Megan Greenwell, Like The Oakland A's Every Year, Makes An Early Exit

Deadspin editor-in-chief Megan Greenwell is leaving us for WEIRD Magazine, which we can only assume is a sad rip-off of Mad and Cracked. We will miss her deeply, and to show our affection in the only way we know how, we’re roasting her ass.

Tom Ley

The first thing I thought of when I heard that Megan Greenwell was going to be my new boss was a blog post I wrote in which I trashed a feature she had edited for ESPN The Magazine. The post was a standard piece of Deadspin-style media criticism, which is to say it was quite rude.

I was worried that Greenwell was going to throw this blog back in my face, or worse yet, never mention it while slowly and silently carrying out a grudge against me. I am happy to say that neither of these things ever happened during Greenwell’s tenure as Deadspin EIC. In fact, she was as supportive and encouraging as any boss I’ve ever had. Maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but you must understand that petty grudges coat the entire media industry like a corrosive ooze. I know this because I saw my company bankrupted over a petty grudge, and then I saw lots of Serious Journalists with blue check marks on Twitter cheer our demise because a Gawker blogger had once written something rude about them.

More important than Greenwell’s kindness to me, though, was her kindness to the site. Here was someone from outside the Deadspin/Gawker Media ecosystem who had been a target of our sneering, and yet she never took issue with the sneering itself. A pettier person, and therefore a lesser person, could have easily strolled into the EIC job and started issuing diktats about how Deadspin was going to move away from “snark” and start growing up. She never did that, though, because she understood what Deadspin is and still needs to be. I thank her for that, and for doing me the kindness of never pulling up that old blog post and telling me to go fuck myself.

Then again, maybe she never brought it up because she just forgot about the whole thing, and in reminding her of it here I have made myself a new and powerful enemy. If that’s the case, Megan Greenwell can eat shit and go to hell!

Samer Kalaf

Megan has dealt with and contained chaos pretty much since she started the job, smoothly sneaking numerous plates of shit off the dinner table and into a nearby potted plant one by one, and she’s also a reason Drew is still alive, so I don’t have much in terms of roasting material—except for her puggle named Benson.

As a breed, pugs are an affront to nature, but that’s neither here nor there. There is something suspicious about the supposed creature that is “Benson.” Megan has from time to time brought him up in conversation or shared photos of him, but I’ve never seen him with my own eyes. Benson doesn’t come around the office or attend public gatherings—a red flag. The reason why is because he “gets stressed easily.” Oh? He’s stressed easily? We all have stress, Benson. Welcome to the rat race that is New York City. You think you’re too good for me, Benson? Grow up and let me shove a phone in your face so I can slap some crying emoji over it. If you do, I’ll scratch your little forehead and feed you a treat, if I have any on me.

Unless I see this pooch face-to-snout, I have to come to the conclusion that he doesn’t actually exist. Benson is a sham, a damned dog hoax. Don’t believe the lies.

Laura Wagner

The first time I met Megan was shortly after she had been hired at Deadspin and she was getting to know the staff. We were at a bar with a few other Deadspinners, bullshitting and taking turns pouring tea—nothing too hot, just the lukewarm intro tea—when someone brought up a well-known person in sports media. I had heard a funny story/rumor about that person (or so I thought) and so I shared the story with the table. Only when I felt a foot slam into my shin and got a text telling me that I was an ABSOLUTE IDIOT did I realize my mistake: The funny story/rumor that I had gleefully shared with the table was not about the well-known industry person; it was about Megan.

I think I slipped into a shame-induced fugue state because I do not remember the rest of the conversation, but I do know that Megan, when faced with an astonishing moron who perhaps (inadvertently!!!) embarrassed her, didn’t even flinch.

It wouldn’t be the last time. In her year and a half at Deadspin, Megan has had to handle more than her fair share of fools, especially recently, and she doesn’t suffer them gladly. This usually works out well for everyone, with the exception of that time she nixed Worst Foods To Barf, Ranked.

Anyhow, Megan, I’m sorry for (accidentally!!!) being an asshole the first time we met. And please keep your eyes peeled for my least barfable foods ranking.

Barry Petchesky

Deadspin is not an easy place to come to work, because everyone who already works here is a clubby, judgmental weirdo. I did not envy Megan when she became the first outsider in the site’s history to take the helm. How would she handle the antisocial sociopaths on staff? Would we accept her, or shun her as forever as Other? Those concerns were immediately put to rest when she revealed she’s every bit as demented as the rest of us.

