This week in corporate hackery

Well, that's that, fans of weaponized snarkery. No more Hater's Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalogue for you.

Excuse me. Perhaps we should phrase that NO MORE HATER'S GUIDE TO THE WILLIAMS-SONOMA CATALOGUE FOR YOU in honor of its all-caps-loving creator, the cripplingly-funny Drew Magary.

Who's no longer at the sports/culture blog site Deadspin, on account of it's dead because the corporate hacks who own it now failed to understand what it was. What it was, was a lot of free-floating no-boundaries commentary and (occasionally) by-God journalism, most of which was sports-related but more than occasionally was not. The corporate hacks didn't get the "no-boundaries" part, and so they effectively killed the site.

The head corporate hack, new CEO Jim Spanfeller of something called G/O Media, got the ball un-rolling by firing off a memo this week that Deadspin was heretofore to stick strictly to sports. The staff reacted by resigning en masse in protest of this corner-office meddling. Spanfeller's astonishment at this only underlined how little he and the other corporate hacks understood the subversive milieu of the site.

Of course they all quit. None of them would have been at Deadspin to begin with if they were good soldier types.

In response, Spanfeller vowed to hire more people and keep the site alive, and that it will retain its renegade essence. This, of course, is laughable. The parent company for G/O Media is a private equity firm, which is the polar opposite of renegade. And so whatever Deadspin becomes likely will reflect that.

Which means no more Hater's Guide, one of the joys of the holidays for devotees of pure snark. For the uninitiated, it was Magary's lengthy, often profane takedown of frou-frou yuppie frippery, his Christmas gift to all of us. Of course, it had nothing to do with sports, which means it would have been an especially in-your-face violation of new corporate policy. But such a frontal assault on good old American materialism would likely not have sat well with the corporate hacks, either.

The union representing the fleeing staff members says G/O Media's edict represents a muzzling of speaking truth to power, and that's not an inaccurate assessment. The Blob could point out this is just another brick in the wall of dying American journalism, but that's perhaps chewing the scenery a bit. And of course it's merely a well-duh acknowledgement of a process that's been ongoing for awhile now.

Put it this way: Fewer media conglomerates owning more of media means fewer independent voices, and fewer independent voices means less freedom of the press -- a cherished American right to everyone but Our Only Available President and his acolytes, who regard it as a threat.

To be sure, it may be absurd to think of the death of a snark website like Deadspin as a blow to all of that. But you know what's troublesome about that?

That it might not be so absurd.