#i'm kind of sad about deadspin getting liquidated even though it wasn't really deadspin anymore. portends evil

[girderednerve]

they killed deadspin again (laid off its entire unionized staff & sold the rights to the name) & it has made me think about....

the ubiquity of deadspin in older hockey RPF fic. nearly every single one of those stories has some kind of reference to deadspin ("be careful or you'll end up on deadspin!", etc). i sort of marveled over this feature at the time (i.e., the two-year period where i read a terrific amount of hockey RPF, for reasons which remain murky to me), because the deadspin mentions do some interesting work in those stories, i think; they to some degree straightforwardly reflect the kind of beat that deadspin covered, which included gossipy rumors & embarrassing stories, but they also nod a little awkwardly to the fact that the whole project of RPF relies on those stories having public coverage, and the tension around what fans want to know about athletes and what athletes might want known about themselves. essentially all of hockey RPF is premised on the gap between what we publicly see ("get pucks deep", twitter photos holding fish, etc.) and what personal truth must exist beyond this pane; shippy RPF contends that into this gap we might imagine, not just personal conflict, fear of injury, complicated feelings about fame, and so on, but also secret, sometimes painfully secret, relationships and dimensions to forcefully public gender performance. the private lives of athletes are fascinating, but it doesn't stop feeling a little invasive to wonder too hard about them. (i am not actually making any kind of morality claim about hockey RPF and am not interested in hearing one!)

deadspin, around the same time that hockey RPF had its first boom, had a period of incredible popularity, in part because it was a contributor to the shift in sports journalism away from the fairly set model of a beat reporter who observed what happened on the field of play & whose access to the team they covered hinged on maintaining a good relationship with its personnel. beat reporters did a lot of good work, & they might be critical of players, sometimes bitingly so, but generally only in very specific ways (poor performance; some unwritten rules nonsense) and almost never of the players on one's own team. deadspin didn't do that! deadspin was a blog, and they wrote weird, sometimes mean, often very funny, insightful, and sharply political commentary about sports, and they mostly didn't give a fuck about access because they didn't have any to start with. there was some excellent writing on deadspin, along with the gossipy trash. but when deadspin got popular, there was also some friction because deadspin's coverage was, at least comparatively, invasive; because it changed the frame around sports to insistently include the fan experience & political context. the first time deadspin was liquidated in 2019, it was because gawker media, which owned the site, told the staff to stick to sports & they quit. the zombie website operating ever since was never as good, & you should subscribe to defector if you have spare money for sports journalism; it's staff-owned, and a lot of it is excellent. but it's not really the same as the deadspin of yore, and i am having a moment about it alongside the broader misery about the systematic destruction of print journalism, which, even when it's about sports, does matter. not least because it captured the fascination that fans have with their favorite athletes, provided grist for the mill, acted as a lightning rod for questions about journalistic ethics & fandom in the 'new media' blogging era. they changed the fucking game & unfortunately the game now mostly sucks