Sports blogging site Deadspin was sold to a European start-up and the entire staff was reportedly fired with barely any notice Monday — just months after the publication was forced to apologize for wrongly accusing a young Kansas City Chiefs fan of wearing “blackface.”
The NY Post reports Jim Spanfeller, the CEO of parent G/O Media, broke the news of the layoffs and Deadspin’s sale to Lineup Publishing in a memo to shocked staff — the latest piece of the company’s crumbling empire to be dumped amid a wave of job cuts roiling the entire industry.
Lineup will “not carry over any of the site’s existing staff and instead build a new team more in line with their editorial vision for the brand,” Spanfeller wrote. |
| Holden Armenta |
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
A rep for Deadspin said 11 staffers — based in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago — were canned.
Among those was senior writer Carron Phillips, who penned an incendiary column last November that accused 9-year-old Chiefs fan Holden Armenta of racism against Native Americans and black people for wearing “blackface” and headdress to a football game.
The site ran a photo of Holden showing just the right side of his face that was painted brown under a headline that blared, “The NFL needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in Black face, Native Headdress.”
However, a photo of his full face showed it was painted both brown and red.
Phillips failed to mention that Holden is of Native American descent, and he was wearing war paint, with one color covering each side of his face.
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