Sole dedication to revenue, getting it the cheapest, quickest way possible. So Out of Touch: Gen Z Congressman-Elect Mocks RNC Tweet Criticizing Him For His Housing Woes. I realized that I wasnt communicating my advocacy for the department or our initiatives to upper management and other departments back to the team clearly enough. Where people are registered to vote. 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 . [2][3], Spanfeller graduated from Union College with a B.A. Emma Carmichael is a friend of mine, and we both worked at Gawker Media and, as it was later named after being purchased by Univision, Gizmodo Media Group, or GMG. Spanfeller said the company hopes to expand into areas like travel, music, business, and news. In other words, G/O media had effectively broken the redirect at Deadspin2.com, so that the site now redirected to a dead link. Find Out With This Weeks News Quiz. The four women who Spanfeller counts as major hires include two he hired (head of talent and deputy counsel); one he promoted from within to executive managing editor; and a yet-to-be-filled position he says he plans to offer to a woman. You wrote a 'story,'" Spanfeller recalled telling staff. It laid off 14 staffers in the summer of 2020. Ad revenue rebounded, Spanfeller told Insider last year. When asked if she stood by the content of the since-disappeared post, Carmichael remained steadfast: I did really careful, thorough research, and the evidence is there. As the former publisher of National Geographic, Mens Health & Maximmy successful presentation & leadership skills are evident.. G/O Media shuttered its politics site, Splinter, in 2019. Spanfeller admitted he contacted Maidment in June after receiving my initial email requesting an interview. Im kind of a tipsy at a bar in Paris, she added. Asked for a response to the latter allegation, Spanfeller responded, That is absurd. [6] Just under two years later, Spanfeller was replaced as publisher by Scott Kauffmann and became the national sales manager of Newsweek magazine in 1986. 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. Two are now successfully navigating careers in the digital advertising space. Or as Carmichael explained, If you dont know what a herb is, youre probably a herb.. When pressed, Knight admitted the deadline may be unrealistic. 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. Without posting the jobs publicly, Spanfeller hired a stable of white men to fill executive positions overseeing nearly every facet of the company., You also had no interest in meeting the only woman on the revenue leadership team who is an SVP who has been successful., As the only woman on the previous revenue leadership team, I started to wonder if women were being considered for leadership roles., 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., The appropriate thing to do would be to talk to the editorial side of the business and have a clear objective for the survey., Chief financial officer Tom Callahan, who worked at Forbes while Spanfeller worked there. Youre not qualified. (Pontius left the company.) Successfully sold . 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. The confusion stems from a lack of communication. But those efforts did not go very far, the people said, and the company has yet to mount a takeover. Head of The Onion, Deadspin sued for sex discrimination - New York Post Legal review is often a lengthy process involving multiple reads, so talking to a lawyer is certainly not an indication that we would publish without completing the reporting process. Spanfeller said no one told him that a female VP was already successfully performing that job before he hired Thompson. Gaffney and Spanfeller said that G/O Media is looking for acquisitions itself. Spanfeller did offer to promote one female employee, former chief of staff for The Onion Katie Pontius, and make her the companys head of talent, but the position fell through after he demanded that she fire newsroom editorial director Susie Banikarimas her first management move, which Pontius refused, according to sources who spoke to Deadspin. 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. "We closed Splinter because it was a liberal political site that was losing audience in the middle of a liberal moment," he said. in English Literature in 1979 and went to work as a reporter for the SoHo Weekly News. "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 . In the midst of the fallout, former Deadspin, Gawker, and Jezebel editor Emma Carmichael had a spirited discussion with [former Jezebel writer] Clio Chang on the overwhelming herbishness of Jim Spanfeller, she told me over the phone. Have a tip we should know? Spanfeller said that he wasnt preventing, just delaying analytics from being implemented, on the grounds that its not particularly useful information at the moment. (The day after Deadspin contacted Spanfeller for comment, the tech team was given the green light to roll out video analytics. [5] Upon returning from Europe, Spanfeller took a position at AMP Marketing Systems. No media company does. [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. "We were a leftist site, not a liberal one, which gives you a sense of how closely Spanfeller followed our work," he said. 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. [] While it is what we did at Forbes that has nothing to do with the reason to do it here. 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. 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. "The fact that we could acquire it at a price that would make it one of our smallest investments is that good or bad? Sign up for notifications from Insider! Internet Life, a joint publication of Ziff-Davis and Yahoo!. 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 . The Daily Meal Founder G/O Media Chief Executive Officer Board and Advisor Roles Number of Current Board & Advisor Roles 3 Number of Past Board & Advisor Roles 2 That union also opposes G/O Media's recent requirement to return to in-person work. "We want to do it in a way that's a little more buttoned up," he said. Steve Thompson, 55, was installed over a female vice president who had been running west coast sales for two and a half years. Jim Spanfeller, The digital media and blogging network, which oversees websites like Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jezebel, A.V. []. 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. The employees, nearly all of whom requested anonymity because of fears of retaliation from company management, are angered by a lack of communication regarding company goals, seeming disregard for promoting diversity within the top ranks of the company, and by repeated and egregious interference with editorial procedures. G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller says the company is profitable and ready View details on more than 95 Million registered voters across the United States. 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. Multiple sources say Pontius declined to go along with the plan, angering Spanfeller. In April, the tech team was told to move the companys video operations off of MCP, which Univision paid for to host video content, and onto JW Player, a cheaper video system. In addition to poor planning and communication around the video player, multiple sources say Spanfeller wouldnt allow the tech team to implement video tracking analytics on JW Player, so no one had any idea how many views videos were getting. "There's a fly and he's a swatter, and that's it," the former executive said. The other is still in college.. Former SVP of sales and operations Kurt Mueller had left the company, and McAvoy told the woman Spanfeller was hiring his replacement. Email him here: caleb@mediaite.com
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. 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. 3. Steve Riley on February 14, 2013: Just right off the bat. In the meantime, Carmichael had her own message for Spanfeller: Congratulations on confirming your herb-ishness.. Everyone can seeit on the pageor at least, everyone could see it before the censorship. [14] A subsequent Deadspin post mocked Spanfeller as a "herb"; after being widely shared on social media, G/O Media removed the post. 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. Katie then refused to assume the HR lead role around other wider layoffs at the company. My management style has been widely reported on over the years and the picture you are painting does not comport with that. Jim has a different recollection of the facts, McAvoy reiterated. In the email, Spanfeller said he was "greatly concerned about the objectivity and core intentions of this piece," and questioned the editorial standards of Deadspin's editors. Search over 95 Million Voter Registration Records. These conversations reveal that Spanfellers biggest effect on the company since taking over has been a deflation of morale. New York City. Jim Spanfeller - New York, New York, United States - LinkedIn In all of those cases Jim listened to my arguments and in many cases agreed with me and the issue was settled, he wrote in response to one question. Never mind the flood of negative stories about staff blowback over the company's editorial direction.