hard to lose your job,” said Ms. McKinney, the former staff writer. “There are not a lot of jobs in our industry.”
They settled on a protest consistent with the site’s cheekiness: They would conspicuously post stories that had nothing to do with sports.
“We thought that was a Deadspin-style way of handling it, and something that our readers would be in on and find clever,” Mr. Ley said. “We didn’t want to be preachy, we just wanted to try to have some fun with it.”
And so on Tuesday morning, Deadspin featured articles on subjects like a Washington pumpkin thief and the German actor who played a villain in “Ghostbusters II.”
Mr. Petchesky, the interim editor in chief, was pulled out of a meeting and escorted to the office of Mr. Spanfeller, the chief executive. There, he was fired. Mr. Petchesky said Mr. Spanfeller ordered him to leave using an obscenity. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Spanfeller declined to comment.)
Shaken by the editor’s departure, Deadspin staff members retreated to a nearby Planet Hollywood in Times Square for a drink. Roughly a third were ready to quit, Ms. McKinney estimated. The others thought they should try to negotiate editorial protections or the reinstatement of Mr. Petchesky. They gathered again later that evening at the Magician, a Lower East Side bar popular among Gawker-era bloggers, for a planned wake for Splinter.
On Wednesday morning, the workers met in Ms. Greenwell’s vacated office. The sentiment had turned. More staff members were inclined to leave.
The meeting with Mr. Maidment followed in the afternoon. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Maidment declined to comment.) During the meeting, Deadspin staff members laid out their case for posting articles that did not touch on sports. A recent internal study found that a small fraction of Deadspin’s posts fell under this category, and that they drew a larger readership than sports stories.
Some staff members also described what they saw as a lack of clarity from the editorial director. Where should they draw the line between a sports piece and one that would flout the new rule? A weekly N.F.L. preview called the Jamboroo — by Drew Magary, a popular writer who confirmed Thursday that he had also resigned — often started with a long personal essay. And what about the landmark Deadspin essay from 2014 on “Gamergate”? Would that be off-limits, given that G/O Media has a separate video games site, Kotaku?
There was the broader question: Why? In digital media, Deadspin would be considered, from a business perspective, a modest success. In a good month, it had 20 million unique visitors, according to Mr. Ley.
Now Deadspin is down to few, if any, staff members. Mr. Maidment is running the site himself as G/O Media seeks a new top editor.
Those who resigned do not expect to benefit from the agreement on severance that was reached four years ago, when Gawker Media became a union company. G/O Media told them they would be paid through Friday.
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