This is a woman who thinks pancakes and donuts are bad, who thinks the Oakland A’s and Kentucky Wildcats are good, who thinks her clearly defective dog is perfect, and who thinks anyone on this staff is worthy of the time and attention she has put into making us better at our jobs and keeping us shielded from the predatory private-equity scam that now runs the place. I assure you, we are not worth it. But Megan has that ultrarare, ultravaluable quality in a boss when she puts her staff first. She sacrifices for us—her well-being, her time and effort, her very job, as it’s turned out—to make our lives better at the expense of her own. She didn’t have to do any of this, but I suspect she doesn’t know how to be any other way.

At 6 p.m. today I am going to block her from my phone.

Billy Haisley

As is tradition with these end-of-tenure roasts, I’d love nothing more than to razz Megan by recounting some funny anecdote from our time spent together or to resurface some embarrassing thing she’s done or said, but the truth is I don’t have anything to even jokingly make fun of her about. Megan has been a great boss—in some ways, the best one I’ve had at Deadspin.

She is a rare combination, a sharp editorial mind who totally gets what the site is at its best, while also (and this is the rare part) being an organized overseer of a website and a compassionate manager of people. Megan was the first true outsider EIC at Deadspin in a very long time, and because of how smart and good she is, she won all of us mistrustful assholes over much faster than I would’ve imagined possible. She took over the site at probably the most difficult time in its history, and though the tough times have only gotten tougher, she’s done a heroic job keeping us motivated, hopeful, and committed.

I hate that she’s leaving on these terms, and I still don’t totally understand how or why it’s come to this. Nevertheless, I do know that Megan is a strong and dedicated leader, and if she feels like she had no choice but to step down, then I can only be mad at the people who put her in that position. The skills she’s shown at Deadspin mean her career will only continue to climb, and I wish nothing but the best to her, her family, her pug Benson, and all her Puerto Rican neighbors.

Drew Magary

Greenwell is a pioneer in that she was, of course, the first sane EIC in this site’s history. She was also the first EIC who hadn’t either founded the site/already been working here when they got hired, and so we were like, “Whoa hey an OUTSIDER. Is this person gonna understand what we’re all about?” And she did. Took less than a second to know Greenwell was made to run Deadspin, and that Deadspin was made for her to take command of it. I was grateful to work for Greenwell even BEFORE she and her hubby waited all night in a hospital while I, on the road and away from all my loved ones, underwent emergency brain surgery nine months ago, and now I’m even more grateful to be her friend. I would literally not be here without her.

On the other hand, Greenwell hates donuts. And pancakes. And ham. So maybe I take back what I said about her being sane. Maybe instead of donuts she can eat shit instead.

Lauren Theisen

Goodbyes are a time to say all the things to a person that you were never able to say before. Pride and passion and just a general desire to annoy my boss kept me from telling her any of this during her time at Deadspin, but I hope Megan can read these truths now and forgive me for taking so long to admit them.

Albert Burneko

This feels stupid and embarrassing to say, as someone whose job basically amounts to “write pretty much whatever you want, whenever,” but I have been having a very hard time at this job this summer, not least because of my unhelpful sense that someone with my job has no excuse, ever, for not having a very easy time. The truth is, at a certain point it became paralyzingly difficult just to get started typing words for even on the simplest, shortest, most ephemeral little highlight blog. Privately I’d begun to panic at the possibility that this was it: That when I’d taken this job, it had been with some small and finite reservoir of writing inside myself, built up like a drain clog over 30-plus years of not being a writer, and that I’d purged it, and this was it, I was finished, I couldn’t even do 400-word blog posts anymore, and it was time to figure out the next broadly silly hustle I’d use to pay the bills for a while before everything inevitably fell all the way apart.

Some number of weeks after sinking to that stupid, desperate place, I contacted Megan in a panic in the middle of a workday afternoon to ask for some time off, pretty much immediately. It wasn’t any kind of formal Vacation Request form (I don’t even know if our company has those), just a despairing email out of nowhere: “Hey boss, I’m in a total freefall, can I go away for a week,” from probably this site’s least productive and least essential staff member. This was a couple of weeks ago. Megan responded within minutes with an unconditional “Dude, yes, take a fucking week off!” I felt better instantaneously.

That’s Megan’s style as I have become familiar with it anyway: Genially brusque, or brusquely genial, and offended by the very concept of there being any pressure that she can’t take off of the people under her and bear up herself. I do not mean to suggest that this little interaction is a worthy microcosm of Megan’s strength and decency as a boss, but it meant a lot to me, especially because it wasn’t surprising: You know you can go to Megan Greenwell and say “Shit’s real bad right now” and she will skip right past the humiliating theater of proving shit has valid reasons for being bad to the part where she does what she can to make them better. Not every boss is like that. Most people are not good and decent enough to be that kind of boss.

Speaking of which: At some point right around the same time, Megan went to her boss, as I’d gone to mine, in search of some assurance and from a much stronger and more justified position to ask for it. She received less than none. Now the good boss who protects the people under her is leaving this company. Form your own judgments of the other one, the one who’s still here. I already have. Congratulations to Wired.

