Damn hate to hear this!!

Seriously? Well he wins the prize. At least Tim has a defense and hopefully the Constitution behind him. Householder was straight up crook that stole tax dollars for next 30 years.

The story is all over the internet.

Just Google "Tim Burke".

Seems from at least two places I read today that the Feds hang a lot of weight on the fact they do not call him a journalist. Their claim there may be a stretch given the work he’s done over the years and the modern age of digital media.

And now Burke's former employer Deadspin is dead.

Since we are already in Siberia, I will say it. Deadspin is a great case study in how to ruin a perfectly good thing by unnecessarily turning political, a transition Burke was a big part of at Deadspin.

At least Burke hasn’t lost his ability to be a smug, I’m smarter than everyone person. He is the poster child for why Deadspin fell out of popularity. At some point, that persona and outlook on the world is exhausting. He was always looking for the next clip to try to deliver a one-liner as a constantly online person.

Constantly online person? That's his job. He's an expert in digital media and people pay him to find and archive video.

Deadspin was at its height with Burke a part of it. It built an audience of people who liked sports but were also not afraid to be cynical about sports culture. Turns out there's a lot of overlap with that audience and people who are cynical and critical of politics, culture, and media. Typically left-leaning people. No one returned to Deadspin because they stuck to sports. If you want talented editorial content that celebrates sports, you have plenty of other options. Did you ever see Burke's Sinclair Media video? It was a huge traffic driver for Deadspin yet has nothing to do with sports.

Deadspin's downfall truly begins when they were purchased by G/O Media. A very common story for media companies is their eventual sale to a venture capital firm that has little to no interest in the story or the mission of the properties they are buying. That was the case with G/O media and their CEO.

If you're really wanting to dig deep on this, I highly recommend former editor Megan Greenwell's article The Adults in the Room that describes just how exactly new ownership siphoned any value out of the company while simultaneously not understanding what they owned or how it worked. It's been scrubbed from the Deadspin site, but she does have it up on her own site:

https://www.megangreenwell.com/the-adults-in-the-room


It also didn't help that a very common refrain when an athlete discusses anything remotely in the political arena, especially if it's left-leaning, is "stick to sports." Well, the staff took that and rebelled against the Stick to Sports mandate. G/O responded by firing the editor, and the staff resigned en masse. Burke had already left for other ventures by this point but remained friendly with that staff.

Or you can hear Burke talk about this situation himself in this interview with the Scripps School: https://youtu.be/HSNP1iKH2SU?si=n4wztpZCpxP45PgM&t=693

Months later, they reformed under the company Defector, which is employee-owned and carries on much of the spirit of the old Deadspin. Despite launching during the pandemic, they've managed to survive and thrive. Deadspin had no constituency anymore. As a long term reader I jumped ship along with all the staff after the ‘Stick to Sports’ debacle. Without the original readers it really left only SEO optimized crap yet still remained a punching bag for the conservative opponents.

He was and is exhausting. Being cynical about everything, 24/7, is only going to appeal to a very small fraction of the population. One of the worst things about social media, and the online culture in general, is that a lot of journalists had this new platform to be amateur comedians with bad one-liners. Deadspin was the very extreme version of it. Burke is the poster child of this.

I never paid much attention to Burke or Deadspin.

It seems like a lot of people here don't like him. But that's not a reason to send somebody to jail for 60 years.

It sounds like he was sent this link by somebody who found it publicly published online, and used it to report on how Fox News & Tucker Carlson edited the content of that Kanye West interview.

Journalists rely on leaked documents constantly. Feels like a very slippery slope for journalism if you start to define accessing any digital media that lives behind a password as illegal hacking.

Let's take a very famous instance of investigative journalism: the Boston Globe was leaked documents that showed that the Archbishop of Boston had covered up accusations against a priest who had repeatedly molested children. Back then, "leaking" a doc meant a person gave it to them physically. Let's say that took place in 2023 and the same source that leaked those documents sent reporters at the Globe a link to access those documents. Is that hacking?

To me, it feels like a pretty slippery slope to say with certainty it is.

Just a point of clarification that Gawker, not Deadspin, published the Hulk Hogan tape.