News of the sale, and G/O’s pending dissolution, managed to rate mention in The New York Times, which notes that company CEO Jim Spanfeller published an “epilogue” to G/O’s legacy on the company blog. To connoisseurs of the Spanfeller School Of Business Writing—previously confined to those lucky enough to wake up to periodic “State Of The Company” emails from him clogging up their inboxes—it’s a clear paragon of the form: Over-long, highly defensive, and largely concerned with the assigning of blame to proper parties (media unions, mostly) and away from the innocent (G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller).
Among other things, Spanfeller addresses that time the entire workforce of sports culture site Deadspin resigned in protest after being ordered to curtail its more wide-ranging focus “to cover just sports, sports related issues, as well as sports adjacent stories,” described in the blog as “the slightest of changes.” “That was perceived as beyond the pale by the legacy team and as such they left en masse. An outcome that the management team certainly did not want.” (If you’d like another perspective on these events, you may enjoy the formerly-hosted-on-Deadspin “The Adults In The Room,” written by former Deadspin Editor-In-Chief Megan Greenwell, now the author of newly minted bestseller Bad Company: Private Equity And The Death Of The American Dream.) Still, the Deadspin story did have a happy ending: “In the end, we sold the site for more than we bought it for.”
Elsewhere in the article, Spanfeller addresses various other bugbears that have impacted his time in the manager’s chair, notably the hated specter of writers writing about the things they want to write about from positions of familiarity or expertise. (“Often now, the writer wants to choose topics and story angles to match their own specific world view. A practice that often actually works against the very brand building that some would suggest supports such practices.”) But it’s not all doom and gloom: Spanfeller takes a moment to herald some of his big successes, too, like G/O’s innovative use of artificial intelligence to produce bold new experiments in online content, noting—in his blog post about his company no longer surviving or growing—that, “Innovation was always a constant, which was clearly a key reason for our survival and growth during these very trying times.”
The Times notes that G/O hasn’t completely powered down, as it’s still hunting around to find a buyer for Black culture and news site The Root. It’s also not clear what’s next for Spanfeller, whether he and his friends at Great Hills Partners will now seek out another set of sites to leave their lasting and undeniable impact on, or whether he might consider retiring, possibly to tend to a garden where he’d grow a variety of plants known for their properties in garnishing and flavoring food.
