Deadspin sold to European media company, AP launches e-commerce site – weekly news digest

Deadspin, the US-based sports news website, has been sold to Lineup Publishing, a new little-known European digital media company.

“Deadspin, which started as a blog in 2005 and was part of the Gawker Media portfolio of websites, was sold to G/O Media in 2019 along with a number of other former Gawker brands”, The New York Times recounts. 

Deadspin’s previous owner G/O Media owns a set of American digital media brands like Quartz and Gizmodo. In recent months G/O Media has been offloading its outlets, most notably by shutting down and then selling feminist website Jezebel.

The sale of Deadspin was announced on Monday. The price hasn’t been disclosed, and existing Deadspin staffers will be laid off as the new owner is expected to build its own team to operate the website. Little information is publicly available about Lineup Publishing; according to its website, the company is based in Malta.

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The Associated Press is introducing its own e-commerce site, Axios reports. Called AP Buyline, the project is launched in partnership with the Taboola advertising platform. The site will start publishing next week and will include product reviews and personal finance coverage.

The launch is “part of a broader effort by the AP to diversify its business by adding more consumer revenue”,  Axios’ Sara Fischer writes. Last year the organisation announced its plans to diversify revenue, which has traditionally relied predominantly on licensing its content to other publishers.

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The Russian government is intensifying its attacks against the largely exiled independent media sector in the wake of the rigged presidential election due to be held this week. 

On Monday Vladimir Putin signed into law the ban on advertisers to work with “foreign agents”, a designation widely used against independent media organisations and individual journalists. The regulation “[is] widely expected to make it next to impossible for independent media outlets hit with the designation to earn money”, The Moscow Times notes.

In the meanwhile, one of the most prominent independent publications Meduza (which had earlier been designated an “undesirable organisation” and thus effectively outlawed in Russia) reported facing “the most intense cyberattack campaign in its history”. The publisher says it faces an unprecedented scale of blocking its mirror servers, which are used to try and bypass the block in Russia, as well as attempts to undermine its crowdfunding channels and hacking activities against its individual journalists.

Source of the cover photo: chrisdorney for Depositphotos, 182679864

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