Kiran Chitanvis

Here’s my submission: It’s an inarguable fact that our soon-to-be former editor in chief, Megan Greenwell, has bad taste in baseball teams (no matter how well they do). Please enjoy this compilation of what happened when she attempted to remember her favorite guys.

Chris Thompson

Megan Greenwell brought me on as a full-time staff person at this reeking hell-hole of a site, where I have aged like an Indian summer jack-o’-lantern in stop motion. Also she hired Luis, which was clearly intended as some sort of attack on morale. What the fuck, man. May she burn in hell for a million billion kerjillion lifetimes.

Anders Kapur

Megan Greenwell stubbornly refuses to admit that Big Thief is good. The biggest upside of her leaving is that Luis Paez-Pumar will no longer have institutional support for his trash music takes.

Shaina Travis

One time I sent this gif to Megan on accident and she didn’t fire me or report me to HR. So, that was dope.

WE’LL MISS U MEGAN

Luis Paez-Pumar

Megan told me to “fuck off” approximately every three days in the 8-plus months we worked together. She kicked me from Slack channels multiple times, usually when I was talking about the Patriots or my objectively correct food takes. She could not go a day in the office without dunking on me, usually multiple times. SHE DOESN’T LIKE DONUTS.

And yet, Megan was the best boss I’ve ever had. The way she fought for Deadspin all the way until this most bitter end; The way she would encourage us all to do dumb and stupid and vastly entertaining blogs; The way she pushed the site towards the place we all felt it could be…I will miss that. I’ll miss the way that, even though we disagree on everything else, I could always count on Megan for recommendations on Weenie Music, the favored musical genre among Deadspin’s best people. I will also miss Benson, her extremely anxious and adorable pug. Maybe I’ll miss Benson most of all. I will not miss her disdain for the Nerd Show (Game of Thrones) and Nerd Movies (anything related to Marvel), but you have to pick your battles.

Deadspin will miss Megan dearly, but hey, maybe Deadspin Slack will improve without her making every conversation about the goddamn Oakland A’s.

Diana Moskovitz

The primary job of any Deadspin EIC is to keep the staff from accidentally blowing up the site. I know, that sounds easy, but that’s because you haven’t been a blogger. All these years and all these EICs later, somehow Deadspin still has not blown itself up. The joke is every editor is the editor that ruined Deadspin, but the truth is every editor saves Deadspin from itself. Megan managed to do that through two different owners, two different executive directors, and some very trying times.

Dom Cosentino

Greenwell’s tenure had the distinction of being the most crisis-free in Deadspin history. No stress at all. She could put all her energy into implementing a vision, editing blogs, making hires, motivating the staff, and managing all that needed to be managed. There was certainly no chaos. No existential uncertainty. No staffers falling and breaking their brains or dealing with serious illnesses. Definitely no corporate pressures whatsoever. Why she would want to leave Deadspin at this moment will forever remain a mystery, but at least she can take solace in knowing that if the A’s don’t let her down before the postseason, they most certainly will once they get there.

Patrick Redford

It’s bullshit that we have to have a roast Megan right now, given the circumstances of her departure. She deserves better than this, I’m devastated she is going, and I hope they don’t hire some pud to replace her. Imagine that!

Megan is Good for a variety of reasons: she’s the second boss in Deadspin history to be a fan of the Oakland A’s and the first from Sacramento (kinda); she somehow reads every post on the site, even Lauren’s posts that have headlines like Tampa Bay Lightning Trade Tiimoö Hapslïïtuun; she is a thoughtful editor and I always wished she wrote more because she’s got sharp knives (the Nardini blog was perfect); she helped save Drew Magary’s life.

Megan is also the worst type of sports fan, who I think gets legitimately ticked off when you make fun of her teams (not the A’s or the Sharks, of course, only the bad teams she likes). That tendency usually gets rounded off by blog life, and yet Megan will read you the riot act if you insult the port land trail blazers.

Her greatest failure at Deadspin is never blogging about her and Greta Gerwig’s time as apparently elite high school fencers, and she would always indignantly refuse to even entertain the notion. She shares with her predecessor a tendency towards weapons-grade wrongheadedness, and her ability to shit on universally agreed upon joys like pancakes makes her equally as odious as that bastard Tim Marchman.

I suppose those are not the worst traits a boss could have. I would take her against, say, for example, hypothetically, some cowards who have alienated an entire workforce in record time and sent people fleeing for the exits. If you can’t see the value or skill of someone like Megan Greenwell, well, good luck in the media business! Even Univision could, and making them look smart is impressive as hell.

