Everyone who worked for Deadspin quit yesterday. If you’re not familiar with Deadspin, very little of what follows may interest you. But it should.

Ostensibly a sports website, part of what is left of long-ago Gawker Media, Deadspin was, for me at least, pretty much a daily must-read. Not so much because of what its writers had to say about sports, but in spite of what they were required to say about sports. Fans like me reveled in Deadspin because it was home to a lot of damned good and very entertaining writing, most notably that of the site’s indisputable star and Minnesota-native, Drew Magary, who has also quit.

Why the exodus? Well, mostly for a numbingly familiar-to-the-point-of-cliched reason. Several months ago, you see, Deadspin was bought up by a crew of – wait for it — private equity “investors.” We’ll call them “vultures.” In this case known as Great Hill Partners.

In the interests of quickly maximizing their profit margins, Great Hill installed new management and the leadening editorial horror began soon thereafter.

Instead of encouraging and amplifying what made Deadspin irresistible — imaginative, free-wheeling, provocative commentary in which sports were treated like a facet of the much broader cultural landscape and not some walled-off, brain dead island where the wide, weird world never intruded — Great Hill Partners was determined to, uh, “focus” directly on sports. And just sports.

As in “Stick to sports, damn it.”

Here’s Deadspin explaining what happened then.

As if anyone anywhere was pleading for another site “focused” on why the Cleveland Browns are so bad again this year. Or how Alabama might win another football championship. Or who the Yankees will gobble up off the free agent market. What the Great Hills brain trust saw as a sure winner money-wise was exactly the kind of symbiotic boilerplate “coverage” every other daily sports page, local sports talk station and sports website belabors every goddam day and goddam minute of the goddam year.

Here’s a sample — from Deadspin writer David Roth — of what Great Hill Partners wanted stopped and why it suddenly finds itself without a staff.

“When Trump went to Game 5 of the World Series and was booed and jeered and subjected to a personalized version of the same idiot chant that America’s sourest grandparents and most goal-oriented small-business fascistsdelight in doing at his rallies, the codependent relationship between our broken politics and busted media blossomed into a public display of affection. The incident itself was unremarkable and unsurprising in itself. People jeered and booed Trump because Trump is historically unpopular, and because jeering and booing have historically been popular ways of getting that message across. Even a crowd of monied sports fans and establishment D.C. mutants could not turn down the opportunity to tell one of recent history’s most repellent figures how repellent they found him. It’s an exceedingly rare opportunity, too, because Trump is a priggish and buttery germaphobe who eschews not just the demeaning rigors of retail politics but any occasion at which he might be treated with less than absolute servility and adoration.”

And here’s Magary — who also writes for GQ and will not be out of work for long — in a epic rant days prior to the 2016 election.

“[Trump] will never answer for his crimes, and there’s a frighteningly large portion of the electorate that will always love him for that.

And so I’d just like to say to that portion of the electorate: Fuck you. No, seriously. Go fuck yourselves. I’m not gonna waste any more time trying to convince you that you’re about to do something you’ll regret forever. I’m not gonna show you old clips of Trump saying rotten things. I’m not gonna try to ANNIHILATE Trump by showing you records of his hypocrisy and greed. I’m not gonna link to a John Oliver clip and be like, “THIS. So much this.” Nothing’s gonna take down Trump at this point, so I’m not gonna bother. No no, this post is for ME. I am preaching to the sad little choir in my soul here. … Trump is human waste. He is the worst of America stuffed into a nacho cheese casing, and he is emblematic of the kind of arrogant, flag-waving, trashy, racist moron that the rest of us have to DRAG kicking and screaming into the 21st century: Cliven Bundy, Sean Hannity, Kim Davis, and on and on and on. Trump voters are the people who have spent the past decade or so voting insipid obstructionists into office, sending death threats to anyone who even mentions the idea of gun control, demanding 100% tax cuts on millions of dollars they can only daydream about making, and getting suckered in by any Oil Party candidate waving a NO GAYS flag. Fuck them. These are needy hillbilly loons who are just as starved for attention as Trump himself.”

(Magary’ annual NFL pre-season breakdown, “Why Your Team Sucks” were invariably classics.)

So yeah, Deadspin was kind of “sports-plus.” Sports covered and commented on in the context of everything happening today, and without apology.

And I say that as someone who enjoys sports, but grinds my teeth any time I have to pretend that sports matter. They don’t. They’re a game. An entertainment. A distraction. What matters is all around sports, in the minds … somewhere … of most of the fans in the stadiums or on the couch. Despite what some color commentator might say sports are not quarantined off in a psychological cell block immune to what … well, to what’s happening on the planet outside the ballpark.

What’s emblematic in the death of Deadspin-we-as-we-knew-it is the pervasive blandifying of journalism in so many other forms. In the trade there’s something known as “service journalism”, a form of the media art in which everyone seeks to get along and make each other happy. Advertisers buy advertising and publishers, editors and writers produce provocation-free copy to enhance the appeal of that advertising. I refer you to almost any local business magazine, city magazine and “consumer-oriented” website. (I’ve written for them all. )

The bleed-over from those examples of what used to be known as “advertorial content” into “real journalism” is a belief that the criteria for quality reporting — on any topic — is that it be as provocation-free, as “fair and balanced”, as predictable and quotidian, as rote and humor-free as the private equity vultures demanded Deadspin be … or else.

The fact that it’s not particularly enjoyable to read is amost what proves its bona fides.

In some dystopian fantasies a mad scientist experiment goes awry and every organism on the planet is reduced to the same grey mush. I’ve thought of this bumping into the occasional Star Tribune reporter. There’s this eery Stepford quality to the younger ones. Each speaks, in casual conversation mind you, with the same semi-robotic, self-consciously moderating vernacular, careful to say little to nothing, and never anything funny. Which alas, is how they also write. Grey and bland.

(The irony there is that in my experience at least, these young reporters have clearly been hire to fill a widely diverse range. Racially, gender and sexual orientation-wise, they’re different. But in terms of their diversity of thought-processes and the ways they collate information … they’re virtually identical.)

A few weeks ago I was watching the “Special Features” end of a DVD of one of my favorite movies, “The Conformist” by Bernardo Bertolucci. In an interview, Bertolucci was talking about the occasional odd bit of comic physicality his male lead, Jean-Louis Trintignant, would throw into a scene.

At first Bertolucci couldn’t see himself using that particular take. Trintignant’s character is a haunted man, not particularly humorous. But, says Bertolucci, as he edited the film he was eventually reminded of French critic/philosopher Roland Barthe’s, “The Pleasure of the Text”, and the idea that serious work needs the element of pleasure — the touch of humor, hyperbole, vulgarity even — to make it more accessible and vital to the reader or audience.

Rather than a liability, the “inappropriate” is essential.

I hadn’t thought of Barthes since college. But the “pleasure of the text”, the willingness and ability to draw in and hold an audience, sometimes with the unlikely and unpredictable, sometimes with the outrageous and profane, is what made Deadspin (we knew it) so unique and so valuable.