Online sports magazine Deadspin has been sold to a European company that will not keep any of its current employees—just months after it triggered an intense backlash by falsely accusing a young boy of wearing “blackface” to a Kansas City Chiefs game.
“Recently we were approached by the European firm Lineup Publishing expressing interest in purchasing Deadspin to add to their growing media holdings,” Jim Spanfeller, the chief executive of Deadspin publisher G/O Media, said in a company-wide notice on Monday.
“Lineup Publishing is a newly formed digital media company described in their words as ‘dedicated to creating, acquiring and managing high quality media brands across a variety of sectors,’” he continued, emphasizing that this is G/O accepting Lineup’s offer, as opposed to G/O “actively shopping Deadspin.”
“The rationale behind the decision to sell included a variety of important factors that include the buyer’s editorial plans,” he told Deadspin staff.
As part of the deal, according to Mr. Spanfeller, Lineup will “not carry over any of the site’s existing staff,” and will instead “build a new team more in line with their editorial vision for the brand.”
“While the new owners plan to be reverential to Deadpin’s unique voice, they plan to take a different content approach regarding the site’s overall sports coverage,” he wrote. “This unfortunately means that we will be parting ways with those impacted staff members.”
Monday’s notice did not share more details about the deal. Although a G/O spokesperson confirmed that 11 Deadspin staffers—based in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago—were laid off.
Deadspin, founded in 2005 and known for publishing a mix of pop culture, politics, and sports, became owned by G/O since 2019 and had since took a “stick to sports” approach. Over the past years, G/O had been offloading sites and cutting staff gradually as it tried to streamline the wide-ranging publication and recenter its focus on sports stories.
The magazine found itself embroiled in an internet firestorm last November, after running a column accusing a young Kansas City Chiefs fan of engaging in racist behavior.
“It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once,” Mr. Phillips wrote. “But on Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, a Kansas City Chiefs fan found a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time.”
The author then questioned the NFL’s commitment to its “social justice initiatives,” arguing that the organization has not been doing enough to create a more racially sensitive culture among fans.
“This is what happens when you ban books, stand against Critical Race Theory, and try to erase centuries of hate,” he wrote. “You give future generations the ammunition they need to evolve and recreate racism better than before.”
In December, the boy’s family sent Deadspin a letter, demanding that it apologize and retract the column, or they would resort to legal action against the author, the sports news site, and G/O Media.
“These Articles, posts on X, and photos about Holden and his parents must be retracted immediately,” the letter read. “It is not enough to quietly remove a tweet from X or disable the article from Deadspin’s website. You must publish your retractions and issue an apology to my clients with the same prominence and fanfare with which you defamed them.”
The Armentas are represented by lawyers from Clare Locke, a firm specialized in defamation cases. Earlier this year, it helped Dominion Voting Systems secure a $787.5 million settlement against Fox News over allegations about the role Dominion machines played in the 2020 presidential election.
The article in question remains up on Deadspin at the time of this publication, but with an update to remove any photos, tweets, links, or otherwise identifying information about the boy. The headline was also revised “to better reflect the substance of the story.”
“We regret any suggestion that we were attacking the fan or his family,” the editors said.
