YouSaid · the spoken record

Megan Greenwell

lines on the record
55
first
2025-05-29
most recent
2025-05-29
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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  1. “And I feel like the rise and fall of Dead Spin encapsulates a lot of things, right? There was a set of upstart blogs and we were all there for the moments when the traditional newspapers would be furious at the bloggers in a way that the TikTokers now refer to me as the mainstream media, which is And I'm like, no, I live the first version of this fight. Actually, hold on. But then there was a displacement, right? That did become a huge force in American sports and culture. And then the business model fell out for a huge variety of reasons that we've talked about a lot in Dakota over the years. And then private equity rolls in. And the thing that grabs me about that, and I'm confident led you to write this book, is the PE company tried to operationalize Dead Sp”

    2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “I mean, Dutzman was like so many things because it was so fun and so weird. As the 2010s went on, there were fewer and fewer publications that were doing fun and weird, but Dead Spin just never lost that ethos. It added on all of this other stuff. It added on serious investigative work and big, beautiful features, pretty ambitious videos, and all of that stuff. We had a nice events business going. When I got there in 2018, it was absolutely my dream job. That was the job I wanted was editor of Dead Spin. And I was sort of like, great, I'll stay here until they kick me out. And them kicking me out came a lot sooner than I expected it to because of private equity. But yeah, it was just, I think, one of the most distinctive sites on the internet in a way that really made it the place I wanted to work.”

    2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “We've talked about private equity a bunch on the show. It's a force in American business, it's a rising force in technology, which is often the focus of this show. We've talked about it in the context of media a lot, and you had a very direct private equity in media experience at Deadspin. I came up as a blogger on the other side of the Gawker equation. We were ferocious competitors to Gizmoto and I ran in Gadget. And we would always look at Dead Spin as this amazing, vibrant force, not only in American sports media, but in political media and cultural media. For our audience who doesn't remember what Dead Spin was like in that moment, just give a sense of what it was.”

    2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “I feel like the book is really important. It's really good. It's fun to read in a infuriating way. But I should say journalism is important. You were the editor of Dead Spin. You were wired for a minute. You have a long history as a journalist.”

    2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Megan's interest in private equity came from her experience as editor in chief of Deadspin, the famous and now defunct sports and culture website. Deadspin was part of Gawker, and Gawker was taken over by a private equity firm called Great Hill Partners, which began to immediately micromanage Deadspin's content. This was on Meghan first begin to realize that the goals and financial results of a private equity firm were very disconnected from the goals and financial results of the companies which they had taken over. In her book is a deep dive into how private equity works, as expressed in four parts of the economy. Media, of course, retail, housing, and maybe the most maddening of all, healthcare.”

    2025-05-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How private equity kills companies and communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT