jim spanfeller political affiliation

As with any reporting process, we asked questions intending to incorporate the answers. Multiple people who worked for him at The Daily Meal (part of Spanfeller Media Group) told Deadspin that Spanfeller couldnt cede any control. John Taggart for The Washington Post via Getty Images, NOW WATCH: WATCH: How advertisers can navigate the death of third-party cookies, according to execs from Mars Petcare, R/GA, The Washington Post, and The Trade Desk, Clashes between the Gawker Media editorial culture. So Out of Touch: Gen Z Congressman-Elect Mocks RNC Tweet Criticizing Him For His Housing Woes. Spanfeller Hired Media Friends/Former Colleagues to Fill G/O Media Roles Just After Claiming He Had No Plans for Major Turnover. James J. Spanfeller Jr. is an American media executive best known for running Forbes.com from 2001-2009. Spanfeller also said that he did not ask Katie to fire Susie, only to be in the room while I had the conversation about Susies future with the company., Spanfeller ended up firing Banikarim himself, and then, months later, hiring Angela Persaud for the chief talent officer job after a public search. "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. Reverse Phone Search Tool And much more all for free! I Close-Read the 113-Page Complaint Trying to Ban the Abortion Pill in Texas. 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. Use this information as you see fit. He started screaming at me, Who told you you were allowed to speak about audience? Sole dedication to revenue, getting it the cheapest, quickest way possible. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. My territory has been cut in half. In the midst of the fallout, former Deadspin, Gawker, and Jezebel editor Emma Carmichael had a spirited discussion with [former Jezebel writer] Clio Chang on the overwhelming herbishness of Jim Spanfeller, she told me over the phone. Before he started full time in early June, Flanagan was brought in as a consultant just after Spanfeller took over G/O Media. 12-Year-Old Prankster Throws Dead Snake on Woman's Car and Gets Flattened by Husband 15,743. Text. [2][3], Spanfeller graduated from Union College with a B.A. 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. Spanfeller said the company hopes to expand into areas like travel, music, business, and news. But those efforts did not go very far, the people said, and the company has yet to mount a takeover. Asked for a response to the latter allegation, Spanfeller responded, That is absurd. The other is still in college.. 3. But Spanfellers expectation that the process would be done in the next week or so shocked the tech team. "The fact that we could acquire it at a price that would make it one of our smallest investments is that good or bad? We have also learned the tech team has been asked to post the survey again. At an all-staff meeting this week, Knight told Spanfeller that August 15 is the target completion date, which Spanfeller told Deadspin he believes is achievable. (The other woman on the executive leadership team, general counsel Lynn Oberlander, left the company this week.) That the story has been submitted for legal review without the benefit of our responses leads me to the conclusion that the piece is already fully written and that our responses to questions are mere window dressing. This former staffer said the team wished to add Black creatives to help create more representative branded content to meet the demand, but it was not given additional resources. In conversations with Deadspin, more than 20 employees from across the business, tech, and editorial departments of G/O Media expressed frustration with Spanfellers approach to hiring and his new executives lack of knowledge about the company combined with their seeming unwillingness or inability to get up to speed. There are regions that were within my scope of responsibilities and within my role that I cannot call on and neither can my team.. At least have everybody well briefed on this is what were doing and this is what wed like to learn from it, Reibstein said. In an email read to Deadspin, McAvoy agreed that she was qualified for the role and said he would talk with Spanfeller to ensure she was interviewed for the new opportunity, which had not been posted publicly. He would stop into peoples offices with the doors open and scream at them, so everyone knew what was going on., 5. I have communicated our timeline concerns to Jim and he understands that development is not an exact science and that goals may not be hit, Knight told Deadspin. What Spanfeller says is normal is, of course, a reflection of his own values, which evidently rank transparency, diversity, and inclusion as secondary concerns to financial success. Thats not reality, a tech staffer told Deadspin. 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. A longtime digital media veteran, Spanfeller was an unconventional choice to lead the new Gizmodo Media Group sites (The Daily Beast's CEO, Heather Dietrick, once served as president of the . A source said Spanfeller told editors-in-chief of the companys websites that he had chosen Maidment, 68, for the job before the sale was completed and did not interview other candidates, including Banikarim. "We want to do it in a way that's a little more buttoned up," he said. These actions are clearly management attempting to target, and even intimidate, staff into changing their editorial stance in spite of our contract-protected independence, especially as it comes on the heels of managements repeated attempts to kill this story as it was being reported about the company. James J. Spanfeller is president of The Spanfeller Group, a management consultancy focusing on digital strategy, audience development, revenue acceleration and talent acquisition. [He] wasnt