The Mavening of Sportswriting

You’ve been waiting for it, haven’t you? Wondering whether it’ll turn up next to an old Drew Magary Funbag. It will be the first Deadspin post, written after this week’s staff exodus, that fully symbolizes the site’s bleak future—their version of Sports Illustrated’s Notre Dame story. We know Deadspin is dead. Now, it will be undead.

This week, Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley described the growing class of “zombie” publications: “Trustworthy brand-name publications are being hollowed out and refilled with unpaid ‘community’ contributors or low-paid, less experienced professionals who don’t have the stature to challenge editorial imperatives or productivity quotas that generate useless, often-inaccurate content.”

Without really trying, a reader can access a whole zombie content library. In addition to Deadspin and SI, Newsweek, Playboy, LA Weekly, U.S. News & World Report, The Hill, and newspapers like The Denver Post all exist in varying states of catatonia. The Los Angeles Times and Texas Monthly narrowly missed joining the list. To honor the company that gutted SI, we can call this process the Mavening. The Mavening is the way media overlords taunt readers by forcing them to watch as they drag around the corpse of a beloved friend.

You occasionally find ancient zombies like The Saturday Evening Post hunting for bewildered readers with articles like “11 Old Candies You Can’t Buy Anymore.” But the Mavening is mostly an invention of the digital advertising crisis.

A Mavened publication has certain qualities. First, the owners take whatever editorial line the publication was pushing and do the opposite. Sometimes, this is as simple as taking good journalism and making it bad.

During its death march, the Village Voice pruned its famous arts coverage by cutting critics like Robert Christgau. At Texas Monthly, a magazine with a history of ass-kicking journalism, a former editor was caught discussing publicity plans with the company run by a cover subject. During Forbes veteran Lewis D’Vorkin’s brief, bonkers run as L.A. Times editor, he proposed a homepage full of “GIFs, GIFs, all manner of media.”

Readers find that Mavened publications lack their favorite bylines. On Wednesday, Deadspin staffers like Tom Ley and Laura Wagner quit. In 2017, the LA Weekly’s “Red Wedding” claimed the jobs of nine of the paper’s 13 editorial staffers.

The writers who replace them are typically notable for not being notable. When Ross Levinsohn was CEO and publisher of the L.A. Times, he proposed making part of the paper a “network of deep micro-niche vertical ‘entrepreneurs’ and their audiences.” Now running Occupied Sports Illustrated, Levinsohn is proposing a reboot. SI will be staffed by dozens of content-creating “mavens” who will make as little as $25,000 a year.

Inevitably, the overlords will insist that big, splashy hires are right around the corner. (“We’re excited about Deadspin’s future and we’ll have some important updates in the coming days,” G/O Media crowed on Wednesday.) But the hallmarks of Mavened publications include sloppy writing, a deadening lack of higher thought, a pro-Jeffrey Epstein blog, and a sad plea (in after-the-fall LA Weekly) for “Angelinos” to write the contents of the paper.

For sportswriting, the Mavening is particularly deadly. On October 1, if you had to draw up a list of top-tier sportswriting shops, would you have come up with … eight? Maybe 10, if you were counting generously? In a month, two of them have been fully Mavened.

The heartbreaking thing is, even with their disemboweled staffs and owners that have been dragged on Twitter, a hollowed-out SI or Deadspin probably still makes the list. On Tuesday, SI announced the hiring of Yahoo writer Pat Forde. Someone’s going to put up their hand to edit Deadspin.

There’s no shortage of sports news. But Mavening kills off a particular form of it. A decade ago, Deadspin started to lean into a kind of muscular, socially attuned sportswriting. It created a rubric to wish “death to the NCAA.” It tweaked readers who demanded their favorite writers stop talking about the 2012 election. It cast Donald Sterling as a raging bigot years before Adam Silver ejected him into the sun.

In the intervening decade, mainstream sportswriting absorbed some of this vision, thanks to Deadspin’s hectoring, the activism of athletes like Colin Kaepernick, and the election of Donald Trump. But that kind of writing—at Deadspin, anyway—is unlikely to survive the churn. The Deadspin exodus was put into motion on Monday with a memo from G/O Media ordering the staff to make sports their “100% focus.” On Thursday, the owners even slagged a recent Deadspin ranking of classic rock and one of Magary’s NFL columns.

Whether non-sportswriting attracts readers, as former acting editor Barry Petchesky argued, is almost beside the point. Mavened publications want traffic but not thoughts. The “incredibly broad mandate” G/O Media’s owners claimed to have granted Deadspin’s staff is illusory. For them, the worst thing a website could generate is a mild headache—mild and major headaches being pretty much the point of journalism.

This week, as one staffer after another quit, I couldn’t help but think of one of the first Deadspin-induced moments of journalistic anxiety. In 2008, author Buzz Bissinger faced off with Will Leitch, the site’s founder, on HBO. Bissinger freaked out that real, honest-to-god reporters like him were being undercut and replaced by snotty bloggers.

The critique isn’t worth revisiting. But think about this: Now we’ve lost the snotty bloggers. The kind of churn Bissinger feared has decimated two separate categories of sportswriters. And it ain’t over. We are fated to live in a world where certain owners will make sure this process continues apace, until only mavens remain.