Also, Megan once told me she doesn’t like looking at pictures of dogs on the internet because it interferes with her belief that her pug-mix is the only cute dog. Here is a photo of her dog:

Kelsey McKinney

Listen, usually I would love to make some jokes at Megan’s expense. She is unbelievably easy to dunk on: she hates donuts; she chose the Oakland A’s to root for; she dressed up as the “this is fine” dog meme for Halloween in 2018. It is rude as hell that she is leaving Deadspin barely two months after hiring me. But 1) most dunks on Megan are also dunks on me because I too love weenie music and hate desserts and 2) it is not fun to make jokes about someone who had to leave a job that she loved and was viciously good at just because a bunch of C-suite executives didn’t like her.

It is deeply embarrassing for this company that Megan Greenwell is leaving. What is even more embarrassing is that the men who made this dream job a hostile environment for her don’t seem to realize how rare a talent she is. This sucks. It’s not fair, and it’s unwarranted, and it is truly indicative of a leadership that makes decisions not because they are good for business, but based off petty squabbles.

I have worked with dozens of editors, and Megan is one of the best. She is smart and dedicated, thoughtful and compassionate. She will happily delete all your favorite parts from your story and then force you to re-read it until you realize that she was right all along. She has morals and a backbone. Megan protected Deadspin in period of upheaval and kept it from becoming another sports site with game recaps and no soul at all. Despite an ongoing crisis that started basically the week I was hired, the staff she has nurtured and led at Deadspin is one of the most supportive and truly joyful places I have ever worked. I would trust Megan with any story I wanted to write. I would also trust her with my dog.

Dave McKenna

Megan has this trick where she’s always smart and nice and supportive, and makes you feel good about yourself and what you do and where you work. She kept that up from her first day til today, no matter what was coming down from above. I haven’t figured out what she got out of it yet. But that must be part of the trick. Be well, Megan.

Giri Nathan

Running this site is not for healthy people. It is for people who drool snus juice onto their pillows, then wake up and scour their faces with a detergent-spurted Brillo pad. It is for someone you could easily envision urinating on a subway platform. I have to admit: I was curious if this well-adjusted and -liked person was up for the task. Sure, she was emotionally invested in a trash baseball team. But she also seemed to own a wallet-style container for her valuables. Were we selecting an editor-in-chief too far along the ape-evolves-into-human continuum? What would happen to Deadspin under her guidance?

The answer was a heroic run, led by the best boss I’ve had, in spite of the worst conditions possible. Mega(n) has perfect taste, a steady hand when threading tricky rhetorical needles, an open ear to even the dumbest half-ideas, and an easygoing ambition that makes you want to do better work. In at least one case, she kept us literally alive.

She also read everything on the site, a feat matched only by the most deviant and least employed lawyers of our time. And over 18 months, she proved that being feral is not a real prerequisite for this job. (Please revise the listing accordingly.) It turns out you just have to be very talented and care insanely hard! Fighting a stranger is optional.

In the home stretch, she soothed us as we descended into danker and darker circles of corporate hell, fended off the infinite ghouls along the way, and went out in a blaze—exposing truths inconvenient to powerful people, exactly what the leader of this site is supposed to do. That she’s leaving now and on these terms sucks too much for jokes. There goes our strongest wall of defense against the inevitable. If we do survive without her, I look forward to her next tour of duty here, when she’ll finally turn Deadspin into the food blog it’s long been pretending not to be.

David Roth

Earlier this week, some time after I learned of her departure but before attending her wake at one of the janky bootleg Dave And Buster’s bars favored by this website’s staff, I learned that a restaurant named Taix, in Los Angeles’s Echo Park neighborhood, was closing. It’s a strange place, as I remember it—an ostensibly French place where no one orders food, sometimes there is music of the People From The Neighborhood Wandering In variety, with inexpensive drinks and a broader vibe so inexplicable that it somehow boomerangs around to being welcoming. A place like this closing so that it could, at some point in the future, become a glassy condo with like a Five Guys on the first floor, is in some ways just one of those things that happens in cities. It sucks, and it sucks in a familiar way, and it sucks because people with money tend to be boring and pedestrian and so like predictable things that suck over unpredictable things that don’t. You do not need to live in a city to know what this looks like, but if you do it is something you likely see every day.

I met Megan Greenwell for the first time at Taix, years ago, after she’d written a story for The Classical and while she was the editor of a magazine and website called Good, which was indeed briefly very good before the rich people in charge of it decided that they wanted it to be worse. So the place closing, some days after I found out that she was leaving the website and some days before it became real, landed as an additional and gratuitous insult. I already know how things are going, I already know who’s in charge and what they want, enough, enough.

