I’m Back Baby

I haven’t written anything in about a year. I haven’t written on this blog in close to three. I don’t know why, really. It’s not like I’ve been busy or anything. But I just listened to Bill Simmons discuss how he got to ESPN, and color me inspired. So here I am, writing words in coherent sentences for the first time in a while. The goal is to make this blog part of my life. It’s going to be in baby steps first. For now, my goal is three posts a week. If I can prove to myself that I can do that for a while, then we’ll go from there.

Do I care if anybody reads this? Nope. Hell, nobody even knows this blog exists. I’m doing this for me. Once upon a time I fancied myself a writer, even though I’d never really written anything. I wanted to be a writer though. And here I am, two years a college graduate, and I have no clue what I’m doing with my life. Here are things things I hope to get out of this little escapade:

1) Find my voice
2) Entertain myself (specifically make myself laugh)
3) Do it consistently
4) Avoid cliches

I feel like if I can do those things, this could turn out alright. I plan on writing about whatever’s on my mind that day, without any planning ahead–at least for now. There will probably be some sports, media stuff, movies, and the occasional story from my life. In the interest of the children, I’m going to try and keep this thing PG-13, though we’ll see how long that lasts (gotta find that voice!).

The biggest thing that I hate about myself is I tend to live in the future. I like imagining where things will go, not where they are right now. It’s a form of procrastination I guess. A week or two ago I discovered the longest joke in the world. I won’t spoil the ending for you (the imaginary reader), but suffice to say the punchline hit me like a Friendly’s Fribble 2 hours later. So I’m going to do my best to stop imagining myself at the end of the road, but rather at the bottom–which is exactly where I am. Hopefully I can just keep moving forward one step at a time.

Changes to Deadspin in the future

The great thing about Deadspin is they know what they are. They don’t try to break news that significantly impacts the sports landscape, or spend their time promoting their brand across multiple platforms. They are a site who’s primary tool is humor, and they use that to appeal to their audience.

One thing that Deadspin could improve upon is the promptness of some of their posts. If they don’t already pay for the AP wire they should, because they will occasionally write about something that is several hours or several days old. While most of the stories that move on the wire wouldn’t draw a huge crowd on Deadspin, there is the occasional story that is right in their wheelhouse that they miss, such as this one, which appeared on the wire and on other sites roughly 12 hours before Deadspin got around to covering it.

Design wise, I would like to see a drop-down menu at the top of the page with the site’s most common features. Rather than have to scroll down to the bottom of the page, a drop-down menu–similar to what most other sites have–would give the site a fresher feel and make it most user-friendly and organized. The more organized the page, the more people will be drawn to it; and I think that’s one area where the page design could use some improvement.

Financially and editorially, it seems that Deadspin, and Gawker Media sites in general, are certainly positioned well for the future. They employ young writers who know how to embed video, tweets and other internet fodder into their stories, and everyone it seems has a good grasp of what kinds of stories drive the most traffic on the site. As long as they occasionally break a good story, like the Sarah Phillips scandal last week, they’ll remain relevant in the sports media landscape. And in today’s climate with countless blogs and news sites, that’s about all Deadspin can ask for.

 

Deadspin site analytics

Not surprisingly, Deadspin is especially popular among the 18-34 year-old male demographic, according to data compiled by the media-tracking websites Quantcast and Alexa. In fact, most of their readers are educated, white males who’ve gone to college and are young enough to appreciate the kind of sarcastic humor Deadspin relies heavily on.

Generally speaking, it appears most of Deadspin’s readers fall into the category of the typical American male. More than half of Deadspin readers have gone to college, with 20% having gone to grad school, and 76% of them earn less than 100k in annual income. I was a little surprised at the lack of diversity among readers considering Deadspin’s penchant for covering soccer as equally as every major American sport. 83% of their readers are Caucasian, while Hispanics, the second largest demographic represented, make up only 6% of readers.

What interested me the most was how large a drop off their is in the site’s traffic on weekends. During the week Deadspin averages about 1.4 million page views a day, with a high of almost 2.5 million on February 6, the Monday after the Super Bowl. On weekends however the site consistently experiences a sharp decline, with the amount of page views hovering around the 750,000 mark. Such a divide would be cause for concern for many sites, but for Deadspin there’s a logical explanation for it.

Most Deadspin readers browse the site either from school or work, according to the data on Alexa. Their humorous take on sports and the media obviously is a welcome distraction for people looking to kill time while they’re supposed to be doing work of some kind. No school or work on weekends means more free time for everybody, which means people are more likely to engage in other activities that they plan for, rather than sit at a computer trying to pass the time.

Deadspin’s site navigation and layout

What makes Deadspin so unique in terms of site layout, is their ability to adapt without alienating readers. About a year ago Deadspin radically changed its website design, but they still kept the old layout available to readers who preferred a more traditional blog format.

