The most evil, slow, dead-eyed smile imaginable, directly into the camera.
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And yet, I still expect articles on this on the sites.
Honestly this doesn’t really surprise me. Even from the Gawker days this suite of sites was really messily organized. They had 3 different groups under different mast heads covering comics, 2 or 3 covering video games. Like 4 political/news sections. And once AvClub media was dumped in by Univision that just got worse.
And the fact of the matter is that Splinter was never really any good, and didn’t come from either AvClub or Gizmodo Media. It was Univision’s failing Fusion brand relabeled and tweaked to replace Gawker. Most of the good political and media coverage since the Univision take over was coming out of other sites in the loop. Especially Jezebel and Gizmodo. And while there were good writers and some good worked mixed in with the mess and the click bait, even when Gawker was a going concern those sorts of writers never tended to stick around for long.
So the new owners seem awful. But this doesn’t surprise me, and I’m reasonable sure that if some one smart were in charge something similar would have happened. Cause when the sports section frequently has better political coverage than the politics section, your doing something wrong.
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An in-joke subhead for this site should be “just look at it.”
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Some of Splinter was good and some of Splinter was bad, but on the whole I agree with you: it didn’t have enough distinguishing it to make it seem worthwhile. It didn’t have the same bite/edge as the original Gawker site it seemed meant to replace. Meanwhile the political content on Deadspin was often head and shoulders above it.
That said shuttering it right before the election comes off as weird to me.
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At least they had HamNo, who, since the events in this article have transpired, has changed his bio line at The Guardian from:
Hamilton Nolan is a senior writer at Splinter. He lives in Brooklyn
to
Hamilton Nolan is a writer in New York City
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Thing is that the original Gawker mostly didn’t have the bite your thinking of. There were a couple of points where it did, but that was entirely down to brief periods where very particular staff happened to be there. As soon as those people moved on or got chased out Gawker was what it was always intended to be. A shitty, snarky tabloid targeted at people who thought they were too good for tabloids. Shit was started to report on journalism industry gossip.
While some good stuff sort of accidentally happened there. It was never a site that anyone else should try to emulate, and it wasn’t a model that really even worked. A publication that became influential in spite of itself. And largely through letting staff do do their own thing so long as they also generated enough tabloid material to pay the bills.
So trying to recreate the general tone, without any of the people or focus that made it work in the brief periods where it did. From an already weak publication was a pretty dumb idea.
More than a year is not “just before” though we’re close to the primary and this impeachment thing is just as important.
I’m just not concerned about it. Their pre-Splinter election coverage as Fusion was actively awful. 2018 coverage was better, but far from worthwhile. And the good election coverage from now G/O media has come from Jezebel’s The Slot sub blog for a number of years. Most of the important stuff they published during 2016 came from there and a handful of writers then at Gizmodo proper who were pointedly not offered jobs at Splinter, and now work elsewhere.
That’s sort of my sticking point here. Everything that Splinter was doing, was being done better elsewhere in the same company by other staffers. So I just don’t think that publication stood a chance of making an impact.
I in no way trust this is what happening. But without a serious following for the brand itself it makes more sense to kill it. And reorganize the staff who are worth a damn with those people from the other sites who are doing it better to create something else. And you really want to get that done before the election.
But that’s probably not what’s happening here, unfortunately.
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I’ve never liked his work. Though if they really are trying to retain the staff as claimed I’m surprised he’s not on this list. Since he’s basically the only thing over there with a following.
I figured all these people are laid off. Because of “open positions at G/O Media” proviso. If you want to keep particular staff you create new positions at the other sites for them. You don’t give them first dibs on 3 pre existing opens they may not even be qualified for.
I just wanted to chime in and say that I agree with all your points and you did a much better job of saying what I was thinking (nothing in my comment was meant to be a defense of gawker, which was shit 95% of the time, and more of an indictment of splinter).
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When you get right down to it the major thing Gawker did right was let staff do their own thing so long as they generated the requisite number of posts and clicks. So with the right people working there certain parts flourished. But that success was as transient as their staff, and with their long history of treating staff like shit staff was almost always pretty transient. And about as often that approach created awful.
I’m pretty sure we’ve regularly been hearing about good staff leaving, things being shut down, labor disputes and general shit management as long as this media company has existed. That’s always made it pretty hard for me to defend them, or lament this sort of thing.
Wait… He’s not paying them, and expects to tell them what they can or can’t write?!
Nothing to see here, just your standard-issue Deadspin political coverage, no mention by the author of Splinter at all
Eat that, Spanfeller and Maidment!
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Deadspin’s actually had much better political coverage than Splinter did since before there was a Splinter.
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yes I know, you’ve said as much multiple times in this thread.
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As long as you’re just looking at them. 
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No, he’s telling the remaining staff at the other verticals that they shouldn’t cover Splinter’s closure.
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now, now. the reporting has remained good between Thiels takedown of Gawker and the recent owners nose diving the sites into the ground. it has gotten overly Ad friendly and full of toxic firings, yes, but I know exactly the time it started and whom to blame.
it is not an election year
there is no election next month
whatever it is we’re supposed to do between elections, now is the time
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