But this is supposed to be about Megan so I will tell you about Megan: She is very smart and very discerning and of course like everyone else here I will miss it when she and a few other staffers randomly hijacks a Slack channel to rank the “specialty pies” at some pizzeria in Berkeley, California. Of course, like everyone else, I will miss hearing someone say the names of various Oakland A’s players out loud, in earnest, while some of us are just trying to work and like live. This, this woman has looked me in the eye and said things like “Lou Trivino” and “Mark Canha” and I can’t do a fucking thing about it. She’s the boss, and I know her well enough to know that she’s right. Nothing gold can last forever, which is something that Megan knows as both a fan of a NFL team that is fleeing her hometown and a baseball team whose average postseason run is shorter than the run-time of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. I count myself lucky to have been able to have been with her and had some good times in various fun places, with other fun people, before they get around to knocking them all down.

Gabe Fernandez

When I was first brought on to write weekend blogs for Deadspin, someone informed me that Megan was a diehard Oakland A’s fan and, like a good little foot soldier, I decided to keep my Houston Astros fandom quiet so as not to get off on the wrong foot my new boss. But after learning that her food takes include such blasphemy like “pancakes are bullshit,” “ham sucks,” and “donuts are bad […] yea all donuts,” I regret not wearing Astros gear from head-to-toe, a replica World Series ring on my pinky, and the image of Jose Canseco watching Kirk Gibson’s homer fly over his head in 1988 tattooed on my neck for the first in-person meeting I ever had with her. (What I did instead was thank her for not firing me after four weeks on the job, like a groveling little weasel.)

In all seriousness, I can’t thank Megan enough for letting my words get published on a site that I’ve been a longtime reader of, raising hell whenever a check comes late, and agreeing to take tequila shots with the younger members of her staff for her birthday. Greenwell is good as hell.

Ray Ratto

I have never met Megan Greenwell in person and yet she employed me, so already she is the best boss I ever had. As Malcolm Gladwell explained in his 2017 treatise on colossal self-absorption, “I’m Drunk, High And I’m Having Hallucinations So Don’t Mind Me,” the absence of boss is always preferable to the presence of boss, so for that alone, I wish her next endeavor will be a long, happy and successful one without ever having to interact with her new co-workers.

I mean, I wish had tales of Greenwell, like the time she held up that liquor store armed with only a flint knife and a schnauzer named Petey because she’d run out of Rumple Minze and her ATM card was on the blink. Or the time she locked Petchesky in a closet and said, “I’m off to Switzerland for a little R&R, so hold down the fort until I come back. And stop scratching at the door. It leaves marks.” I could make up more stories, but libel’s a bitch.

I will say only that she leaves us all better for her having been here, and when I say “here,” I mean “there.” I’ve never been “here,” and I think we can all agree that Megan preferred it that way. May she bring success and fulfillment to her next post, and may she regard those around her as optional companions. It worked great for me, and I’m the best judge of not being around people I know. So up Megan! May her triumphs be uninterrupted.

And now, over to alcohol for another testimonial.

Emma Carmichael

Megan Greenwell once got me a three-course meal at Má Pêche (RIP) on ESPN’s dime. I salute her for that, and for how she got out of this place. Cheers to a legend of the blog.

Nick Martin

Megan would never tell anyone this, but behind closed doors, she is inarguably the biggest MCU fan I have ever encountered, specifically in a boss-worker relationship. Remember those 10,000-word posts I kept posting on the Avengers movies: All her. Yep, she was the ghostwriter. Just didn’t want to put her name to them, for some reason. I wish I could tell you how many times I’d be sitting there at my desk, minding my own business, hard at work in the blog mines trying to score The Big Scoop she was always telling us to go get, only to hear that familiar ping and look up to find yet another Slack message from her. It was usually some crazy theory about how selfish it was for Captain America to split the central reality by staying with Peggy, or some great lament trailing on about If Only We Had A Real-Life Tony Stark To Save Us or a diatribe about how Nebula’s dumb robot-ass brain fucked over the Avengers not once but twice, and yet nobody noticed. Honestly, I’d humor her for as long as I could and act as though I knew what she was talking about, but like, cmon, I’ve got work to do here! I would show you the Slacks but I was booted off the system. Too bad there’s no way to verify. But take my word for it, she loves it.

Emma Baccellieri

It was easy to roast Marchman. It would be easy to roast Barry, or Ley, or Magary, or Samer. Plenty of dumbass content for roasts to be had.

But Greenwell??? I have no dumbass content from Greenwell. Just time with an editor who’s incredibly smart, compassionate, and incisive; someone who made this site better with everything she did for it.

Even though she’s a Blazers-A’s-Kentucky fan. (?????) Truly impressive that she could rise above this weird fandom trifecta to be a functioning member of society.

