The VP, who said she now reports to Thompson, said all of her previous reviews from her managers have exceeded expectations, and that she was able to more than double revenue for my region in less than a year. Well keep fighting for whats right. Among the multiple Gawker and/or GMG and/or G/O websites I wrote for was, for a brief stint, Deadspin, which is currently without a staff after every single one of its writers quit en masse following the firing of beloved editor Barry Petchesky, who is another friend of mine. All rights reserved. Enter Jim "Herb" Spanfeller. [5] Upon returning from Europe, Spanfeller took a position at AMP Marketing Systems. Where people are registered to vote. The Onion Union, which represents AV Club staffers, told Insider in a statement that it hoped "this period of prosperity creates tangible benefits for all of our members especially those whose jobs are being moved to Los Angeles, one of the most expensive cities in the world.". Six of these hires were Spanfellers colleagues from his previous jobs at Forbes, Playboy, and Ziff Davis. A week after Spanfeller insisted to Varietythat he did not plan to cut our way to growth, the CEO fired 25 employees, including in top positions, such as axing former Gizmodo Media Group editorial director Susie Banikarim. They include: (Spanfeller declined to be interviewed in person but answered emailed questions. She asked McAvoy, then her immediate supervisor, for the opportunity to interview for the position, citing her leadership of the revenue division, her construction of a diverse team, and her renown in the industry. The other is still in college.. Answering a similar one, he seemed to contradict himself: This concern was expressed to me and I take it very seriously. In this specific case, I have committed to the current story being fully reported and submitted for external review and, if it passes that review, it will be published. DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION are core to our culture, and we expect all staff to advance and promote that. Heartened, the SVP emailed Spanfeller to remind him of their meeting in April and express her hope that women, people of color, and people who identify as LGBTQ would be considered as he hired his leadership team, and to say that she looked forward to discussing her role in the organization. Sean Flanagan, 55, who was hired to lead east coast sales, was also installed over a female senior sales employee, who had been at the company for four years before she left in July. Sources say he was retained to consult on sales and how the department could work more directly with clients, which the now-former employee says was her job. According to sources familiar with the situation, the Onions union sent a letter to Spanfeller asking that he help provide a plan for the site and fill the vacuum left by top leadership. in English Literature in 1979 and went to work as a reporter for the SoHo Weekly News. Two are now successfully navigating careers in the digital advertising space. Still, tensions between management and staff are high at the company as it prepares to enter negotiations with the G/O Media editorial union, one of the two unions representing editorial workers at the company. [10] Spanfeller was also responsible for advertising sales on the magazine's website and that of Yahoo! I found this troubling but was okay with it given the circumstances. (check all that apply). In 1964, Spanfeller recieved the title of Artist of the Year from the Artists Guild of New York. Shortly after the sale in April, she said, she met briefly with Spanfeller and explained to him her role and responsibilities in the company, which was primarily to work directly with clients to secure partnerships, instead of going through media ad agencies. His skin got bright red, she said. It wasn't Great Hill's first foray into the media business it had previously invested in IGN and sold Ziff Davis but the G/O deal was a tiny one for a firm that describes itself as "targeting investments of $25 million to $500 million.". In an email, Flanagan disagreed with those assessments: Simply not true. Clashes between the Gawker Media editorial culture and the company's new private equity owner seemed inevitable from the start. Jim Spanfeller the beleaguered boss of G/O Media, which owns The Onion and Deadspin is being sued by two former executives who claim in separate lawsuits that he discriminated against . This has led to some protest among employees, as one staffer told Deadspin, It definitely feels like its the old boys club. A second employee told the site, This guy just seems like he doesnt like women.. In late July, more than a month after the womans conversation with Spanfeller (and after the Daily Beast and New York Post published stories about his rocky early days at the company and he became aware of the reporting process for this story about his hiring practices), that same VP was given what management called a promotion, which Spanfeller noted in his responses to Deadspin, saying that she has been promoted to VP Marketing under Bruce Rogers with wider responsibilities., I am at the same level and performing the same duties now as I was before I got this supposed promotion, the VP said. [9], In 1996, Spanfeller left his job at Inc., where he had become publisher, to become publisher of Yahoo! []. 