Fellowships Reports Lab Storyboard Nieman Foundation at Harvard

ABOUT ! " # $ SUBSCRIBE

BUSINESS MODELS MOBILE AUDIENCE AGGREGATION REPORTING TRANSLATIONS FUEGO

How Eviction Lab

is helping
journalists cover a
spiraling housing
crisis
SARAH SCIRE

Defector’s Kelsey
McKinney on how 2020 Should the
destroyed the concept government use
Section 230 to
of “sticking to sports” force the tech
giants into paying
for the news?
“We can’t cover sports right now, or ever, as an individual
JOSHUA BENTON
and separate thing because sports are the gift we get for
making our society as just and fair as possible.”

By WALT HICKEY Sept. 10, 2020, 2:40 p.m. %

Walt Hickey runs Numlock News, a daily morning newsletter Journalists

obsessed with fascinating numbers that are buried in the news. A perceive stories
version of this interview originally ran in Numlock Sunday. Kelsey published in local
news outlets to be
McKinney is a features writer and co-owner of Defector. less newsworthy
MARK CODDINGTON AND SETH
LEWIS
Kelsey McKinney is one of the founders of a new sports site,
launched this week by a number of ex-Deadspin writers and
editors, called Defector Media. You may know her from stories
like The Only All-Girls Tackle Football League in America and
What A Foul Ball Can Do, as well as her newsletter Written Out.

We spoke about how the ex-Deadspin crew hatched a plan to start The Pentagon
their own media company, how they managed to develop a orders the military
business model on the fly in the face of a global economic
newspaper Stars
and Stripes to shut
catastrophe, how 2020 destroyed the concept of “sticking to down by the end
sports” — the day we talked was the day the NBA players got the of the month
league to commit to using their arenas as voting sites for the 2020 LAURA HAZARD OWEN

election — and the advantages of a subscriber-supported

platform. This interview has been lightly condensed and edited
for clarity.

§ § §
Facebook has been
terrible about
WALT HICKEY: You are an owner and a founding writer removing vaccine
behind a new site called Defector, a sports and culture misinformation.
Will it do better
site from a lot of alums from Deadspin. Where did this
with election
idea come from? misinformation?
LAURA HAZARD OWEN
Kelsey McKinney: We left Deadspin in October of
2019, and almost immediately we were still in
conversation with each other. It never really ceased.
As anyone who has been laid off from a media
company — at this point, most people — will tell
you, it’s a fairly traumatic experience. People bond
together really quickly. We were all in
communication, talking, and the problem with being
in communication and talking with a group of people
who really loved their job is that they want to do
their jobs still.

We were all moping and whining about the fact that

we didn’t have a blog, and it sucks that we couldn’t
cover the things that we wanted to cover. So, we
started having a conversation about like, “Okay, what
could it look like?”

Initially we thought that looked like finding a big

investor, because there were a lot of us and people
need money to survive. We started talking to some
major investors trying to find someone that could
afford to pay us salaries and healthcare. And then the
coronavirus hit and the entire economy fell apart.
And those deals seemed stagnant.

Because that had been our default, our first idea,

once those deals fell apart, we started having a
different conversation: “Okay, if we can do this any
way in the whole world, how would we do it? What
kind of dream publication would we actually want to
work for?” And that’s kind of how we stumbled upon
this idea of a cooperative mutually-owned
organization, by thinking about, “Okay, what failed
us in other media organizations? And how can we set
up a company that won’t fail its current and future
employees?”

HICKEY: It feels very back to basics. It’s a new model, but

it’s an old model in a nice way.

MCKINNEY: It’s fundamentally a blog, right? That’s

nothing new. People have been writing forever, but we’re
hoping that the financial plan and the structure of the
organization will work.

HICKEY: Deadspin’s ostensible reason for existence was to

cover sports. But so much of it was covering all of the
stories that circulate around sports. And for a while, a
pervasive argument against that kind of coverage was like,
“Well, audiences prefer when you stick to sports.” In
2020, that view is fairly antiquated, when ESPN right now
is having some of the same coverage as CNN.

MCKINNEY: Deadspin was never particularly good at

sticking to sports throughout its history. It always
covered politics. For a period of time, it had an entire
culture vertical, always focused on how sports fit into the
world, which means you can’t ignore the outside world.