This format simply lists the posts in a vertical format, with a thumbnail picture and first few sentences of the story. It’s not very space efficient or nice to look at, but at least the option is there for readers who prefer that layout.

Deadspin’s redesign is much better, but it’s also a relatively basic site layout  that is nicer to look at while also being user friendly . The site only has one front, with several divided sections that are easy to differentiate from each other.

The area directly under the banner at the top of the page is devoted to the top story. This is always accompanied by an eye-catching photo or graphic of some kind, with the story’s first paragraph and spikes to related stories below it. Almost always, the graphic they create will have words on it or feature some sort of unusual combination to catch the reader’s attention, such as the top story from the afternoon of April 12. 

Directly to the right is the site’s main tool, the story scroll. Every published post goes on this bar, which is updated in real time. Because every published post is added here, all a reader has to do to find a story is scroll down until they get to it. Since that could take a while, Deadspin also provides a search bar to search for keywords that will lead you to posts on specific subjects.

Right below the day’s top story is two previously posted top stories, with links to related stories below that as well. Since Deadspin also publishes many posts on particular subjects and has several series going at once, they also have a recent archive of four different series on the home front that have recently been in the top story spot.

Because some of Deadspin’s content is clearly more popular and time-sensitive than others, they also post links to some of their other content towards the bottom of the page. These are often posts that have popular tags as titles, such as “Streakers” and “Opening Day(s).”

The final section of the site’s design is a link to Deadspin’s sister websites under the Gawker umbrella. Below a thumbnail of each site, Deadspin lists links to some of the site’s most popular features, which makes it very easy to get to. This is also where you’ll find the links to the site’s “About us” page and the “Tips” section.

Leveraging social media

Considering Deadspin is a blog, it’s a little surprising to see that their use of social media isn’t particularly noteworthy. Of all the social media sites on the internet, the only two that Deadspin is really active in are Facebook and Twitter. And even that activity is somewhat limited.

All the site’s Facebook page consists of is posts linking to articles on the site. Readers are obviously given the chance to comment on the posts, but that is the extent of the reader interaction facilitated on the site. They have the option to like a post from the site to Facebook, but nothing more. The links go directly to the site, with little or no added material to help better tell the story. They simply use Facebook as a way to drive traffic to the site, and nothing more.

Deadspin uses Twitter much in the same way they use facebook: linking to stories on the site. What I think makes the Twitter page more appealing than the Facebook one, is Deadspin actually links to all of their articles on Twitter. The Facebook posts are limited to the stories that have a video or eye-catching photo to accompany them. On Twitter, every single story is linked to, which could also be a reason why Deadspin has so much more of a Twitter following, with almost 160,000 followers, compared to their 64,000 Facebook likes.

As far as reader interaction, Deadspin is non-existent in that respect on Twitter, much like Facebook. Readers are free to retweet, reply or tweet at Deadspin, but it’s clear they mainly use the site much the same way they do Facebook. And considering their audience, mostly web-savvy readers, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Using graphics and multimedia

Because much of their posts border on ridiculous, Deadspin heavily relies on the use of videos, photos and graphics to supplement their stories. Just a look at their homepage will show how much video is posted relative to the total number of posts.

The videos they post are often for stories that would not be believable without it—such as this one—or stories where the written word just does not suffice, like this. Sometimes the videos are just inserted to provide context, and sometimes they’re just for humor. While Deadspin never produces their own video content—it’s all taken from other places—they do use it as an incredibly effective technique to get people to click on their articles.

Deadspin uses photos much the same way as any news outlet would, but they also makes it a point to have as much fun with graphics as possible. There’s no real rhyme or reason for when they decide to create an awesome graphic, but when they do it’s usually very funny. Besides serving as the thumbnail for articles on the main scroll bar on the right hand side of the page, these don’t really serve a purpose other than making you laugh.

While they don’t often use interactive techniques such as polls or quizzes, Deadspin does heavily employ their comments section. Whenever a big event comes along—March Madness, the Super Bowl, etc—Deadspin holds a “open thread,” which basically consists of readers posting in the comments section for a set period of time about a given subject. It’s not very organized, but it gives readers the chance to interact with each other in a slightly more controlled way than on random articles.

Ultimately, Deadspin does not use many interactive techniques besides video particularly well. It’s not a very good site for user-site interactions to take place, but that’s because of their audience. Deadspin’s readers go there to read and see ridiculous things they would not see elsewhere. If they wanted to fill out a march madness bracket or answer a poll question, they could go to a more regular news site to do that.

Covering major stories

The majority of material on Deadspin wouldn’t qualify as “news” in a mainstream news organization. However, there are occasional stories that Deadspin gives considerable coverage too, usually because they have off-field implications for their subjects.

The most famous of these stories is of course the Brett Favre-Jenn Sterger scandal. This was a story, broken by Deadspin, regarding lewd photos sent to Sterger by Favre while they were both working for the New York Jets in 2010. Similar to many original Deadspin stories, this one detailed not only the news itself, but how Deadspin found out about and subsequently reported it.

