Employees in G/O Media's editorial union urged the company's private-equity owners to replace G/O Chief Executive Jim Spanfeller in a letter Monday, saying a change in leadership was . All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC.
Laura M. Browning and Caitlin PenzeyMoog, the A.V. We had to move fast because the company was losing money at a rapid pace, Spanfeller wrote in a statement. Flanagan volunteered to go first, and what followed wasnt overwhelmingly inspiring, as one sales employee who was at the meeting put it: Flanagan read word for word what was on the slides, two people present confirmed. New York City. (The other woman on the executive leadership team, general counsel Lynn Oberlander, left the company this week.) James J. Spanfeller Jr. is an American media executive best known for running Forbes.com from 20012009. Gaffney said the firm was prepared to hold onto the investment for a decade or more and that Spanfeller, a former Forbes and Playboy executive, does not have a time frame for preparing the company for a sale. [11], Spanfeller ran Forbes.com for 8 years from 2001 to 2009, when digital and print operations were run separately. "We are happy to hear that the company is profitable and financially stable enough for Jim Spanfeller to consider further acquisitions, and look forward to welcoming more workers into our union," the G/O Media union said in a statement. Asked about the former employees accounts, Spanfeller said he has no idea what this refers to and it is not my recollection of working at The Daily Meal, adding that he doesnt recall screaming at anyone. Gaffney and Spanfeller said that G/O Media is looking for acquisitions itself. [1] He is also a past Chairman of the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and longtime executive board member of Digital Content Next (DCN). Amid the chaos, someone edited Spanfeller's Wikipedia entry to read, "Jim Spanfeller is a fart-faced fascist best known for running Forbes.com from 2001-2009." (That language has since . G/O Media, from a business perspective, has turned a corner, Spanfeller says. Or as Carmichael explained, If you dont know what a herb is, youre probably a herb.. According to sources familiar with the situation, the tech team was instructed by Knight, who was directed by Spanfeller, to push out the survey without consent from anyone in editorial. Spanfeller said that he wasnt preventing, just delaying analytics from being implemented, on the grounds that its not particularly useful information at the moment. (The day after Deadspin contacted Spanfeller for comment, the tech team was given the green light to roll out video analytics. Neither Sean nor Jim ever reached out to ask, Hey, what are you doing, how are you doing it, how is it working? There was never a conversation about my role, she told Deadspin.
Political affiliation Definition | Law Insider I was also hiring a good portion of these jobs before I actually took over day to day control of the company. Jim Spanfeller @JimSpanfeller Founder of http://TheDailyMeal.comand http://TheActiveTimes.com. (G/O Medias Collective Bargaining Agreement contains a clause that explicitly states that editorial decisions can only be made by editorial staff members, which Spanfeller is not. There are regions that were within my scope of responsibilities and within my role that I cannot call on and neither can my team.. 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. I hired Katie who accepted the job, he wrote. From a womans perspective, I did feel very belittled. You wrote a 'story,'" Spanfeller recalled telling staff. In an emailed statement to Deadspin, Spanfeller claimed that he did not make the hires, but admitted to making professional introductions for some of these new employees. Oberlander actually left last week. Its something that Im working to improve. On July 9, he hired Faiza Javaid as deputy general counsel, a position that was posted publicly. When she tried to edit the post, she was greeted by the following image: Attempts to create a new post were similarly thwarted. Indeed, two former G/O Media staffers blasted Spanfeller for being stingy with resources.
G/O Media lawsuits: Two former exec allege discrimination - CNN Vice president of sales for the south Lance Johnson, who worked with Spanfeller at Forbes (and most recently worked with Bruce Rogers at a company called SITO Mobile). Which he would do by turning Deadspin into a sports-only website. Spanfeller said he asked for the survey; Rogers said he wrote it; and editorial director Paul Maidment said he didnt approve it, but he told Deadspin editor-in-chief Megan Greenwell that he did not attempt to stop it from running on the site when he was filled in shortly before it was scheduled to go up. Political affiliation means the state of belonging to or endorsing any political party. The CEO alleged. Sports News Without Fear, Favor or Compromise. They are parti pris, which is why the overwhelming majority do not do so and many will not even report on rivals for the same reason. (Though the source spoke in great detail about her experience, she requested her name not be used because she didnt want it to affect her future employment opportunities.) When confronted with this negative feedback, Spanfeller insisted that he cannot be sexist because he has daughters.