In 2020, I’ve been thinking constantly about something

Sean Doolittle, a pitcher for the Washington Nationals,
said early on. His quote was, “Sports are like the reward
of a functioning society.”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot, about how we can’t

cover sports right now, or ever, as an individual and
separate thing because sports are the gift we get for
making our society as just and fair as possible. Right now,
we’re seeing that multiplied a hundred times, because you
have athletes who are feeling the urgency and have the
power to come out and say what they believe politically.
ESPN was saying just a few years ago that they wouldn’t
cover politics at all. Now there’s no choice there. It’s been
made really clear by the athletes, the people who play the
sports, that they don’t want that distinction there
themselves. So, who are we to decide that it must be
imposed?

HICKEY: It’s August 28th when we’re speaking, and the

NBA is currently setting up their arenas as places for
voting availability in many major cities.

MCKINNEY: It’s not just that, right? It’s where the NBA
plays, where their stadiums are built, that affects those
cities. Everything from the very beginning of a
professional organization has ramifications, politically
and personally, on the place where it is. So, you can’t just
extract that into a separate little thing where we only
cover who has the most dunks a year because there’s
more going on there.

HICKEY: Yeah, nobody wants to follow a blog about a

random number generator.

MCKINNEY: Yeah, exactly.

HICKEY: You’ve covered some really outstanding stories.

Two of my favorites were about the football league that
was built for girls and the one about fans who have been
hit by foul balls and oftentimes the serious consequences
that live with them. So, you cover a lot about the
intersection of sports and culture. What are you looking
forward to writing about at Defector when you guys
launch?

MCKINNEY: I always found stories by asking myself a

question and then Googling it, and if there’s no answer,
then I write the answer.

Which is to say that there are a lot of things that my beat

has entailed over the years, but something that I’m really
interested in looking at and focusing more time on at
Defector is how sports function at lower levels than the
professionals. Thinking about the interactions of fans to
sports, but also thinking about high school and travel
soccer. Right? And all of these arenas in which a lot of
stories are happening that just aren’t being covered
because of the complete destruction of local news. So, I’m
hoping to kind of cover some of that. We want the site to
be fun. So, I’ll also do some stuff that will just be fun
stories.

HICKEY: That’s a really fascinating type of story, the

amount of investment in even just travel soccer is a huge
deal. It completely changes who gets to play and who
doesn’t get to play. It changes the economics of these
sports entirely. A game that typically should involve just
the cost of a ball can now involve hundreds, if not
thousands, of dollars in transportation alone.

MCKINNEY: Yeah, and you see girls that are on two travel
soccer teams and their parents are paying for them to go
to Princeton Summer Soccer Camps. And, of course, that
ends up affecting whether or not you get recruited onto a
college team, which affects whether or not you get
recruited into the NWSL, whether you can even pay for
college in the first place. All of those things are
connected, definitely, and that’s the kind of stories I’m
interested in, these stories that affect us on a personal
level and not necessarily at the highest echelons of where
we’re playing the sport.

HICKEY: The overwhelming majority of football that is

played in America is not in an NFL stadium.

MCKINNEY: Right. And I grew up in Texas! So to me, high

school football is the pinnacle of all sports. But also, I saw
a lot of people injured playing high school football. I saw a
lot of people bank their entire futures on getting a college
football scholarship, and then that fell through. We all
know stories of sports at a lower level, high school,
middle school even, where those have had massive
ramifications on people’s lives.

HICKEY: Sports is just a fragment of a lot of bigger issues

rolled into one.

MCKINNEY: People like things because of who they are

holistically, right? You like the TV shows you like because
they relate to you in some way. You like the books you
like because of the books you read early on. The same
thing is true for sports. We try to talk about it as just this
separate, completely independent entity. You lose a lot of
why people love the sport. It’s not just about coverage, it’s
also about what people get out of it.

HICKEY: You’ve been working on this project called

Written Out about women who are “written out of the
literary canon, written out of history, and written out of
contemporary literary coverage.” I would love to hear a
little bit more about the conception of that and how that’s
going.

MCKINNEY: I was a freelancer before I was at Deadspin,

and then after quitting Deadspin was also a freelancer.
And if you have worked as a freelancer at all in the last
five years consistently, you’ve watched the industry just
very quickly deteriorate. There are fewer and fewer places
to place stories, there is less and less money in those
stories. Because those sites are fewer, there are less places
that have the money to accept independent pieces.

