Who Deletes a Blog?

At some point, a live person has to push the button.

Internet Archive

Earlier this week, my former employer G/O Media sold Deadspin, the former Gawker media sports website, to a company called “Lineup Publishing.”

Lineup Publishing’s website says that it is based in the town of San Gwann, Malta, and offers little other information, which is very funny to me, a person whose knowledge of Malta basically boils down to “financial crime” and also “blowing up a journalist with a car bomb.” Lineup Publishing did not carry over any of Deadspin’s current staff, a group of writers who had kept the site on life support since it effectively died in 2019 following its original staff’s mass resignation.

But something else happened in this process. After many years, someone on G/O’s management team decided to delete a couple of blogs. One of them, the 2019 piece “The Adults in the Room,” by former Deadspin editor Megan Greenwell, was a brutally effective skewering of the private equity interests and incompetent upper management at G/O. It was written right as Greenwell was on her way out the door following a period of insane turmoil at the company that also included intensely fraught union bargaining as well as, yeah, Splinter getting killed. We’ve been over this before. You can read Megan’s piece in full here on her website or as it first appeared through the Internet Archive. The other deleted piece was Laura Wagner’s report on how G/O was running its websites into the ground.

The fact that G/O decided to do this is not surprising; it’s honestly shocking that they waited this long, and that several other pieces that Deadspin (and Splinter) published are still up. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this since then for a different reason: because I can’t quite imagine what it would be like to be the person who actually pressed that button.

Was it Jim Spanfeller himself? If so, that makes a little more sense. I’ve met Jim, and to a certain extent, I think I understand him. He is a fundamentally vacant person who is not very intelligent and sees his primary role in life as delivering KPIs or good graphs to the people who pay him money. He fits more firmly in a group of people who have devoted their lives to a philosophy I think we can name after a cryptocurrency meme: “Number Go Up.”

I get the Number Go Up people. They are everywhere in New York City and many other places, working at banks, hedge funds, financial institutions, real estate companies, things of that nature. While some of these people may be active and malevolent sociopaths, I think many of them are not, meaning that they need a way to frame the world in their minds that lets them sleep at night. Hence Number Go Up.

It is probably easy to convince yourself in many of those jobs that if those Numbers are Going Up, you are creating something, you are bringing value to the world, you are making people’s lives better and certainly making your life and your loved ones’ lives better. At many Number Go Up jobs, you can effectively insulate yourself from the real world such that the Numbers become all you have to interact with, which makes this worldview easy.

When I first broached this topic with some of my friends, they said I was being naive. Surely the person who deleted Megan and Laura’s blogs was just a Number Go Upper—someone who doesn’t think about journalism in the slightest and simply clicked the button in the CMS as one of 1,000 other stupid tasks they were assigned by Spanfeller or whoever that day. This is entirely possible—probable, even. But I’m not so sure. I think it’s entirely possible that the person who hit that delete button was someone who knew they were working for a media company. I think it’s entirely possible that they even read the blog they were deleting. How could you not? At least in my mind — how could you not? And once you did, how would that make you feel? How would you square that in your view of the world?

This action was almost certainly framed as a way of “prepping” Deadspin for sale to the Maltese venture. So it was productive, in that sense. But I find it hard to imagine someone deleting a piece of writing—actively doing censorship, basically—without at least attempting to understand why that writing was being deleted. Which means that there are basically two things that could have happened here. One is that Spanfeller himself, or someone else whose only principle is Number Go Up, deleted the blog. Two is that someone more junior, who is not fully committed to NGU, deleted the blog.

What I want to know is what that person believes. My only guess is that they have some conception of media in which journalism should be informative but inoffensive, and that they think in some ways that smoothing out those edges is better for the world in general. Because that’s what we all want, right? Most humans share a general desire to make things better for their species. Some limit that instinct to one certain race or group or nationality, and those people are evil, but they at least feel that same pull for collective betterment.

The simplest answer is usually the right one, of course: the person who deleted that blog did not think about it at all. But there’s a part of me that hopes they’ve thought about that decision as much as I have. I hope it made them lose sleep. I hope that maybe, it’s the little transgression that provokes enough shame to make them wake up.