When the staff of Deadspin resigned en masse last fall, it felt like the end of an era of online journalism. The fun internet—best embodied by the old Gawker Media sites and The Awl—was gone, undone by tech companies, private equity goons, and a lawsuit from Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel. These sites were out. What was in? Nothing good.
Deadspin’s private equity–backed management took a look at what the staff was doing successfully and decided the wisest course of action would be to demand that they stop doing those things. When interim editor in chief and longtime staffer Barry Petchesky refused to “stick to sports,” per a memo from leadership, he was fired; the rest of the site’s staff quit within two days. Deadspin’s overlords got their wish—they replaced the walkouts with more pliant employees and have been rewarded with vastly diminished traffic, engagement, and influence.
All of the worst trends in media from a year ago are still present today, perhaps more so: mass layoffs, contraction and consolidation, a losing battle against Big Tech for advertising dollars. Variety was once the calling card of internet journalism, but now it is defined by a crushing sameness, brought on by financial pressure, social media, and the frantic drumbeat of news in the Trump era. As a result, it is surprisingly hard to find a website that you actually want to read.
Earlier this month, nearly all of the 20 staffers who quit Deadspin launched Defector, a site that they co-own. It is, refreshingly, both very much like the old Deadspin and very much not like the rest of the internet. There are no advertisements, no Amazon affiliate links, no plans to sell out to venture capitalists. Instead, the site is supported by subscriptions, which cost between $80 and $1,000 a year. So far the model has proven a success. Editor in Chief Tom Ley told me that the site was expected to hit 30,000 paying subscribers on Monday, which at the base rate would amount to over $2 million a year.
With a staff of 19, Defector has slipped between two subscription-based trends, neither the atomized Substack model nor the scale model being deployed by traditional newsrooms like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Defector is a throwback to what its editors believe is a healthier and more sustainable model. “It really makes you think of how cyclical everything is,” Ley told me. “The internet disrupted magazines, and now we’re basically just trying to do a zine, which feels like it’s from 1982.”