Because of that, I found myself sitting on seven stories

that I knew that no one wanted, right?

I was like, “Nobody is going to want this story about an

early 20th century writer who wrote a book about being
an old maid at 25 and living with two cats. No one wants
that.”

But the founders of Substack reached out to me actually,

and they were like, “Have you considered starting a
Substack?” And I was like, “No, I’m not doing that right
now.” And then I lost a bunch of freelance assignments
and I was like, “You know what? Maybe this is the place
where I could put all of these weird stories that I have
that no one wants.”

And it worked. It’s just been a great place for me to be

able to blog and to write things that I really care about as
the rest of the industry has been unstable. But also, I
think, it’s easy to lose as a professional writer a sense of
wonder in your work. Which sounds corny, but I think
working in a space that isn’t edited and isn’t decided on
by editors-in-chief, or kind of mediated in that way, gets
you into some really interesting places.

I think Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter is super fascinating

right now. And I think part of that is just because you can
read it and watch the way her mind works, right? The cake
isn’t fully formed until you get to the end. And I think
that’s been true for me too, in my work and my
newsletter, that you’re writing to figure it out, which is, I
think, interesting in its own way.

HICKEY: I enjoy your newsletter and I think that one

reason that I really enjoy it is that lots of freelance stuff
comes down to what editors want, but with so much
media being ad-supported, it’s not even what the editors
want so much, it’s the perception of what a broad
audience wants, and sometimes those niche pieces can’t
happen. But when you have this niche-specific audience,
people who specifically sign up for this kind of stuff, like
with an Oscars one I write sometimes, I just want to talk
to a couple hundred people who really care about the
Academy Awards. I just really love yours for that
particular reason.

MCKINNEY: Thank you. Yeah, I feel that way about your

newsletter too. I think that it’s kind of a revival in a way
of the early 2000s’ blog economy.

I used to look at my Google Reader and be like, “Okay,

here’s the blog that I read about wallpaper design.” That’s
not a sustainable job. It was just someone who was like, “I
love wallpaper design and here are three blogs a day about
it.”

And I, being an idiot, was like, “Yes, thank you.” I think

that’s kind of how newsletters work too. Right? I say I’m
super interested in the way that women write and the way
that we forget about women writing. And just a few
hundred people are like, “Hey, me too.”

HICKEY: I’ve enjoyed your post-Deadspin work, and I am

so excited for Defector. Can you tell folks where to find
Defector, how to subscribe to Defector, and what the
offering is?

MCKINNEY: Our hope is that Defector will be a homepage

site, so go to defector.com.

We are subscription-funded at multiple levels, depending

on how much you want to give us. There will be podcasts,
currently we have one. We’re in some brainstorming
phases for some others, and there will be newsletters, all
of which we’re hoping will fill different needs.

But the bread and butter is the blog on the site. So:
Defector.com.

Walt Hickey runs Numlock News, a daily morning newsletter

obsessed with fascinating numbers that are buried in the news. A
version of this interview originally ran in Numlock Sunday. Kelsey
McKinney is a features writer and co-owner of Defector.

NO COMMENTS SHOW TAGS

Join the 50,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in

our daily email.

your email address here

Subscribe

How Eviction Lab is helping journalists cover a

spiraling housing crisis
As the pandemic has worsened an already critical situation, researchers started to
live track evictions in 17 cities and launched a scorecard to compare protections for
renters in each state.

Should the government use Section 230 to force the

tech giants into paying for the news?
A new paper argues that the “26 words that created the internet” should remain in
force — but only for companies that agree to certain new regulations and
restrictions.

Journalists perceive stories published in local news

outlets to be less newsworthy
Plus: “Cultural competence” through diverse sourcing; limitations in how journalists
represent public opinion; and lessons from studying 7,000 news push notifications.

RSS FACEBOOK TWITTER SUBSCRIBE

FUEGO ENCYCLO ARCHIVES CONTACT ABOUT

Help advance the Nieman Foundation’s mission “to promote and elevate the standards of journalism” by
making a donation.

To promote and elevate the Covering thought Pushing to the future Exploring the art and
standards of journalism leadership in of journalism craft of story
journalism

© 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College / Some rights reserved Harvard Trademark Privacy Digital Accessibility

Walter Lippmann House One Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA 02138 617 495 2237