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Finished at FanHouse

By Pete

Over the past three football seasons I have been writing for AOL’s sports blog, FanHouse. I compiled over 100,000 words on college football, and was a part of the initial group at kick-off. Last night, I got an email from Randy Kim, FanHouse’s Executive Producer, informing me that I was no longer on the team. Ostensibly, because I hadn’t been producing enough lately.

To understand what I believe to be the real reason for the firing, we’ll have to go back a few months.

Actually, we need go (at least briefly) farther than that. Randy is the fourth (by my count) producer. All of the previous producers really knew what they were doing, “got” the whole blogging thing, and they understood that they weren’t working with some homogenized news outlet but a group of very talented writers/bloggers. Randy says all the right things, he has the outward appearance of someone who understands, but his handling of FanHouse seems to suggest otherwise.

FanHouse Fantasy Girls
Shortly after Alana (the most recent producer) was, more or less, forced out (the details of which I do not know well enough to explicate in any detail) and Randy took over, the suits at FanHouse did one of the most idiotic and ridiculous things I can imagine having been done: they partnered with some company which hired tarted-up women with zero sports knowledge to read weak cue cards about fantasy football. They called them the “Fantasy Girls” (a truly ironic title, in my opinion) and I think there were a grand total of three people, outside the “brain trust” at AOL, who thought it was a good idea. Everyone else pretty much thought it was stupid.

No big deal, though, right? I mean, sure, it was offensive to the female FanHouse talent. It was in questionable taste. It was obvious pandering to some mysterious guy demographic who likes trashy girls pretending to know sports. The content, aside from the girls, was also terrible. But, in the end, not such a big deal, and easily fixed, but it was handled very poorly.

The content was slipped into our news stream without a word about it to us. It then took the better part of two days of the FanHouse authors protesting¹, to get any sort of response out of management. All the while, FanHouse was getting blasted in the sports blogging world and many authors were feeling a bit left out in the cold.

To me, the fact that FanHouse seemed both unrepentant about the videos and not at all interested in changing was reflecting poorly on me as a part of the team. People couldn’t be expected to understand the inner-workings on FanHouse and I wanted to make clear, in no uncertain terms, that I didn’t agree with it. I did that in this blog post. Over a week later, Randy wanted to chat about it.

Fall-Out
It turns out that I offended some folks at AOL (shocker), not the least of which seemed to be Scott Ridge, who was aghast that I would attach his name to the whole debacle². During our phone call, Randy tossed around veiled references to the freelancing and non-disclosure agreements and asked no fewer than five times if I was sure I wanted to keep working at AOL. He claimed that AOL didn’t have a problem with me stating my opinion on my personal blog, or even disagreeing with AOL. The problem, according to him, was reproducing the email³ and using Scott Ridge’s name. At the end of our first call, I offered (quite generously, I think) to redact those bits. He said he wasn’t sure if they wanted me to do that or not.

I’ll give that a moment to sink in — I offered to remedy what he claimed was the only problem and he wasn’t sure if he was interested.

At this point, I realized that I was probably a dead man walking at AOL. During the conversation there were certainly a number of insinuations that AOL was looking to get rid of me. A week or so later, I was told that they were going to keep me, but wanted me to go ahead and redact the name and email. I agreed⁴. Since then things have been fine. I don’t think the new management holds a candle to producers past, but they haven’t done anything as stupid as Fantasy Girls, although I’m not sure how they could.

The Final Straw
My posting this season has declined. It wasn’t so much a time problem, however, as it was a combination of additional work being added to the posting process and a number of other internal, administrative issues. Nevertheless, I received an email from Randy. In the email, he basically says a few things: that it’s not about anything personal, that I’m a “very good” writer, but that he doesn’t think I have time to blog, and he implied that my lack of posting was somehow keeping others from posting as much as they’d like. He closed with “I think it might be best for both sides to amicably part ways and move on.”

Now, I will be the first to admit that the asserted reason looks okay at first glance. It would certainly survive summary judgment, so to speak. It would, however, fail on the merits.

For starters, the insinuation that one person not posting enough somehow keeps everyone else from posting as much as they’d like is, in a word, idiotic. In fact, one person not posting as much actually provides more opportunities for the other bloggers as there are really only so many things to write about in a day.

Second, I vaguely recall some contractual limits on the number of posts for each person in a month, but I don’t recall any minimums and, if they exist at all, they have not been considered or enforced at any point during the 3 year run of FanHouse.

Finally, this is literally the first contact I’ve had with Randy since he took issue with my blog post⁵. If he had sent me an email or called me up in the middle of the season and said, “Hey, Pete, you haven’t been posting enough lately and we really need some more out of you,” I would have gladly complied. He didn’t. As far as I knew, FanHouse was satisfied with my production from a content and quantity stand-point. Further, if the expectations were made known and I didn’t meet them, I really would have no room to complain at this point.

When considered against the totality of the circumstances, however, it seems pretty clear that this is partially, if not entirely, retaliatory.

While I will certainly miss the extra drinking money, I won’t miss having to deal with all of the BS. If any of you know any openings for unabashed Alabama homers who are better with editorial/column work than wire-regurgitation, please pass them along. I’ll be looking for a place to cover the 2009 football season.

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1. Literally hundreds of emails were sent in the span of about 48 hours.

2. Imagine that, public accountability for your stupid decisions.

3. The email in question consisted of two sentences and virtually no interesting information.

4. those portions have since been un-redacted… would that be “dacted”?

5. That was the first contact I ever had with him.

Full post as published by PeteHoliday.com on December 12, 2008 (boomark / email).