interested in hearing what someone with 20 years of experience would say.. I found this troubling but was okay with it given the circumstances. I have stood up for and advocated for my team since the day I started at G/O. It was a welcome refrain for employees all too aware of how the company had languished under Univisions doomed ownership. The appropriate thing to do would be to talk to the editorial side of the business and have a clear objective for the survey.. The differences were as granular as whether to call published pieces "blogs" or "stories." It will post an eight-figure operating profit this year, he told Insider, and hunt for acquisitions in 2022. Legal review is often a lengthy process involving multiple reads, so talking to a lawyer is certainly not an indication that we would publish without completing the reporting process. This is the same thing that has also happened to Deadspin. So put this piece on ice. This particular set of troubles all started when private equity firm Great Hill Partners purchased GMG and hired Spanfeller, a former Forbes.com CEO, to guide the ship. I hired Katie who accepted the job, he wrote. In one instance in which Spanfeller tried to promote a woman within the company, his offer came with strings attached. 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. She said Spanfeller didnt have many questions for her, describing him as apathetic. Spanfeller seemed not to recall this interaction, telling Deadspin that the sales team was not covering direct clients.. I have definitely given positive feedback to numerous women, including senior executives in edit, sales, and marketing, he offered instead. Elsewhere in the company, G/O Media has pushed staffers at its site the AV Club to relocate to Los Angeles from Chicago, according to a recent report in Gawker, which is now owned by Bustle Digital Group. Im not building a club, we are working to build a successful companyand that depends on great women and men.. It is also worth noting that multiple internal candidates have expressed interest in the position of EIC of the A/V Club. The Onion union declined to comment, but a source with knowledge of the situation disputed that the union demanded promotions, saying its letter demanded action and used the words We ask for the following when addressing promotions. View Jim Spanfeller's professional profile on LinkedIn. He sent a message back about the importance of diversity and inclusion and a full hiring process. These include a senior vice president of marketing who last week wrote a baffling reader satisfaction survey for Deadspin at Spanfellers behest; a sales executive who, sources say, appears unable to give an effective sales pitch; and an editorial director who repeatedly attempted to kill the reporting process for this story. It was placed there without consultation or even simple communication to anyone on Deadspins staff. Or as Carmichael explained, If you dont know what a herb is, youre probably a herb.. Without posting the jobs publicly, Spanfeller hired a stable of white men to fill executive positions overseeing nearly every facet of the company., You also had no interest in meeting the only woman on the revenue leadership team who is an SVP who has been successful., As the only woman on the previous revenue leadership team, I started to wonder if women were being considered for leadership roles., What Spanfeller says is normal is, of course, a reflection of his own values, which evidently rank transparency, diversity, and inclusion as secondary concerns to financial success., The appropriate thing to do would be to talk to the editorial side of the business and have a clear objective for the survey., Chief financial officer Tom Callahan, who worked at Forbes while Spanfeller worked there. During Jim Spanfeller's younger years, he lived in Pennsylvania and recieved his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1952 from the Philladelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. That distinction quickly sparked backlash in late 2019, when the staff of Deadspin resigned over the firing of a top editor and the company's mandate that the site stick to covering sports. Everything theyve done in reaction to it is the herbiest shit I could possibly imagine. In the meantime, Carmichael had her own message for Spanfeller: Congratulations on confirming your herb-ishness.. Emma Carmichael is a friend of mine, and we both worked at Gawker Media and, as it was later named after being purchased by Univision, Gizmodo Media Group, or GMG. 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. The takeover of G/O Media, previosuly known as Gizmodo Media Group and Gawker Media, by former Forbes executive Jim Spanfellercontinues to throttle downhill, as one of the companys news sites, Deadspin, published a scathing expos on Friday detailing a litany of problems employees have faced since investment firm Great Hill purchased Gizmodo and placed Spanfeller in control. While the archived version of the post did not preserve the original images, you can view a PDF of the original post below. The Daily Meal was acquired by Tronc in 2016. Mr. McAvoy was clear to me on his opinion that he did not think she was the right choice at this time, Spanfeller said. (Spanfeller says this is inaccurate and that he did consider other candidates for the editorial director role, but Paul quickly rose to the top after he expressed an interest in the position.) Three of the men Spanfeller hired were installed over successful women who had been at the company for years. A G/O Media spokesperson said the company plans to grow the 174-person editorial headcount to 200 by the end of the first quarter next year. McAvoy described the SVP of marketing job as a combination of sales strategy, account management, and managing creative