Youre not qualified. 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. Sole dedication to revenue, getting it the cheapest, quickest way possible. Jim Justice speaks during President Donald Trump's political rally inside the Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington on Thursday. I have stood up for and advocated for my team since the day I started at G/O. 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. His skin got bright red, she said. Asked about the contract, Spanfeller responded, I firmly believe in editorial integrity. Initially, we had to move fast because the company was losing money at a rapid pace, he said. 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. Vacillating Wildly From Dispiriting to Exhilarating. pretty big scoop from me Jim Spanfeller is a herb https://t.co/gZDCs6mfhC. The Onion Union, which represents AV Club staffers, told Insider in a statement that it hoped "this period of prosperity creates tangible benefits for all of our members especially those whose jobs are being moved to Los Angeles, one of the most expensive cities in the world.". 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. 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. Successfully sold . Im not building a club, we are working to build a successful companyand that depends on great women and men.. 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. View details on more than 95 Million registered voters across the United States. It was a welcome refrain for employees all too aware of how the company had languished under Univisions doomed ownership. [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. In late July, more than a month after the womans conversation with Spanfeller (and after the Daily Beast and New York Post published stories about his rocky early days at the company and he became aware of the reporting process for this story about his hiring practices), that same VP was given what management called a promotion, which Spanfeller noted in his responses to Deadspin, saying that she has been promoted to VP Marketing under Bruce Rogers with wider responsibilities., I am at the same level and performing the same duties now as I was before I got this supposed promotion, the VP said. 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. When I followed up about the meeting the next day with Spanfeller, I was told it was canceled. (10 is very satisfied, 1 is very unsatisfied); What do you like MOST about Deadspin? (Spanfeller told Deadspin that he and Callahan had only been in a single meeting that I recall.). "We remain optimistic that our labor will be taken into consideration as this period of financial promise collides with a time that has been particularly rough on morale," the Onion Union statement said. Spanfeller said no one told him that a female VP was already successfully performing that job before he hired Thompson. As with any reporting process, we asked questions intending to incorporate the answers. 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. No media company does. In reality, this story started with a tip the site received about Spanfellers hiring practices, and grew from there thanks to sources accounts. The next day she refused to join me in communicating our plans to Susie. I read that she's a registered Republican in Texas. This response, which Spanfeller emailed out along with the questions to and answers from every other executive to the entire company as an attempt to undermine this story, prompted this response from a third sales employee. A longtime digital media veteran, Spanfeller was an unconventional choice to lead the new Gizmodo Media Group sites (The Daily Beast's CEO, Heather Dietrick, once served as president of the . In the meantime, Carmichael had her own message for Spanfeller: Congratulations on confirming your herb-ishness.. After two years of mainly working from home, the company wants everyone back in the office four days a week. 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. Throughout his career he has recieved more than 60 awards for his work from such . These vacant roles have yet to be filled and Spanfeller has not announced an interim editor. [15][16] In January 2020 the GMG union, which represents the staff of G/O media, announced a vote of no confidence in CEO Jim Spanfeller citing, among other issues, a lack of willingness to negotiate for "functional editorial independence protections. [4] He soon switched to the business side of the paper, and later took a tour through Europe. 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. Its everything Ive wanted and more.. James J. Spanfeller serves as President & Chief Executive Officer of Forbes.com, a leading media Internet company, and as Executive Vice President of Electronic Publishing for . Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. 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. You wrote a 'story,'" Spanfeller recalled telling staff. Once it became clear that the sales department was being restructured in Kurt Muellers absence, another female vice president, who had been at the company for four years, asked McAvoy in early June for the opportunity to be considered for an expanded sales role, providing examples to show her success at the company. 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. 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 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. Or knowledgeable writers?, Asked about the survey, Rogers said he thinks its responses will accurately and fully reflect Deadspin readers opinions of the site. View Jim Spanfeller's professional profile on LinkedIn. The JW Player was an interim step, Spanfeller said. Spanfeller declined to answer a question about whether he expressed these sentiments to Klancnik. New York City. Everyone can seeit on the pageor at least, everyone could see it before the censorship. It was four days old. Asked for a response to the latter allegation, Spanfeller responded, That is absurd. 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. Which he would do by turning Deadspin into a sports-only website. He credited The Root for its journalism on the Black Lives Matter movement. [11], Spanfeller ran Forbes.com for 8 years from 2001 to 2009, when digital and print operations were run separately. Fuck Jim Spanfeller and Paul Maidment. Whats left of that company is currently called G/O Media. 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. Maidment never responded to my questions directly; the first time I saw his answers was when they were included in Spanfellers company-wide email, but he had this to say about his role in the newsroom: I have always shielded the editorial teams I have managed from commercial or business-side interference in what they write, which to my mind is the essence of editorial integrity. 