The Adults in the Room ⇥ theconcourse.deadspin.com

Today was Megan Greenwell’s last day at Deadspin — a decision she made after the private equity firm that bought the Gizmodo Media websites from Univision tried to change things up in a really stupid way.

Her last piece for the website is brilliant:

There is a version of the story of this company in which idealistic journalists, unconcerned with profit, are posed against ruthless business-doers, concerned about profit above all else. That would be a convenient story, pitching me and my colleagues and friends as people who just care too much about The Truth to yield before the gale-force winds of Capitalism, but it wouldn’t be a true one.

The real and less romantic story is this: The journalists at Deadspin and its sister sites, like most journalists I know, are eager to do work that makes money; we are even willing to compromise for it, knowing that our jobs and futures rest on it. An ever-growing number of media owners, meanwhile, are so exceedingly unwilling to reckon with the particulars of their own business that they refuse to accept our eagerness to help them make money. They’re speaking a language no one else does, proud of their own inability not just to not fail, but to not understand the terms on which they’re failing. The tragedy of digital media isn’t that it’s run by ruthless, profiteering guys in ill-fitting suits; it’s that the people posing as the experts know less about how to make money than their employees, to whom they won’t listen.

Greenwell is moving to Wired, and I imagine that their output will continue to improve because of it. As a daily reader of Deadspin, I sincerely hope that the person who takes her place has a similar approach to the job; I hope they do not cave to management’s wishes that they “stick to sports”.