New York City. "You're not a 'blogger,' you're a professional journalist. 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. 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.. "I think that most media company CEOs probably are as involved as I am," Spanfeller said. Spanfellers pushed back against these internal criticisms of his questionably ethical hiring process and management style by blaming G/O Media for losing money too fast. 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. These vacant roles have yet to be filled and Spanfeller has not announced an interim editor. In two cases, women asked for and were promised the opportunity to interview for executive-level positions for which they were qualified, only to see Spanfeller hire one of his former colleagues before they were given a chance to interview. When Jim Spanfeller and a private equity firm called Great Hill Partners took over G/O Mediaformerly Gizmodo Media Groupin April, their stated goal was to make the company profitable. About their hires, he wrote, I introduced Steve and Lance to Mike McAvoy, but I did not make the hires. Jim Spanfeller @JimSpanfeller Founder of http://TheDailyMeal.comand http://TheActiveTimes.com. And as the only woman on the previous revenue leadership team, I started to wonder if women were being considered for leadership roles. Indeed, Spanfeller told Deadspin that he first contacted Rogers about the job on June 11. A leading digital publisher producing category leaders The Daily Meal and The Active Times. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. These include a senior vice president of marketing who last week wrote a baffling reader satisfaction survey for Deadspin at Spanfellers behest; a sales executive who, sources say, appears unable to give an effective sales pitch; and an editorial director who repeatedly attempted to kill the reporting process for this story. "The fact that we could acquire it at a price that would make it one of our smallest investments is that good or bad? It wasn't Great Hill's first foray into the media business it had previously invested in IGN and sold Ziff Davis but the G/O deal was a tiny one for a firm that describes itself as "targeting investments of $25 million to $500 million.". Asked for a response to the latter allegation, Spanfeller responded, That is absurd. Details may include related records, political party, location, and more. 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. In addition to the annoying ads, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller also wants Kotaku to only write about video games. He credited The Root for its journalism on the Black Lives Matter movement. In the meantime, Carmichael had her own message for Spanfeller: Congratulations on confirming your herb-ishness.. I was sorry and that is accurate, he said. But those efforts did not go very far, the people said, and the company has yet to mount a takeover. []. Asked about the meeting, Knight initially didnt answer. Youre not qualified. 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. Elsewhere in the company, G/O Media has pushed staffers at its site the AV Club to relocate to Los Angeles from Chicago, according to a recent report in Gawker, which is now owned by Bustle Digital Group.
Back to the Office, But Only to Picket - Curbed Jim has a different recollection of the facts, McAvoy reiterated. "We closed Splinter because it was a liberal political site that was losing audience in the middle of a liberal moment," he said. For instance, Rogers, who sits in a corner office in New York, still hasnt been formally announced as a new employee internally or externally, and sources who work in sales say its unclear what his job description is, though he evidently has plenty of time to contribute to Forbes, where he posted 14 articles in July. As the former publisher of National Geographic, Mens Health & Maximmy successful presentation & leadership skills are evident.. The detection of possible errors in a person's voter record as well as instructions on how to update it. 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 think the thing thats most strange about it is that they didnt coordinate with the editorial side of the business.
Voter Registration Records On Glassdoor, a website where current and former employees can submit anonymous reviews of their workplaces, reviews of The Daily Meal are overwhelmingly negative. Employees across editorial, sales, and tech have left, but many of these positions, even mission-critical ones, have not been filled. [5] Upon returning from Europe, Spanfeller took a position at AMP Marketing Systems. 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. Text. (The other woman on the executive leadership team, general counsel Lynn Oberlander, left the company this week.) 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. "[17], "Great Hill Partners Agrees to Acquire Gizmodo Media Group", "Great Hill Partners Acquires Gizmodo Media Group", "President & CEO, Jim Spanfeller Named as IAB Chairman", "Alumni Album: Helping Us Connect to the Web", "Advertising; 4 Young Executives On Move at Newsweek", "Playboy Hires 2 New Execs; Title of Publisher Goes to 1", "New Gizmodo boss Jim Spanfeller is an old school digital media vet", "After Days Of Resignations, The Last Of The Deadspin Staff Has Quit", "Deadspin Is ZombifiedBut Gawker's Content Warriors Fight On", "The Media-Sensational Rise and Fall of "Jim Spanfeller Is a Herb", "GMG Union votes no confidence in G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jim_Spanfeller&oldid=1074755870, This page was last edited on 2 March 2022, at 00:52. Oberlander actually left last week. Computing. From a womans perspective, I did feel very belittled.