12-Year-Old Prankster Throws Dead Snake on Woman's Car and Gets Flattened by Husband 15,743. . While the archived version of the post did not preserve the original images, you can view a PDF of the original post below. When I followed up about the meeting the next day with Spanfeller, I was told it was canceled. At least have everybody well briefed on this is what were doing and this is what wed like to learn from it, Reibstein said. Meanwhile, many people who are still at the company feel their work is being hindered by new management. Spanfeller responded that he would be happy to get together, but did not say anything about open roles. The sales employee (who is not an SVP) wasnt surprised to hear that Spanfeller didnt know what she did. Endnotes [1] Statement from G/O Media: "Some reports have miscast Jim Spanfeller as a private equity businessman when, in fact, he has spent his entire career in editorial-driven businesses. Spanfellers executive assistant set up a time for us to meet. Whats left of that company is currently called G/O Media. While cleaning house and bringing in some trusted former colleagues is not entirely uncommon in private-equity acquisitions, Spanfeller filled nearly his entire top layer of management without any public recruitment process; the only woman hired as a department head, head of talent Angela Persaud, was also the only person at that level whose job was posted publicly. [1] He is also a past Chairman of the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and longtime executive board member of Digital Content Next (DCN). Internet Life, a joint publication of Ziff-Davis and Yahoo!. I was disappointed. Youre not qualified. (The people I work for and the people who report to me know what I do, Rogers, 63, told Deadspin in an email.). Made up mostly of the former Gawker Media sites, G/O Media has been in a near constant state of turmoil for the past few years. Reverse Phone Search Tool And much more all for free! Jack Crosbie, a former Splinter contractor and co-owner of Discourse, said that traffic declined at Splinter because G/O did not refill lost positions. Its motivation is simply to publish true and interesting stories, and to make sure the things powerful people would rather stay in the dark end up in the light of day. Who even told you you were allowed to think about audience?, My management was straight-up scared of him, said a staffer who worked at the site for two years and had responsibilities on both the editorial and marketing sides of the company. 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. Successfully sold . "We closed Splinter because it was a liberal political site that was losing audience in the middle of a liberal moment," he said. A voter's representatives in government. I intend to continue supervising the reporting process, including legal review, and then publish a thorough and fair story, which of course would include responses from people we spoke to. , in respect of a candidate, means the name of the political party that has endorsed him or her or the word "independent", as the case may be, included in the nomination paper in accordance with subparagraph 66 (1) (a) (v). As you know, one reason that I dont believe that publications should write about themselves is because I fear it damages perceived external credibility in editorial independence, which, if anything, makes keeping advertisers at bay harder, not easier. Find Out With This Weeks News Quiz. In early April, Great Hill Partners, a private-equity firm, acquired Gizmodo Media Groupa collection of sites, formed from the assets of the old Gawker, that included Jezebel, Lifehacker, and Deadspinas well as The Onion, a satirical news site, reportedly at a fire-sale price.The company, renamed G/O Media, installed Jim Spanfeller, formerly of Forbes.com, Playboy, and Ziff Davis, as CEO. The two former staffers described Spanfeller as a micromanager who insists on approving minor budget items and sitting in on meetings far beneath his level, like editorial audience meetings with each site. Sources say that on the tech side of the company, Spanfeller has taken to micromanaging various aspects of developers work, holding meetings to ask what each one is working on, demanding detailed accounts of how they spend their working days, and mandating various projects based on his work at Forbes in the mid-2000s. Sources say the meeting concluded with an agreement that the best course of action would be to explain to Spanfeller why the player would not be finished by August 15. Email us. And he made sure to make it clear that I just didnt get it in his mind that I just didnt get this whole digital thing, she said. "We want to do it in a way that's a little more buttoned up," he said. LinkedIn is the world's largest business network, helping professionals like Jim Spanfeller discover inside connections to recommended . Great Hill Partners is a growth equity company committed to building businesses. These conversations reveal that Spanfellers biggest effect on the company since taking over has been a deflation of morale. When asked why he didnt consider the SVP, Spanfeller told Deadspin, I was unaware of her interest in the role and that Mike had made that commitment and Im sorry. James J. Spanfeller Jr. is an American media executive best known for running Forbes.com from 2001-2009. That management did not