Deadspin may not be active for the Super Bowl this weekend, but some of the site’s more prominent ex-staffers are launching a temporary publication to blog about the big game.
Several of Deadspin’s most well-known writers—who quit the now-dormant outlet last fall over deep conflicts with its bosses at G/O Media and investment firm Great Hill Partners—will reunite this weekend to blog about the Super Bowl for a website underwritten by password-management tech company Dashlane.
The website, titled “Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog Dot Com,” already features a mock-Q&A post with former Deadspin features editor Tom Ley, who, in a familiarly Deadspin-like tone, explains how the blog will run three days over Super Bowl weekend and that “At the conclusion of this three-day period, we will vanish.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Ley continued, referencing Deadspin’s demise, that “All of your favorite sports bloggers” will be a part of the blog. “Well, maybe not all of them, but at least the ones who are currently unemployed due to their recent decision to detonate their own careers. We’re all feeling great and ready to blog.”
People involved with the project told The Daily Beast that, along with Ley, several of the site’s former writers and editors, including Barry Petchesky, David Roth, and Drew Magary will blog for the site.
In keeping with the blog’s subtle middle-finger to G/O Media, the password-security company’s splashy full-page ad reads: “Dashlane is proud to sponsor Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog Dot Com, because we’re tired of big companies ruining good websites.”
Deadspin imploded late last year when its entire editorial staff resigned en masse after G/O Media brass mandated that the website—which often successfully veered into politics and culture coverage—“stick to sports” and then fired a top editor for refusing to do so.
G/O Media briefly and desperately attempted to restock the website’s content, whether through short-lived freelance recruitments or publishing un-bylined, decidedly un-Deadspin content later confirmed to have been written by the company’s editorial director Paul Maidment. Sources told The Daily Beast in January that G/O leadership attempted to recruit some of the site’s former staff, but have come up empty-handed.
Maidment, who was responsible for the disastrous “stick to sports” edict later resigned to pursue an unnamed “entrepreneurial opportunity.”
