G/O Media was a digital publishing company formed in 2019 when the growth equity firm Great Hill Partners combined Gizmodo Media Group with the Onion Inc. titles. It has sold every one of its publications and no longer operates as a publisher.
The epilogue
Its own website now carries a statement headed “G/O Media Epilogue,” signed by Jim Spanfeller. It opens: “Given that we have now completed the transaction of all our media assets with the sale at the end of last year of TheRoot.com our company’s future or lack thereof is now abundantly clear.” Spanfeller states the reason plainly — “G/O Media is predominantly owned by a Growth Equity firm named Great Hill Partners. Given how both private equity and growth equity work it became clear to our investors that it was time to move on” — and describes the company’s life as a “6-year run.”
The company’s earlier domain, gomedia.co, no longer resolves; the epilogue is published at g-omedia.com.
The Deadspin dispute, in the owner’s account
Spanfeller’s statement gives management’s version of the episode the company is best remembered for. He writes that G/O Media “asked for the slightest of changes, to cover just sports, sports related issues as well as sports adjacent stories,” that this “was perceived as beyond the pale by the legacy team and as such they left en masse,” and that the outcome “the management team certainly did not want.” He adds that a replacement team returned the site to previous traffic levels, made a profit “for the first time in many, many years,” and that it was eventually sold “for more than we bought it for.”
This is one side of a dispute, presented as such: it is the owner’s account, published by the owner, and the departing staff’s account is not represented here.
Relevance to digital political discourse
G/O Media is a documented case of a private-equity-owned publisher assembling well-known independent titles, clashing publicly with their newsrooms over editorial scope, and then selling the titles off individually — with the owner’s own exit statement identifying the ownership structure, rather than the journalism, as the reason.
Sources
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G/O Media. G/O Media Epilogue. Signed statement by Jim Spanfeller on G/O Media's own site. Source for the company having "completed the transaction of all our media assets with the sale at the end of last year of TheRoot.com," for its ownership by the growth equity firm Great Hill Partners and his account of why the investors chose to exit, for the "6-year run," and for his account of the Deadspin editorial dispute, the mass departure of its staff, the site's later profitability and its eventual sale.