The rise and fall of Deadspin: how ‘jerks in Brooklyn’ changed sports journalism

Deadspin blew up the tropes and traditions of old-school sports media, changing the industry by challenging the accepted narrative

Will Leitch was sitting on a panel when he was confronted by an exasperated ESPN executive. Roughly six months earlier, Leitch, then the editor-in-chief of Deadspin, had published a leaked internal memo from the network - a massive 50-page intra-office Q&A about some programming items as well as tree planting, parking issues, and sleeping security guards at ESPN's headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut.

It was just a reminder that ESPN - the most powerful force in all of sports then and now, but certainly even a larger percentage of it then - was just as banal and stupid and pedantic as your paper company in Omaha, Nebraska," Leitch said.

This article was originally published by Global Sport Matters, a project of the Global Sport Institute at Arizona State University. For more stories like this, visit the Global Sport Matters website.