The Adults In The Room
There is a version of the story of this company in which idealistic journalists, unconcerned with profit, are posed against ruthless business-doers, concerned about profit above all else. That would be a convenient story, pitching me and my colleagues and friends as people who just care too much about The Truth to yield before the gale-force winds of Capitalism, but it wouldn’t be a true one.....MUCH MORE
The real and less romantic story is this: The journalists at Deadspin and its sister sites, like most journalists I know, are eager to do work that makes money; we are even willing to compromise for it, knowing that our jobs and futures rest on it. An ever-growing number of media owners, meanwhile, are so exceedingly unwilling to reckon with the particulars of their own business that they refuse to accept our eagerness to help them make money. They’re speaking a language no one else does, proud of their own inability not just to not fail, but to not understand the terms on which they’re failing. The tragedy of digital media isn’t that it’s run by ruthless, profiteering guys in ill-fitting suits; it’s that the people posing as the experts know less about how to make money than their employees, to whom they won’t listen.
“It’s still a killer business,” Kendall Roy tells his father Logan in the latest episode of Succession, in which Logan debates whether to pull the plug on Vaulter, a digital media company run by the family business. “The platform, the brands, ethos and culture are leading edge, and in my view, it’s fixable. All they need is adults in the room.”
It seems likely that a similar conversation played out earlier this year in the Back Bay offices of Great Hill Partners, the private-equity firm that now owns the company where I am on the payroll until the end of today. The managing partners—all of them men, white, and members of the one percent—agreed to buy this company at a steep discount, and to bring in another white male one percenter as co-owner and CEO. This company had a good platform and strong brands; all they needed to do was hire a few people who could make it profitable. All they needed was adults in the room.
It seems likely that variations on this conversation played out earlier this year in the Thousand Oaks, California, offices of SAGE Publishing, and in the New York offices of First Look Media, and in the Folsom, California, offices of e.Republic. In those three cases, as in the fictional case of Vaulter, the adults in the room decided the magazines they published—Pacific Standard, Topic, and Governing, respectively—could not be saved. It seems likely that similar conversations play out constantly in the New York offices of Alden Global Capital, the purely evil hedge fund that has eliminated two out of every three jobs at the 100 newspapers it runs.
A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart. They know what they know, and they don’t need to know anything else....
The writer, Megan Greenwell, not a white male, is the former editor-in-chief of Deadspin.
I am not sure whether she is a member of the 1% but I'm guessing not.