respond to our request for an explanation is only another of the many ways the workers at GMG have been ignored and put on the back burner in the name of a profitability mirage that is clearly more attractive to the big decision-makers than a functioning workplace. Three and a half hours later, Maidment told us to put the story on ice, but both Spanfeller and Maidment maintain that Spanfeller never explicitly or implicitly directed the story to be killed. The appropriate thing to do would be to talk to the editorial side of the business and have a clear objective for the survey.. Jim characterized that as a misunderstanding, she said. Laura M. Browning and Caitlin PenzeyMoog, the A.V. It was four days old. She said Spanfeller told her that he was unaware of what she did at the company, and that she replied: That doesnt help, because that says you not only didnt know what I did, but you also had no interest in meeting the only woman on the revenue leadership team who is an SVP who has been successful, according to meeting her revenue and finance goals. She said the conversation ended with Spanfeller saying, Im sorry, I dont know what else you want me to say., Spanfeller confirmed the womans account to Deadspin. From a womans perspective, I did feel very belittled. 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. Other top employees who have left the company since the start of Spanfellers reign include former A.V. Jim Spanfeller . And Fake. Spanfeller said the company hopes to expand into areas like travel, music, business, and news. Once it became clear that the sales department was being restructured in Kurt Muellers absence, another female vice president, who had been at the company for four years, asked McAvoy in early June for the opportunity to be considered for an expanded sales role, providing examples to show her success at the company. That is clearly evident when you note the poor syntax and galling bias of the questions. McAvoy told her she would be able to interview for a bigger role, she said, only to follow up a few weeks later and say that Rogers had been hired. We shall have a discussion on the policy at the next EiCs leads meeting. As traffic dipped and employees headed for the exits, staffers at the company wrote a letter to Great Hill asking that Spanfeller be replaced as CEO. During an internal sales summit meeting in New York on June 19, sales execs practiced pitching G/O Medias general presentation, a deck of about 15 slides that tells clients why they should do business with the company. Jim Spanfeller has 2 current jobs as Founder at The Daily Meal and Chief Executive Officer at G/O Media. Its hard to imagine what one would not like on that list of items, Reibstein said of the third question. (10 is very satisfied, 1 is very unsatisfied); What do you like MOST about Deadspin? I have definitely given positive feedback to numerous women, including senior executives in edit, sales, and marketing, he offered instead. Spanfeller, a man who is regularly and perhaps euphemistically referred to in press accounts as a digital media veteran, has so far hired a slew of his former colleagues at Forbes.comwhere he was CEO from 2001 to 2009and Playboywhere he was a senior vice president from 1989 to 1993. Jim Spanfeller, I told Mike, verbally and in writing, that I would be interested in taking on new responsibilities and opportunities within the organization and I would like to interview for whatever position would be a part of that, she told Deadspin. John Taggart for The Washington Post via Getty Images, NOW WATCH: WATCH: How advertisers can navigate the death of third-party cookies, according to execs from Mars Petcare, R/GA, The Washington Post, and The Trade Desk, Clashes between the Gawker Media editorial culture. Have a tip or story idea? G/O Media executives have discussed potential deal targets in the past, including Genius, The Hill, and HuffPost, according to two people familiar with the matter. [11], Spanfeller ran Forbes.com for 8 years from 2001 to 2009, when digital and print operations were run separately. Spanfeller, who became head of the digital media company when GMG was purchased by private equity firm Great Hill Partners, told staff that he expected the site's direct advertising to "take the. Spanfeller says Pontius accepted the job, but he decided she was not a good fit for this position after Pontius refused to join me in communicating our plans to fire Banikarim. This conversation inspired her to write a post on the personal account she still holds on G/Os publishing platform, Kinja, titled Jim Spanfeller Is a Herb., Pronounced with a hard h, herbs are difficult to define, but typified by the individuals seen in this earlier Carmichael post about herbitude. The role was not posted nor was it communicated to me in time where I would have even been given equal opportunity to be considered, she said. Im not building a club, we are working to build a successful companyand that depends on great women and men.. "You can write a blog, just don't publish them here.". 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. In its brief life, the postwritten by Emma Carmichael, a former editor at a former version of the companywas viewed nearly 100,000 times and was tweeted out by the official People for Bernie Twitter account.
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