teamsall responsibilities that fell under the SVPs purview. Political affiliation means the state of belonging to or endorsing any political party. And Fake. His skin got bright red, she said. This response, which Spanfeller emailed out along with the questions to and answers from every other executive to the entire company as an attempt to undermine this story, prompted this response from a third sales employee. It was four days old. New York City. Think Youre Smarter Than a What Next Producer? Spanfeller said no one told him that a female VP was already successfully performing that job before he hired Thompson. Like many media companies, G/O Media's advertising business was battered by the pandemic. (check all that apply); and What do you like LEAST about Deadspin? Once it became clear that the sales department was being restructured in Kurt Muellers absence, another female vice president, who had been at the company for four years, asked McAvoy in early June for the opportunity to be considered for an expanded sales role, providing examples to show her success at the company. [We] had a phone conversation, kind of confronting Jim about it, and he told Mike, I thought we talked about this. It was throwing Mike under the bus, and Mike told Jim that they had not talked about it. [4] He soon switched to the business side of the paper, and later took a tour through Europe. That is clearly evident when you note the poor syntax and galling bias of the questions. Where people are registered to vote. Spanfeller told Insider that G/O Media plans to reinvest the profits into the business. The role was not posted nor was it communicated to me in time where I would have even been given equal opportunity to be considered, she said. 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 . Initially, we had to move fast because the company was losing money at a rapid pace, he said. Multiple sources say that Spanfeller reached out to VP of media operations Brad Klancnik to tell him he was a valuable employee and that the new owners would like him to stay at the company, but female VPs say he did not relay such messages to them. As for why that move was never announced, Spanfeller told Deadspin he believed Mike McAvoy would announce Rogers arrival, even though Spanfeller hired Rogers and he has announced other hires across the company since taking over. Follow him on Twitter here: @calebecarma. "We closed Splinter because it was a liberal political site that was losing audience in the middle of a liberal moment," he said. For the last two questions, the options were the same: Uncompromising commentary, sports stories I cant find anywhere else, knowledgeable writers, broad scope of coverage, political coverage and strong political point of view, and criticism and coverage of other media companies.. Email him here: caleb@mediaite.com Vice president for west coast sales Steve Thompson, who worked with Spanfeller at, Vice president for east coast sales Sean Flanagan, who worked with Spanfeller at. 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. Search over 95 Million Voter Registration Records. The VP, who said she now reports to Thompson, said all of her previous reviews from her managers have exceeded expectations, and that she was able to more than double revenue for my region in less than a year. Who even told you you were allowed to think about audience?, My management was straight-up scared of him, said a staffer who worked at the site for two years and had responsibilities on both the editorial and marketing sides of the company. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. She asked McAvoy, then her immediate supervisor, for the opportunity to interview for the position, citing her leadership of the revenue division, her construction of a diverse team, and her renown in the industry. Views. About their hires, he wrote, I introduced Steve and Lance to Mike McAvoy, but I did not make the hires. Spanfellers executive assistant set up a time for us to meet. Which he would do by turning Deadspin into a sports-only website. But Spanfeller said that he wants G/O Media to keep the voice and mission that made Gawker Media sites singular in the digital media industry. Or knowledgeable writers?, Asked about the survey, Rogers said he thinks its responses will accurately and fully reflect Deadspin readers opinions of the site. I am a father of three wonderful woman, Spanfeller wrote in a statement. Clubs executive editor and managing editor, respectively, stepped down on July 12. He is currently the CEO of G/O Media which consists primarily of sites that were previously part of Gawker Media. ), Spanfeller described the situation differently. Jim Rich, the former top editor of the New York Daily News, will start as editor-in-chief of Deadspin on Monday. Club managing editor Caitlin PenzeyMoog, who both resigned on July 12. in English Literature in 1979 and went to work as a reporter for the SoHo Weekly News. "You're not a 'blogger,' you're a professional journalist. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. [10] Spanfeller was also responsible for advertising sales on the magazine's website and that of Yahoo! Spanfeller Media is working to redefine content for the digital era. Spanfeller Media Group ( SMG ), a subsidiary of publishing company Tribune Publishing, is a digital media company based in New York City. 