Derek Jeter’s looking for a digital Playday
DEREK Jeter’s
digitalpublishing career may be in its final inning, as his sports blog, Players’ Tribune, scrambles to find a new buyer after burning through close to $80 million since its launch five years ago, according to sources.
Jeter is not expected to be involved if a sale is concluded, sources said.
“It’s hemorrhaging money,” and the Yankee legend is “looking for a soft landing” — namely, a buyer who will save the blog from shutting down, a source told Media Ink.
Jeter’s day job since 2017 as CEO and minority owner of the Miami Marlins MLB franchise leaves him little time for developing his Web site.
In addition, Jeter Publishing, a boutique book imprint at Simon & Schuster, appears to be winding down with the release of “Heartless” by Chip Jones in May — one of the few new books on deck.
Some of the biggest names in sports were small investors in the 2014 launch of Players’ Tribune, which allows athletes to reach fans in their own words by posting directly without the filter of established sports Web sites.
Early investors were said to include former Boston Red Sox slugger David “Big Papi” Ortiz, NBA star Kevin Durant, who this year jumped from Golden State to the New York Nets, retired NBA legend Kobe Bryant, and NFL quarter
backs Cam Newton and Russell Wilson.
But despite occasional traffic spikes when a superstar broke news on the site, Players’ Tribune has generally struggled for viewers, attracting only 258,000 unique monthly visitors in September, according to Comscore.
When Jeter was still involved in 2017, the company announced it had raised $40 million from investors that included New Enterprise Associates, IVP, and GV, Google’s venture capital arm. The company said at that time it had raised a total $60 million since its launch.
In December 2018, it purchased Unscriptd, a shortform video network that was used by 2,500 athletes in Europe, Asia and Australia.
But Players’ Tribune has also had to borrow money to stay afloat more recently, according to a source. In January, Players’ Tribune reportedly laid off eight people — about 10 percent of its workforce at the time.
Current CEO Jeff Levick did not return e-mails seeking comment. A call to Jeter agent Casey Clark was not returned.
Bloomberg first reported last week that the Players’ Tribune had hired a financial adviser to explore a potential sale. Jeter could not be reached for comment.
Dead ad
The clash between management and the writers at Deadspin is hitting the troubled sports site’s owner in the pocketbook, as a big advertiser said it’s pulling $1 million in ads.
The pop-up video ads earlier this week had drawn the wrath of Deadspin’s editorial team, which invited readers to kvetch about the aggravation.
Management at Deadspin publisher G/O Media disabled the comments. But by Thursday, the Daily Beast and the Wall Street Journal reported that Farmers Insurance was pulling all its ads from the site.
That comes as a mass exodus of writers and top editors continued on Thursday — and the departures seemed to cripple Deadspin’s ability to cover the World Series.
It wasn’t until nearly 1 p.m. Thursday, after the Washington Nationals’ stunning upset victory Wednesday night over the Houston Astros, that the site’s only story on the game was posted — shortly after its author, managing editor Samer Kalaf, said he was resigning.
All five top editors have now resigned along with virtually all the writers.
In a farewell tweet, Deadspin editor David Roth said he posted a story about a Jordanian pro soccer team — to guarantee that the freelance writer was paid. Then Roth resigned.
Deadspin writer Drew Magary on Thursday morning said he was quitting. Writers DomCosentino, Luis Paez-Pumar, and Dan McQuade also tweeted their farewells Thursday, adding to the seven who had resigned Wednesday.
Management fired back on Thursday, claiming that the staffers’ contention that non-sports were among the most popular posts was not true.
“In September, unsurprisingly, 24 of the top 25 stories on Deadspin were sports-related while non-sports content accounted for less than 1 percent of the page views on the site,” a spokesman said.
“While amusing, our readers haven’t actually come to Deadspin for stories like ‘Classic Rock, Ranked,’ or ‘You’re Goddamn Right It’s Layering Season,’ or ‘It’s OK to Logoff.’ ”
The spokesman added that “our writers have a free hand to cover the intersection of sports and politics, sports and pop culture, sports and business or, frankly, just about any topic even tangentially related to sports.”
Relations between writers and G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller were strained almost from the time Great Hill Partners bought the Gizmodo Media sites in April. But a new fight exploded Monday when G/O Media editorial director Paul Maidment told staffers to “stick to sports” and stop posting on media, politics or pop culture.