I wonder where he goes now. Maybe Vice Gaming? They have a solid crew over there with some other ex-Kotaku peeps.
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Probably WaPo's new gaming section
Could be. They also reported on his departureProbably WaPo's new gaming section
Kotaku has plenty of other good, important voices in the industry. Alexandra, Kohler, etc.
Probably WaPo's new gaming section
Pretty much.But the fact is they probably can't wait to unload all the real journalists from their sites so they can hire content mill types who will write whatever they're told to, and turn the whole company into the kind of place that generates those junk "You'll never believe what this actor looks like now" articles that are linked in the advertising space at the bottom of other sites.
Jim Spanfeller, the CEO of this company, meanwhile, is best known for growing Forbes.com in the mid-2000s, around the time this website was born. While he was not responsible for the "contributor network" that made Forbes a journalistic laughingstock, he set the stage by demanding increased output at all costs (up to 5,000 stories a day by the end of his tenure). The clickbait and SEO plays and sleazy monetization schemes rejected by Gawker Media were the entire point. Content mills The Active Times and The Daily Meal, which Spanfeller launched and later sold to the Tribune Company at a trivial price, ran the same playbook, and many of his ideas for growing revenue at this company (implementing slideshows to juice pageviews, clogging story pages with ever-more programmatic ads at the expense of user experience) were taken straight from that era—more than a decade ago, or approximately an eon in internet time. The only idealistic belief at Gawker Media was that a journalistic enterprise could make money without scamming people; the guiding principle at Forbes and sites of its ilk was that scams are good as long as they make money.
Looking forward to never clicking on a link to Kotaku ever again.
Pretty sure people said similar things years ago when Brian Crecente left....
Oh yes the dude that exposed naughty dog's crunch culture. That fanboy.
True. After posting I saw that they end the article by saying that Jason didn't comment on where he'll work next. That'd be pretty weird to write if they already know he'll work for them