Tim Marchman

Megan Greenwell is pretty hard for me to roast, and not just because I’m not really in the mood. It’s also because most of what people seem to agree are her most ridiculous traits—her questionable food opinions, her obsession with a second-rate metro’s second-best baseball team, her neurotic desire for constant reassurance and validation—seem, to me, personally, not only entirely admirable but in fact the characteristics of an effective leader and well-adjusted human being. That said, there is one irritating thing about her that I would very much like her future colleagues to be aware of: Her stubborn belief that things will work out right if you make them. Facts and reason carry, in her view; people do what’s best for them and those around them, whether or not it’s easy or obvious; if things don’t work out the way they should it’s because you did something wrong. I’m pretty unclear on how she can, as a grown adult and especially one who’s spent nearly two years at Not Gawker Media, possibly think any of this is true.

Even by Deadspin-editor standards, Greenwell has dealt with a ludicrous set of circumstances. Coming into a job where her zombie predecessor was hanging around, offering unnecessary suggestions and unwanted advice, she soon found out that the corporate monolith that owned the company was putting it up for sale. It was not only doing so in the most ridiculous and ineffectual way possible, but seemingly attempting to actually drive the value of the property it was trying to sell down; it was intent on cutting the staff by some alarmingly large number and willing to drag through two distinct sets of protracted negotiations over just what that number would be;it had no idea how to sell its theoretically marketable property; it dragged out an unnecessarily acrimonious labor negotiation; eventually, it sold the company to an entity I’m not sure I’m allowed to accurately describe under the terms of my severance agreement, with consequences you can read about any number of places, doubtless including the roasts surrounding this one. (None of this even gets into the issues involved with working with the unhinged Deadspin staff.)

Throughout all this, my unwanted advice amounted to saying that it’s good to accept that the world doesn’t make sense and that having reason and right on your side doesn’t amount to much of anything; you do the best you can but ultimately accept that things aren’t under your control. You can’t argue sense to a rabid dog eating its own shit and puking the shit all over the place, especially if the dog doesn’t speak English, and if it never should have been allowed into your office in the first place, that doesn’t much matter if it’s your boss’s boss and in charge of the fate of your company and owned by someone armed with a shotgun who is very aggressively not letting you either put it down or even lock it in a closet.

Megan is the sort of person who insists and truly believes that there’s an answer even when there just isn’t, and if it’s probably a lot of what makes her a wonderful editor and manager and a better friend, it’s also an entirely frustrating trait. She not only really thinks it should be possible to do a job you love and excel at, to focus on the work itself and not the meta-work around it, and for that work to be supported in ways that make money for everyone and allow for everyone to make a decent living, but that if you just figure out the right thing to say to a half-sentient drifter in a Bozo the Clown outfit trained to spout excerpts from Heritage Foundation white papers every hour on the hour you can make it happen, and that if you can’t it’s on you. Where she’s been, I don’t know.

Dayna Evans

For a brief, like, nine months, Megan was given the blessed task of being my editor when we were both at The Cut. We spoke a similar heinous language, wherein we constantly ribbed and mocked each other to the extent that a colleague once asked if I actually hated Megan. Only sometimes, I said. In the years of hate-friendship since, Megan has never said one nice thing to me. She has repeatedly turned down every pitch I’ve ever sent her. She occasionally looks at me with what can only be described as a look of sheer indignation. In short, Megan is like the dad I never wanted. But—as always—the joke’s on her. Because despite claiming that I am a barnacle on her ascent to editorial fame, she still asked me to be her reference in her Deadspin job interview. She has watched countless Eagles games with me. Like a suspicious number of Eagles games. Like the number of Eagles games that might convince you she’s an Eagles fan (she is). She went to a Mets-Phillies game with me this year, where the Phillies lost 9-0. 9-0! The biggest ruse in Megan’s life is that she hates me, and in fact, it’s her pathetic loyalty to me that should be remembered as her primary contribution to this site and beyond. I’ll never forget that she once said, “We should change the name of this site to Daynaspin.” True story.

Veronica de Souza

A MESSAGE TO DEADSPIN READERS: Megan’s departure is another deeply embarrassing loss for the several gargoyles that run J/O Media. Reading about these people and what they’re doing to this once profitable company makes my stomach hurt. It is thanks to them that my part of this post will be broken up by approximately 4 ads and a pop-up survey. But listen, keep reading! Ignore these apparent attempts to make it HURT to read this site. The only thing that should hurt on Deadspin is the occasional (ok, weekly) bad take. Keep reading and commenting and supporting all of these sites. Make it so that the suits will have to actively ignore numbers if they want to press their agenda forward. There are a lot of extremely talented people here (at every site and in every department) who I know will keep fighting off any attempt to meddle with what’s working.

BACK TO REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING: I really enjoyed working with Megan despite her nearly constant threats to physically harm me. I took this personally for a bit until I realized she has a severe medical condition and the only treatment option is a constant stream of goss (see screenshot below, so sad).

