Following Gizmodo Media’s December announcement that Tim Marchman was being promoted to oversee company-wide special projects, Deadspin has been conducting a search for a new editor-in-chief. That search resulted in the hire of Megan Greenwell Monday. The Fusion Media Group (parent of Gizmodo Media Group) release on the hire included comments on Greenwell from Gizmodo Media editorial director Susie Banikarim:
Megan is a true storyteller with brilliant ideas and a long track record of amplifying unique and diverse voices. She comes to GMG with deep and varied journalism experience and a career built on doing what Deadspin already does better than anyone else in sports: telling stories others can’t or won’t. She has consistently impressed me with her passion for the site, its history and its future.
She was most recently the executive features editor at Esquire, where she oversaw the magazine’s digital narrative journalism program. She has also helped launch a digital features program for New York magazine’s The Cut, edited investigations and narratives for ESPN, covered the war in Iraq from Baghdad, and written for The New York Times, Wired, California Sunday, and many other publications. Projects she edited have been nominated for a National Magazine Award and a GLAAD Media Award, and she was part of The Washington Post team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting for coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings.
Some of her editing work includes this piece about the complicated ethics of anti-pedophile vigilantes, the first national profile of the unofficial leader of the Christian left Rev. William Barber, and a definitive feature on the now famous case of the teenager charged for encouraging her boyfriend to kill himself in thousands of text messages. She also oversaw ESPN’s first foray into e-sports coverage, overseeing a special issue of the magazine focused on the topic and featuring this profile of League of Legends star Faker.
Greenwell follows Will Leitch, A.J. Daulerio, Tommy Craggs and Marchman as Deadspin editor-in-chief. She told Jeremy Barr of The Hollywood Reporter she’s long been a fan of the site:
“I have been a fan of Deadspin since its earliest days, so it is a tremendous honor to lead its next chapter,” Greenwell said. “Though many have tried, no one has replicated the site’s unique voice and perspective, and I am so excited to oversee an ever more ambitious use of that one-of-a-kind platform to cover sports topics from the serious to the silly.”
Greenwell is coming in here with a wide-ranging background, working both in sports media and on the news side, and working in both traditional and digital media. Each incarnation of Deadspin under each of those previous editors-in-chief has been quite different than the one before, and that looks likely to continue under Greenwell. We’ll see what way she takes the site.
[Fusion Media Group; photo from a 2014 WNPR panel Greenwell appeared on]