G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller Tells Employees to 'Brace for Impact' of This guy just seems like he doesnt like women, another added. "We want to do it in a way that's a little more buttoned up," he said. 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. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company.
Cramer finally reveals whether he is pro-Trump or anti-Trump - CNBC When one reviews the actual questions one might feel even more uneasy. (The people I work for and the people who report to me know what I do, Rogers, 63, told Deadspin in an email.). Spanfeller admitted he contacted Maidment in June after receiving my initial email requesting an interview. As with any reporting process, we asked questions intending to incorporate the answers. Two other major jobs Spanfeller gave to women include his new head of talent and deputy counsel, which were both outside hires; he did give a promotion to one woman, who he made deputy editorial director. "We needed to change a lot of things, and change is hard.". Mr. Spanfeller has a BA in English Literature from Union College, Schenectady, New York. Jeremy Gordon Oct292019 03:41PM EST. Unlike private equity investors who financially engineer acquisitions, burdening companies they buy with debt and massive . [9], In 1996, Spanfeller left his job at Inc., where he had become publisher, to become publisher of Yahoo! Everything theyve done in reaction to it is the herbiest shit I could possibly imagine. 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. According to sources familiar with the situation, the Onions union sent a letter to Spanfeller asking that he help provide a plan for the site and fill the vacuum left by top leadership. "We were a leftist site, not a liberal one, which gives you a sense of how closely Spanfeller followed our work," he said. His skin got bright red, she said. 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. He previously served as President & Chief Executive Officer of Forbes.com, a leading media Internet company, and as Executive Vice President . 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. In the months that followed, without posting the jobs publicly, Spanfeller, 62, hired a stable of white men to fill executive positions overseeing nearly every facet of the company. The SVP shared her teams revenue goals and their success in meeting those goals, staying focused on numbers and her teams value because she knew her work would be key to profit margins. The survey on Deadspin, however, had some serious issues, he said. After two years of mainly working from home, the company wants everyone back in the office four days a week. 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.
Former Daily News Editor in Chief Is Tapped to Run Deadspin I read that she's a registered Republican in Texas. Then, in early June, former Onion CEO Mike McAvoy, whountil he was separated from the company on July 11had been leading sales across all the sites, told the SVP that Spanfeller had hired two new sales leaders, Flanagan and Thompson. 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. 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. In a follow-up meeting with Spanfeller about the story, she suggested that hard financial data might not be their audiences central interest. The next day she refused to join me in communicating our plans to Susie. Have a tip we should know? Or as Carmichael explained, If you dont know what a herb is, youre probably a herb.. It will post an eight-figure operating profit this year, he told Insider, and hunt for acquisitions in 2022. Jim Spanfeller Biography. Senior vice president of marketing Bruce Rogers, who worked with Spanfeller at Forbes. 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. 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. 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. He sits on the Board of Directors of The New York Chapter of The National Foundation for Teaching . I Close-Read the 113-Page Complaint Trying to Ban the Abortion Pill in Texas. Other top employees who have left the company since the start of Spanfellers reign include former A.V. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. Spanfeller Has an Alleged History of Screaming at Women Employees. Most recently, after the latest edict that Deadspin stick to sports, its writers revolted, and Spanfeller retaliated by firing the top-ranking employee, Petchesky (Deadspins latest editor-in-chief, Megan Greenwell quit in August for many of the reasons described above). . There are regions that were within my scope of responsibilities and within my role that I cannot call on and neither can my team.. 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,. 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.