This time last year, I too quit my job at this company, and Megan has ruthlessly mocked me for it ever since. Even as recently as this week! I’m excited to return the favor for the next 12 months. <3

Susie Banikarim

Megan claims that I once told her that she’s the best hire I ever made. I have no memory of this and it doesn’t sound like something I would say. Nevertheless, I concede she’s a very good person to hire. We had a lot of very honest conversations about how things worked at GMG before I asked her if she wanted to be EIC at Deadspin and she still said yes. Whether or not she regrets accepting the job only she can say but I never once, not even for a passing moment, regretted offering it to her. Also, I’m pretty sure Alex was her favorite so whatever.

Alex Dickinson

I have never been owned so much by someone at work than by Megan. She would own me at close range, from across the room in front of a ton of people, as I was scouring the kitchen for Cheddar Bunnies, or sitting on a couch minding my own business. Then she’d say “K, bye” and be gone before I’d even registered the cutting remark about my outfit, an email I’d just sent or my general Australianess. She owns like a pro and I salute her for it.

I don’t salute her ruthless disinterest in the majestic sport of rugby which does a huge disservice to the readers of Deadspin and the wider fun-havers of these United States.

That said, in a time when we spend almost every waking hour working, in person or attached to our phones, spending it with someone like Megan made it fun and not like work at all. She’s a natural leader, a stellar editor, a fearless protector of her team, and makes it all look easy when it’s anything but. When she ends up running this industry atop one of the three mega media conglomerates that survives, I hope she remembers to swing her old pal a job.

Megan Reynolds

I have long enjoyed being the only Megan at this godforsaken company, but that peace was shattered when Megan took the helm at Deadspin. For a moment, I feared that we would be adversaries, required by law to fight to the death every day. Though this may still be my greatest wish, alas it has not come to fruition. There’s still time. However, Megan is the ONLY Megan that I’ve ever met that I liked and her presence will be missed in a way that I have yet to fully process. Lucky for me, I can still body-shame her dog and also contact her at every waking moment, to scream about Berkeley and the Cheeseboard and our shared love of gummy peaches. She’s a terrible person for leaving but a great person to have around. I will miss her tremendously.

Hamilton Nolan

I for one am glad that Megan Greenwell is escaping the sinking ship while it is still safely afloat. Megan—remember who your true friends and supporters are a few months from now as you cruise past our scattered wreckage in your life boat, with room to save only a handful of souls from the icy depths. I like the Oakland “A’s.”

Sent from my iPhone

Molly Osberg

I am personally very pleased that I won’t have to spend another second of my life thinking about all the things Megan, an actual fucking saint, does for the betterment of the planet and realizing what an awful person I am in comparison.

Jon Eiseman

Megan Greenwell has accomplished a truly amazing feat: in her year-and-a-half tenure of helming a website known for its contentious relationship with superiors and offensive food takes, Megan has somehow managed to leave Deadspin under the worst possible circumstances and have the sort of opinions about food that make me wonder if we’re actually inhabiting parallel universes. Congrats to Megan! Anyway, I could write something long-winded about how a company corrupted by private equity money and run by poorly dressed failsons has forced out one of its most talented, beloved, and successful editors, but that’s too depressing to think about, so instead I’ll just say that Megan is an incredible leader, and I would follow her anywhere — except to her new job at forbes dot com, where I’m sure she will be welcomed with open arms.

Alexis Sobel Fitts

Of all the various atrocities perpetuated by Megan Greenwell, I can safely say she saved her worst for me. Megan is responsible for my joining this company, a role she graciously celebrated by treating me to a $10.99 Thai lunch special with a small sliver of her referral bonus. (Just kidding! She expensed the lunch. THANK YOU Megan!!!)

But the prospect of working adjacent to Megan—someone whose reputation has been earned both by consistently supervising brilliant work and being booted out of various media institutions with the highest integrity and grace—was enticing. Thanks Megan, for welcoming me into our current hellfire, and saving your most glorious exit for four months into my dream job. It was worth it.

Ryan Brown

I’m furious. Megan showed up in full force somehow able to remind me (and a lot of us) what GOwKeR MeDiA always has been, despite the shifting ground beneath our feet. And now she’s leaving after 18 months, which simultaneously feels like no time at all, and, at this company at least, half a lifetime. Awards, accolades and bad takes aside, it takes real courage to work here for that amount of time.

Bummer she’s leaving us to go back to the maw of corporate media. We never did get the Deadspin/Inventory collaboration off the ground, which is a shame, because we could have sold a lot of hats.