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.. From a womans perspective, I did feel very belittled. 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.. That evening, the woman received an email from McAvoy telling her that the SVP of marketing job had been filled with someone who worked with Spanfeller at Forbes. (Pontius left the company.) The CEO alleged. Oh my God, thats so funny, Carmichael said when I informed her of this latest development. A voter's representatives in government. Spanfeller Media Group ( SMG ), a subsidiary of publishing company Tribune Publishing, is a digital media company based in New York City. I was also hiring a good portion of these jobs before I actually took over day to day control of the company. Stay up to date with what you want to know. To hear G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller tell it, everything at his digital media company is going great. Sources say he was retained to consult on sales and how the department could work more directly with clients, which the now-former employee says was her job. Jim Spanfeller has 2 current jobs as Founder at The Daily Meal and Chief Executive Officer at G/O Media. My management style has been widely reported on over the years and the picture you are painting does not comport with that. When Spanfeller Offered to Promote a Woman to a Top Position, He Insisted She Fire a Female Editorial Director Should She Accept the Job. Greenwell told Maidment she was unwilling to shut down an ongoing reporting process in response to management demands, and Maidment continued to make his argument against the idea of reporting on G/O Mediaa hallmark of the company since its earliest days, as well as a tradition at other major publicationsin several meetings with the editors and writers he oversees. Two are now successfully navigating careers in the digital advertising space. Still, tensions between management and staff are high at the company as it prepares to enter negotiations with the G/O Media editorial union, one of the two unions representing editorial workers at the company. Since Spanfeller took over G/O Media in April, more than a dozen people have left the company voluntarily, in addition to the 25 people who were laid off. 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. The former staff of Splinter later launched the worker-owned Discourse Blog. Mr. Spanfeller has a BA in English Literature from Union College, Schenectady, New York. Spanfeller said he would go into negotiations "with an open mind and good faith," but a former executive at the company predicted conflict at the negotiating table between the union and the CEO, given their view of Spanfeller's heavy-handed leadership style. 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. 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). James J. Spanfeller Jr. is an American media executive best known for running Forbes.com from 20012009. These conversations reveal that Spanfellers biggest effect on the company since taking over has been a deflation of morale. 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. Spanfeller said the company hopes to expand into areas like travel, music, business, and news. 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. Now that we are closer to stabilizing the company, there can be a more deliberate recruitment and hiring process. Enter Jim "Herb" Spanfeller. 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. In one instance in which Spanfeller tried to promote a woman within the company, his offer came with strings attached. That management did not respond to our request for an explanation is only another of the many ways the workers at GMG have been ignored and put on the back burner in the name of a profitability mirage that is clearly more attractive to the big decision-makers than a functioning workplace. 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. 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 . When people came in with good ideas they were rejected., A woman who was hired at The Daily Meal after responding to a Craigslist post said she was once asked to write a story about a companys earnings, which she felt she wasnt qualified to write and for which she didnt receive guidance from her editors. 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. We had to move fast because the company was losing money at a rapid pace, Spanfeller wrote in a statement. Jack Crosbie, a former Splinter contractor and co-owner of Discourse, said that traffic declined at Splinter because G/O did not refill lost positions. Sources say the meeting concluded with an agreement that the best course of action would be to explain to Spanfeller why the player would not be finished by August 15. 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 other is still in college., Four of nine major hires have been women, Spanfeller said. Email him here: caleb@mediaite.com Think Youre Smarter Than a What Next Producer? 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. When confronted with this negative feedback, Spanfeller insisted that he cannot be sexist because he has daughters. 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. 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. "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 . The person hired was Bruce Rogers, who most recently ran the institute arm of SITO Mobile, a mobile data company. Spanfeller said he did not recall the specific request. Multiple sources say Pontius declined to go along with the plan, angering Spanfeller. Gov. Never mind the flood of negative stories about staff blowback over the company's editorial direction. 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. When one reviews the actual questions one might feel even more uneasy. 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. We sent a request for an explanation and did not receive a response. Its something that Im working to improve. Spanfeller said he asked for the survey; Rogers said he wrote it; and editorial director Paul Maidment said he didnt approve it, but he told Deadspin editor-in-chief Megan Greenwell that he did not attempt to stop it from running on the site when he was filled in shortly before it was scheduled to go up. Another was more direct: Thats Jim wanting to be in control. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. 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.