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. This guy just seems like he doesnt like women, another added. Two are now successfully navigating careers in the digital advertising space. It definitely feels like its the old boys club, a G/O Media employee told Deadspin. Its something that Im working to improve. In addition to clichs like we are ambitious and be passionate and have fun, the fifth value on the list said, We will be at our best when we embrace many different perspectives and experiences. For the life of me, I am not sure how you can have a legal review without a complete story and I cannot imagine how you can consider your work to be objective without reviewing the answers to the questions that you have asked. In one case, sources say Spanfeller did offer to promote a woman to run human resources, but on the condition she fire another woman at the company as her first order of business. The next day she refused to join me in communicating our plans to Susie. Additionally, as you are reporting here, there are numerous outstanding people, both men and women who have worked for me on more than one occasion., By July, Spanfellers third full month at the company, questions about Spanfellers commitment to his journalists editorial independence began to dominate conversation in the office. Why Ketanji Brown Jackson Split With the Courts Liberals in a 54 Decision, the firing of beloved editor Barry Petchesky, According to Great Hill Partners website, increasingly insisted on directing editorial coverage. Im sorry that Mike didnt more clearly convey the information to me., McAvoy said, Jim has a different recollection of the facts., The SVP said she told Spanfeller that she wasnt the only person who noticed this pattern of hiring his former colleagues over women at the company, and that he should be prepared to address it. The only person that I was aware of that was calling directly on clients was an SVP at The Onion and that was to sell creative services, he said. A leading digital publisher producing category leaders The Daily Meal and The Active Times. The job, however, came with a condition, they said: Pontiuss first order of business would be to fire newsroom editorial director Susie Banikarim. The detection of possible errors in a person's voter record as well as instructions on how to update it. Steve Thompson, 55, was installed over a female vice president who had been running west coast sales for two and a half years. I am and will continue to be a very strong advocate for my team.. I think it makes him a bad role model for the rest of his team.. Other top employees who have left the company since the start of Spanfellers reign include former A.V. Announcing Persauds hire on July 10, Spanfeller wrote this of the process: After a very fulsome search where we interviewed dozens of qualified candidates we identified two finalists. While we were given a 3pm deadline today to respond to dozens of questions, I understand that the folks at Deadspin have already submitted their story for legal review and plan to publish it on Wednesday all without ever seeing any of the responses to the questions that they asked. Just two weeks after Spanfeller and Great Hill acquired the company, and less than a week after he said in an interview with Variety that he didnt expect any layoffs, Spanfeller fired 25 people across the 400-person company, including Susie Banikarim, GMGs widely respected editorial director, and the only person of color on the executive leadership team at the time. This has led to some protest among employees, as one staffer told Deadspin, It definitely feels like its the old boys club. A second employee told the site, This guy just seems like he doesnt like women.. , in respect of a candidate, means the name of the political party that has endorsed him or her or the word "independent", as the case may be, included in the nomination paper in accordance with subparagraph 66 (1) (a) (v). Computing. The union said that it wants the money to translate into higher salary minimums, trans-inclusive healthcare, and a focus on talent retention. Sean Flanagan, 55, who was hired to lead east coast sales, was also installed over a female senior sales employee, who had been at the company for four years before she left in July. tips@mediaite.com, Caleb Ecarma was a reporter at Mediaite. Sign up for notifications from Insider! 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. Jim characterized that as a misunderstanding, she said. In the months that followed, without posting the jobs publicly, Spanfeller, 62, hired a stable of white men to fill executive positions overseeing nearly every facet of the company. [5] Upon returning from Europe, Spanfeller took a position at AMP Marketing Systems. The anti-herb agenda is being suppressed.. Great Hill Partners did not disclose the financial terms of the private, all equity transaction but stated in a press release that Spanfeller is an investor. She told Deadspin she was surprised that Spanfeller seemed to know little about her team, which last year won Digidays best content studio award.. In this specific case, I have committed to the current story being fully reported and submitted for external review and, if it passes that review, it will be published. That union's collective bargaining agreement expires in February. G/O Media, the company which ran Deadspin, was acquired by the private equity group Great Hill Partners, which installed Spanfeller as CEO and gave him one mission: Make them richer. Spanfeller, a man who is regularly and perhaps euphemistically referred to in press accounts as a digital media "veteran," has so far hired a slew of his former colleagues at Forbes.comwhere he. Ultimately, the issue of building a wall has raised political risk, Cramer said. If I had known, I would have been happy to interview her and consider her for the role., On June 20, the next time Spanfeller was in Chicago, the SVP met with him to ask why she had been overlooked. [8] In June 1993, Spanfeller became associate publisher for advertising at Inc. magazine, replacing Kristin Norrgard, who left to become publisher of Working Woman magazine. 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.

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