As with all Deadspin articles, the bigger stories are given their own category and tagged with certain subjects, to make them easily searchable on the site. But Deadspin doesn’t usually employ too many multimedia techniques in their posts. The bigger stories almost always have to have some sort of element besides plain text however, usually from the source itself. This can be in the form of pictures, videos or even emails. Usually the more “incriminating” the photo/video/email is, the bigger the story. Deadspin is also good with graphics, so the bigger the story, the more eye-catching the graphic is on the homepage.

What made the Favre-Sterger story so great, was the subsequent fallout for everyone involved. For Favre, it was the end of what turned out to be a forgettable year as the Jets quarterback. For Sterger, this is most likely what she’ll be remembered for in the public eye, despite any advancement in the journalism industry. The story also sparked an investigation by the NFL into whether or not Favre violated the league’s workplace conduct policy, and

From the moment they broke this story, Deadspin was all over it. In follow-up posts Deadspin continued to provide strong coverage by reporting new developments, such as pictures and voicemails. Ultimately this was one of the most heavily reported stories in the site’s history, as they devoted 63 posts to it over the next year.

While many traditional media types still questioned the site, a major scoop like this one helped legitimize Deadspin, and gave them more mainstream popularity.

Deadspin’s articles

Stories on Deadspin generally fall into one of several categories.

First, there’s the the eye-catching picture or video, accompanied by as little text as possible. Since Deadspin is ultimately a blog, their site is driven by page views and not necessarily quality of the work. Some posts prove their worth to the site by generating a massive amount of page views, like this one which has gotten over 56,000 hits this week simply because of its shock value. Generally, of the 20-30 stories Deadspin will publish on  a given day, roughly 1/3 will be of this nature.

Besides that, the most popular type of Deadspin post is the aggregated story, taken a step further. Much of Deadspin’s content comes from other news outlets, and Deadspin will simply take that story and reach out to someone else to give it a twist and make it as ridiculous and entertaining as possible. Very rarely are these stories longer than 15 inches, and they are almost always written in that informal, blog-type tone that would separate it from a newspaper article.

Something Deadspin is also known for, though they don’t do it nearly as often, is publishing longer-form feature stories. Since most of Deadspin’s content is of the shorter variety, the long-form feature poses a challenge to editors. On one hand, it’s a more polished work produced by the writer, but the story’s length may not generate as many “clicks” as the site might like. To find the happy medium, Deadspin writers sometimes write stories about trying to get the story, which, because of Deadspin’s reliance on tipsters, may be considerably more entertaining than the story itself. The most well known of these examples is perhaps a 2008 story by Pat Jordan titled “Chasing Jose” which details the writer’s attempts to get an interview with the now-disgraced former Major League Baseball player Jose Canseco. That story eventually landed in the annual anthology “The Best American Sports Writing.” Most recently, they published a long, drawn out conversation between a staff writer and a tipster who claimed to have big Brett Favre news. The story was simply a chain of text messages, rather than traditional prose. That easy-to-read format undoubtedly attracted readers to what was essentially a feature story.

Deadspin: An Introduction

Deadspin is a sports and men’s lifestyle blog owned by Gawker Media that was launched on September 8, 2005. Its goal, as stated in the site’s inaugural post is “trying to find and provide sports information on the web in a way that makes you forget, if just for the briefest of seconds, that you have to file that report/duplicate that invoice/fax that cover sheet/fluff that hairless dude.” In other words, “there s a whole side of sports that, because of either corporate obligations or just plain laziness, never makes it into the public consciousness; we specialize in that side.”

With Editor-in-Chief Will Leitch at the helm, Deadspin quickly gained a reputation for reporting the underbelly of the sports world—mainly the off-field lives of athletes, media types and sports personalities. Although they have come under fire from traditional media outlets for occasionally paying sources, Deadspin has gained mainstream popularity and credibility by breaking stories, most notably the Brett Favre-Jenn Sterger scandal of 2010.

In June, 2008, Deadspin announced the promotion of A.J. Daulerio to Leitch’s position. Under Daulerio, Deadspin’s format changed several times, but ultimately their popularity skyrocketed. When Daulerio began as Editor-in-Chief, Deadspin’s monthly audience was around 500,000 people, according to a recent New York Times article. By the time Gawker announced that Dualerio would be leaving Deadspin and moving over to the same position at Gawker beginning in 2012, the site’s monthly audience had grown to 2.6 million in the United States alone.

Most of Deadspin’s content consists of commentaries on sports news topics of the day, sports or sports media related anecdotes or scandals, unusual sports moments caught on film and mocking traditional sport media reports. They also run several non-sports features that have proven very popular with their mostly young male audience, including the Funbag and Drunken hookup failures. Most of their reporting comes from other websites or tipsters, but occasionally Deadspin reporters publish long-form features.