Stress eating an entire frozen pizza for Deadspin
“So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” -Gandalf
(This post was originally posted to Katelyn’s Substack on 11/19/2019 and has been moved here as her Substack no longer exists)
There’s something vaguely ritualistic and comforting to cooking a frozen pizza. Opening the box and unwrapping the plastic surrounding the plastic-y looking pie. It always seems like such a good idea in the moment, especially when you’re hungry after a long day and you’re too tired to cook anything more complex…
Ever since I was a child, I would eat when I’m upset. Eating was how I dealt with my dysphoria or family distress for decades. Frozen pizza has always been the standard in my stress-eating moments.
Lately, however, a new distress has emerged in my life and career. Private equity firms.
What was once the domain of now-Senator Mitt Romney and Bain Capital has now moved into my own backyard. Private equity firms have been snapping up newspapers and online media outlets at increasingly metastasizing rates for the last several years.
Enter Deadspin. Staff at the sports blog that never stuck to sports quit en masse in the face of a corporate edict to, well… stick to sports. Top editor Barry Petchesky was fired by parent company G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller, a herb, for refusing the sports only order. Earlier this year, then Editor-In-Chief Megan Greenwell resigned in the face of similar demands, and allegedly abusive treatment from management. Greenwell wrote a damning goodbye post summarizing her experience and diagnosing the problem in media these days.
“The tragedy of digital media isn’t that it’s run by ruthless, profiteering guys in ill-fitting suits; it’s that the people posing as the experts know less about how to make money than their employees, to whom they won’t listen,” wrote Greenwell. In other words: the problem is dipshit rich dudes who believe they’re smart because they’re rich.
What’s happening at G/O and Deadspin is currently playing out throughout the media landscape. Private equity firm Alden Capital has eliminated two out of every three jobs at the 100 or so newspapers it owns. Similar stories have played out at SAGE Publishing…