Katie McDonough

Megan is a brilliant editor, a respected manager, and a warm and compassionate friend. In her free time, she volunteers with a mentorship program for recently laid-off writers and teaches teenagers about journalism. Her career, and really her general thing as a person, is built on a foundation of doing right by other people. All of it also seems to come really naturally to her, which feels rare and special. And it’s because of all of this that you could call it a shock that she spent so much of her time at Deadspin quietly undermining the career of a promising new sports writer: me. She routinely rejected my blog ideas (“Steph Curry Should Play for the Raptors Instead”); one time bought me a seat at a football game that was not next to the person I was supposed to sit with but then insisted that she had bought the correct ticket and that, instead, I couldn’t read; and finally, when I offered to become editor-in-chief of Deadspin after she left, she told me my edit test was “getting to MetLife stadium without getting lost on the side of the highway.” So is Megan actually a good person? I guess history will decide.

Melissa Kirsch

When Megan started at GMG, she was not rotting from the inside. She had a glimmer of hope in her eye and she smiled the smile of a happy person, not a person who was grinding their teeth down to dust! Before long, of course, the world-weariness, the cynicism, the corruption, the spite, and grift and graft got to her as they do all who marinate in the fetid Slack backwaters and stolen conference-room whisper congresses that are the hallmarks of a digital media outfit in the back half of the twenty-teens. Now she’s a husk, a hollow-eyed phantom haunting the hallways in a threadbare ‘Stick to Sports’ tee. And it is this terrifying being that we unleash on the world, her salad days wilted too soon, her (team) Pulitzer glory a mere memory. Goodbye forever, Megan. I won’t miss you at all.

Danielle Belton

Dear Megan,

I am very upset that you have left me here. Not alone of course. I still have the rest of the EIC crew, my team and the many wonderful people who make up our hilariously labyrinth-like offices that still have remnants of BET Networks on the walls. But you are good, Megan. You are a good and amazing person, a fantastic, stalwart journalist who in a short time I have learned much from. My life is better just for you being in it as part of this ragtag bunch of slightly dysfunctional journalists trying to make blogs work long after blogs died a hot firey death around 2011. But as they say in the Iron Islands before we realized they weren’t integral to the plot at all, what is dead may never die. You may be gone, but the impression you left will linger. Like blogs. Possibly forever.

Patrick George

I have been told that this is where I’m supposed to “roast” Megan, and viciously “own” her, as the staff of Deadspin is known to do to various sports figures (this is called being laser focused on sports.) But the fact is I like her a lot. And while she completely sucks for leaving, I can think of no better legacy than proving that our editorial department doesn’t take shit from anyone. For that I’m grateful to her, and I’m honored to call her my friend.

Megan is off to Wired now, a publication that covers “tech” and still publishes a printed magazine in 2019. It sounds very, very fancy. I wish her the best of luck there, and pray she doesn’t forget about us little people when she’s microdosing LSD with Elon and Grimes.

Stephen Totilo

I don’t have any funny Megan stories, I’m sorry to say. In fact, I wish we had longer to work together so I could get some. But one short, vague anecdote: During a crucial time earlier this year, I was confronted with an extremely difficult conundrum regarding a tough story. It was Megan who came to my rescue and ensured that we had the best story possible. It was just one example of many that she has been an exemplary EiC. I’ll miss her a lot.

Kelly Bourdet

Megan is a tough bitch with a heart of gold. I will miss her a lot, and I do NOT forgive her for leaving.

Aleksander Chan

Megan leaving is extremely annoying, to me. Now whose level-headed, clear-eyed advice am I supposed to seek? Whose office am I going to hide in when I, you know, need a second? I think it’s very rude for her to do this (leave—and more specifically, leave me). It’s very annoying because, and stop me if you’ve heard this one before, a lot of people around here (gestures manically) don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and Megan is one of those rare people in this business who DOES know what the hell she’s talking about. It’s annoying (especially, again, to me)! But I understand. The circumstances under which she is leaving are—how to put this? You know that scene in Deep Impact where Téa Leoni is on the beach with her dad, just bracing themselves for a cataclysmic tidal wave created by a comet crashing into the Earth? It’s kinda like that, except she has escaped the wave and the rest of us are Téa Leoni. Annoying (to me), but I get it! Good luck, god bless, and goodbye Megan. Also, I already called dibs on the rug in her office.

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Megan Greenwell forced me to learn and understand the connection between NASCAR and cow’s milk.

Ben Reininga

There is apparently a great deal I do not know about Megan Greenwell — I found out at her going-away party that perhaps we both worked at the same college newspaper at the same time — and I don’t pay much attention to sports or tweets, which seem to be interests of hers. But last summer, I bought two or three really cool shirts, and every time I wore one, she’d be like “Nice shirt,” or “Where did you get that shirt? Maybe I’ll buy one for my husband.” So, I can say she’s a pretty good shirt-noticer!

Clover Hope

Megan Greenwell is the second-best Megan I know but having one less Megan around in Slack will make my life easier. Not sure why they had a woman running a sports wellness site anyway.

Source: Read Full Article