The history of sports site Deadspin is a long one at this point but as of today it appears the site exists in name only after a European company agreed to buy the site but chose to move forward without the current staff.

G/O Media has sold Deadspin to a European media company who will not be keeping any of the long-running sports news outlet’s current staff, the company told employees in a memo on Monday...

Lineup Publishing 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,” the staff-wide note added.

Justin Baragona broke the story and posted a copy of the entire email set to staff. The email says that current owners Great Hill Partners were not shopping Deadspin in particular but received an offer they couldn't refuse from Lineup Publishing.

According to Deadspin staff, they were locked out of their laptops and accounts and given just a few moments to get up and leave.

Jim Spanfeller strikes again!

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) March 11, 2024

The history of Deadspin goes back to when it was part of Gawker media along with a bunch of similar sites such as Kotaku, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, etc. In 2016 Gawker was sued by Hulk Hogan and lost in court to the tune of $140 million. The company declared bankruptcy and was later sold off to Univision. However, Univision wanted to create distance between the scandal associated with Gawker and so refused to take the main site. Instead it kept the other sites, including Deadspin, as part of the renamed Gizmodo Media Group.

By 2018, people at GMG were taking buyouts in order to avoid layoffs. In 2019, a private equity firm called Great Hills Partners bought the Gizmodo Media Group and the Onion from Univision and renamed it again as the G/O Media Group.

You may recall that around this time Deadspin staffers threatened to quit after the current owners asked them to "stick to sports." This was taken as a warning not to write about politics but as I pointed out at the time, most media accounts of what happened weren't entirely accurate.

Deadspin also got itself in some trouble with a story claiming a young Kansas City Chiefs fan wore blackface to a game.

Sports journalism utterly sucks: Deadspin 'blackface' debacle proves it https://t.co/CIg5nxCfu3

— Trader (@InvestOrTradeX) March 11, 2024

The boy's family filed a lawsuit against Deadspin in February.

Holden Armenta’s parents, Shannon and Raul, alleged that Deadspin intentionally published a defamatory article, exposing “the family to a barrage of hate, including death threats.”

“The Article falsely alleged that [Holden] had ‘found a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time.’ It alleged that [Holden]’s parents, Shannon and Raul, ‘taught’ [Holden] ‘racism and hate’ at home,” the lawsuit, filed in Delaware, states.

“It intentionally painted a picture of the Armenta Family as anti-Black, anti-Native American bigots who proudly engaged in the worst kind of racist conduct motivated by their family’s hatred for Black and Native Americans.”

It sounds like the author of the piece that sparked that lawsuit is now out of a job.

Other sites that were part of G/O Media have also had problems. Jezebel was shut down just last year.

Jezebel, once part of the Gawker universe of websites, brought a brash new kind of internet writing to feminist issues when it was introduced in 2007, paving the way for a generation of like-minded outlets. In 2019, the private equity firm Great Hill Partners bought Jezebel as part of what is now called G/O Media, a portfolio of digital news outlets that includes Gizmodo, Deadspin and The Root.

But on Nov. 9, G/O Media’s chief executive, Jim Spanfeller, said that Jezebel would shut down and that 23 people would be laid off because of “economic headwinds.”

“Unfortunately, our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s,” he wrote in the memo to staff.

About a month later the site was resurrected when Paste magazine purchased it. Paste also bought Splinter, another Gawker site which had been shut down back in 2019.

So it sounds like Deadspin will continue in some form but with an all new staff. Who knows what is coming next. At this point, the former Gawker associated sites seem to exist as familiar nameplates which trade hands every few years.