G/O Media Workers Call on Owners to Replace CEO - WSJ The four women who Spanfeller counts as major hires include two he hired (head of talent and deputy counsel); one he promoted from within to executive managing editor; and a yet-to-be-filled position he says he plans to offer to a woman. The Daily Meal was acquired by Tronc in 2016. Jun 8, 2020, 7:03 AM. G/O is still wracked with internal tensions ahead of contract negotiations with one of its editorial unions. Spanfeller accused writers and editors of acting in bad faith based on a list of questions submitted to him before publication and the fact that a draft of the article had been sent for legal. The next day she refused to join me in communicating our plans to Susie. We have no credibility in writing about ourselves. He sent a message back about the importance of diversity and inclusion and a full hiring process. 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. He is currently the CEO of G/O Media which consists primarily of sites that were previously part of Gawker Media. Most recently, after the latest edict that Deadspin stick to sports, its writers revolted, and Spanfeller retaliated by firing the top-ranking employee, Petchesky (Deadspins latest editor-in-chief, Megan Greenwell quit in August for many of the reasons described above). [5], In 1984, Spanfeller was named publisher of Newsweek On Campus magazine. [14] A subsequent Deadspin post mocked Spanfeller as a "herb"; after being widely shared on social media, G/O Media removed the post. He started screaming at me, Who told you you were allowed to speak about audience? Mad Money Twitter - Jim . 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. Have a tip we should know? 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. In the culmination of a dayslong struggle to suppress a post that repeatedly referred to its CEO, Jim Spanfeller, as a herb, G/O Media has taken the drastic step of removing the article from its Kinja platform entirely. Spanfeller responded that he would be happy to get together, but did not say anything about open roles. Spanfeller said he did not recall the specific request. This is normal in situations like these where a new group is coming in and is facing a near term challenge.. 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.". These men, and others who now hold C-suite positions at the company, were each hired without a public recruitment process, and several were installed over high-ranking women who had been successfully performing those jobs at the company for years. According to multiple sources inside the company, the post even joined the leading posts from official G/O sites on the big board, a large screen in the companys New York headquarters that displays that moments most highly trafficked storiesan unusual feat for a user-generated post. Then, Thursday night, after Bernie Sanders tweeted in support of Deadspin, supporter collective People for Bernie tweeted the post at its new URL: After which, sometime today, the post disappeared, only to be replaced by this: Its not entirely clear which of Kinjas guidelines were violated, particularly considering that theres no agreed upon definition of what constitutes a herb. Spanfellers pushed back against these internal criticisms of his questionably ethical hiring process and management style by blaming G/O Media for losing money too fast. Spanfeller declined to answer a question about whether he expressed these sentiments to Klancnik. Its hard to imagine what one would not like on that list of items, Reibstein said of the third question. 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. "We needed to change a lot of things, and change is hard.". As for the content of the survey, Reibstein said it is possible to read it as innocent, a way to attempt to gauge customer satisfaction, as its known in the marketing industry. Youre not qualified. It laid off 14 staffers in the summer of 2020. I have stood up for and advocated for my team since the day I started at G/O. Steve Thompson, 55, was installed over a female vice president who had been running west coast sales for two and a half years.
Jim Spanfeller Biography & Works of Art | Qart.com While these high-ranking women were being overlooked and bypassed, Spanfeller evidently was concerned about retaining at least one other VP on the sales side. According to Dave Reibstein, past chairman of the Board of Directors of the American Marketing Association and a professor of marketing at University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School of Business (where he teaches a course on market research), there are several problems with the survey. Heres The REAL Clip, Christian Walker GOES OFF on Predator Matt Schlapp for Allegedly Groping Male Campaign Staffer: Hes Done This Before, Im Sure!, LOL.
Jim Spanfeller (@JimSpanfeller) / Twitter 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. Before he started full time in early June, Flanagan was brought in as a consultant just after Spanfeller took over G/O Media. We have also learned the tech team has been asked to post the survey again. 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. Who even told you you were allowed to think about audience? the woman alleged. In the email, Spanfeller said he was "greatly concerned about the objectivity and core intentions of this piece," and questioned the editorial standards of Deadspin's editors.
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