An interview with Defector's Editor-in-Chief, Tom Ley
Deadspin is back... in Defector form
Tom Ley is a friend. He’s a good-natured and big-hearted Coloradoan whose hilarious-yet-insightful writing you may know from Deadspin. At that site, Tom was senior-level editor who, with his coworkers, quit in solidarity when a respected editor was fired during an incredibly cynical power grab by Deadspin’s current operator. Deadspin is beloved, and in the aftermath, the departed staff proved that they had an audience wherever they chose to land, which for a short time included a pop-up website called Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog.
Now, 18 out of 20 former Deadspin staffers have come together to form the employee-owned media site Defector, a subscription-based site that will launch in September. The formation of the company mandates that not only will the editors and writers own the intellectual property rights to their work, they’ll have an equity stake in the company as well. While this kind of equitable, worker-owned set-up has been prophesied, to some degree, it’s thrilling to see a group of talented writers and editors try it for themselves.
I have a good feeling about it, and 11,000 subscribers in the first 24 hours suggest that they’re onto something.
I try not to get too deep into the media landscape in my niche newsletter about Kansas Jayhawk basketball, but Defector’s experiment-in-real-time will be a revelation for the independent sports coverage you might like to see more of in the near future.
Despite Defector’s presence as a direct competitor to this newsletter as well as letters from other hoops writers like Chris Bosh, I talked to Tom earlier this week, a day after news about Defector’s launch hit social media. We talked about where Defector fits in sports media, what they’re going to do over there, and whether Bol Bol will be a Hall of Famer or merely a perennial All-NBA First Teamer.
What you guys are doing is thrilling. How did you arrive at this exact company set-up?
TOM LEY: It was percolating in everyone's mind. Since we left Deadspin, there was a long time lapse between that happening and us announcing [Defector]. It was a matter of trying to figure out what the hell form we wanted to take and what was even possible.
I think for a really long time, we were sort of operating on the assumption that this is only going to be possible if we could get some funding or investment from somebody. And then over the last few months, with all the bad shit that's happened in media in addition to the the bad shit that's always going on, that just seemed to accelerate lately. And I think that sort of shifted our view a little bit.
We were like, “Well, shit, maybe we should just try to do the fully worker-owned version of this and take the bigger risk” in a sense of like, “You know, we could just totally crash and burn and we waste a lot of time doing it and we don't get any money for it.”
But then we were like, “If that's like the worst thing that can happen, like, whatever. We've all been unemployed for eight months.” We'll just go back to continuing to be unemployed. There was a big shift that happened in the last month or two where we just decided “Okay, whatever, let's just do it and see and see what happens.”
Pictured: a t-shirt concept I hope to pitch Tom soon
To some degree, this feels like new territory. But were there other publications or organizations you looked to as a success story?
TOM LEY: The people who are doing our paywall technology and stuff is this company called Pico. We probably wouldn’t have done it unless they were there to tell us how it works and show us where it had worked before. They helped set up The Colorado Sun and Block Club Chicago and a couple different independent websites.
The Sun was a good model for us because it was people who worked at The Denver Post, who had a huge amount of layoffs. So a group of them got together and started The Colorado Sun. They’re in their third year now. Their readership is smaller but more hyper-local. They've got a pretty small staff. We knew that it was going to be different trying to do a national sports website and not having this local base of people within a city that’s like, “Oh yeah, we need to support this local journalism.” The motivations for people subscribing would be different.
We wouldn't really be able to tap into that spirit of pledging to a local newspaper. But we figured that we had other versions of that enthusiasm because a lot of people read Deadspin and were on the site all day. So we figured if we can get some meaningful percentage of those people to become subscribers, we should be fine. It really doesn't take that much money to fund the newsroom. We don't need a hundred thousand subscribers.
What’s the most surprising thing that has happened in the past 48 hours?
Honestly, like the number of subscribers was really shocking to me for a 24 hour period. [Ed note: Defector had 11,000 paid subscribers registered by Wednesday]. I hadn't like put a target in my mind, but I didn't really expect to get that. I didn't think anyone would care that much. So that was cool.
But, for surprising…. Well, we got surprised by a shout out from Bob Odenkirk. I don't know if he has checked it out yet, we checked the subscriber rolls this morning and it does not appear that he has subscribed yet. So he’s all talk no game right now.
What problem do you think Defector solves in sports media? Where do you think the opportunity is?
The way I've been thinking about it is that there is tons of stuff out there for a sports fan to consume online. But I think a really small percentage of it is stuff that, if you sat that sports fan down, they would actually ask for. A million people follow Barstool Instagram account ‘cause it's like, “Oh, here's funny videos on Instagram!” But if you took any of those people and were like, “Do you actually have an affinity for this? What's the deal with this?” They just be like, “Oh, you know, I dunno, it's a funny Instagram account. I look at it.”
What we want is to have a place for people who have thought—and maybe even haven't thought to themselves yet—there’s something missing in all of this. I want something that's between House of Highlights raining videos and dunks on me and the boring-but-quality newspaper copy stuff.
There’s opportunity in the negative space left by all these other outlets. I think a big part of that is like, you know, we'll be rude. Like we were always rude. But we’ve been rude in a way that it's not just for affect, but rude in a way that’s actually a method of addressing the things that we have problems with and that a lot of other people have problems with. So that’s how I’ve always thought about it. If you put all of the sports media brands and publications on a map, there would be like a big empty circle in the middle of it.
Right now, great access journalism—where journalists and writers get meaningful time with the subjects of their stories—is hard to come by. What kind of access-inclusive stuff would you like to see more of?
A lot of the stuff that access journalists did previously was not actually that interesting. And the good thing about athletes having all these platforms is that they exist as their own little independent media companies. So there's no sense in really bothering with that boring stuff anymore. You know? Like, like there's no reason to profile an NBA player and just be like, “What are your favorite movies?”
I honestly don't think we'll try to do a ton of access stuff, but if we did, I'm always most interested in the access stuff that involves the athlete explaining to you, like, that you're stupid, when it comes to how a particular thing in a sport works. I've always been most interested when someone can convince an NBA player to sit down with them and watch film and just like, explain pick-and-roll coverages. Cause that's stuff that you never get. You might get it from NBA broadcasts, but those guys are usually just bullshitting. So that’s something that I would love to do. I don't know who we could convince to talk to us about that stuff. But in general, just like, as far as access journalism goes, that's the stuff I like more now than I used to.
Final question: As a Nuggets fan, how has the Bol Bol experience treated you so far?
The feeling I've had a lot that I haven’t allowed myself to express out loud until right this instant is that that he kind of fucking looks like Kevin Durant, if Kevin Durant could play defense. He looks great. There's one clip where he does a little dribble-drive thing off of two people and floats it in over them from the inside of the paint. And I was like, “That’s a Kevin Durant shot.”
His game doesn’t look like anyone else’s. He’ll be wildly out of position, but he covers so much ground he’ll block the shot anyway. He looks as surprised as the guy he’s blocking.
I feel like all the blocks I've seen have been on like weird jumpers where he didn't realize what was happening. Like he was far away and they shot it and then he just stayed in the air. And the shooter seemed sort of surprised about it. I mean, I'm sure people will figure that out eventually and stop shooting, But for a while, he's going to be surprising people with that stuff.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.