Jim Spanfeller (@JimSpanfeller) / Twitter Spanfellers executive assistant set up a time for us to meet. 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. It laid off 14 staffers in the summer of 2020.
Jim Spanfeller - Chief Executive Officer @ G/O Media - Crunchbase 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. 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. Who doesnt like uncompromising commentary or sports stories you couldnt find anywhere else?
Search over 95 Million Voter Registration Records Sole dedication to revenue, getting it the cheapest, quickest way possible. (Spanfeller denies this claim.). 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 was CEO from 2001 to 2009and Playboywhere he was a senior vice president from 1989 to 1993. Never mind the recent exodus of company leadership under his tenure, including the editorial director, chief financial officer, and chief revenue officer. In an email read to Deadspin, McAvoy agreed that she was qualified for the role and said he would talk with Spanfeller to ensure she was interviewed for the new opportunity, which had not been posted publicly. 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. [11], Spanfeller ran Forbes.com for 8 years from 2001 to 2009, when digital and print operations were run separately. 3. 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. It also wasnt communicated to me as a promotion until the day it was emailed out to the company.. 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. Have a tip or story idea? 2. Never mind that employees called for his resignation last year. 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.
Gaffney said the firm was prepared to hold onto the investment for a decade or more and that Spanfeller, a former Forbes and Playboy executive, does not have a time frame for preparing the company for a sale. I think the general sentiment coming out of that meeting, at least for some of the senior sales people, was like, these guys are going to lead our sales team? Or knowledgeable writers?, Asked about the survey, Rogers said he thinks its responses will accurately and fully reflect Deadspin readers opinions of the site. 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. Mad Money Twitter - Jim . "There's a fly and he's a swatter, and that's it," the former executive said. in English Literature in 1979 and went to work as a reporter for the SoHo Weekly News. (Pontius left the company.) 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.. So put this piece on ice. I was unclear about what she did.
We may earn a commission from links on this page. The former staff of Splinter later launched the worker-owned Discourse Blog. 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. They cant even pitch effectively, said another employee who was present. On July 9, he hired Faiza Javaid as deputy general counsel, a position that was posted publicly. But before a formal interview process could take place, Spanfeller filled the jobs with his ex-colleagues. Spanfeller said the company hopes to expand into areas like travel, music, business, and news. Use this information as you see fit. They requested anonymity to speak candidly but their identities are known to Insider. Well keep fighting for whats right. We have also learned the tech team has been asked to post the survey again. ), This isnt the first time Spanfeller has been accused of micromanaging. 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. Views. The Daily Meal was acquired by Tronc in 2016.
"Jim Spanfeller Is a Herb": The rise and fall of a blog post. James J. Spanfeller Jr. is an American media executive best known for running Forbes.com from 20012009. 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. 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. Indeed, two former G/O Media staffers blasted Spanfeller for being stingy with resources. 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. Clubs executive editor and managing editor, respectively, stepped down on July 12. Hes trying to micromanage, the tech employee said last week. 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. I first emailed Spanfeller on June 24, early in my reporting process, telling him that I was working on a story about the new hires hed brought to G/O Media in his first few months. And he made sure to make it clear that I just didnt get it in his mind that I just didnt get this whole digital thing, she said. The key journalistic properties descended from . At the same time we are still exploring all options to get this work done by August 15th.. On July 25, a pop-up survey appeared on Deadspin asking three questions: How satisfied are you with Deadspin? LinkedIn is the world's largest business network, helping professionals like Jim Spanfeller discover inside connections to recommended . Spanfeller said he did not recall the specific request. He started screaming at me, Who told you you were allowed to speak about audience? That is absurd. 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.
4 Dumb Ways Your Favorite Sites Are Dying | Cracked.com Another former Daily Meal staffer said that management was straight-up scared of Spanfeller, adding, I can see why. Reverse Phone Search Tool And much more all for free! 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.