Nobody is saying they shouldn’t have been fired. I think it's more nuanced than that. G/O bought the remnants of Gawker media, which Hulk Hogan had leg-dropped into bankruptcy. Deadspin was by far the most popular blog on the Gawker network. G/O bought it from Univision because of the amount of clicks it generated. Deadspin is a "sports" blog in the same way MTV is a music channel. Telling the writers of Deadspin to stick to sports and then holding that over their heads and threatening their jobs was never going to work. Deadspin GOT clicks because of the irreverent, silly, sometimes dumb posts. The auto-play ad fiasco was just icing on the cake. If you work at a place and you see something that negatively affects your customer base, you SHOULD speak up. How many of us work in a place where autoplay-with-sound ads is completely inappropriate? I'd say more than half. If you go to Deadspin daily and now they start auto playing ads with sound, you may say "Oh yeah, take that off my daily visit list". Not only does that negatively affect your customers, it negatively affects your clicks. I have employees who disagree with me, and I tell them..... sometimes I'll disagree with you, and we're gonna do things my way. Sometimes I'll disagree with you, and we'll try things your way. I'm *guessing* that employees of G/O talked to management about the negative impact auto-play ads would have before publicly complaining about it first, and got turned away. Maybe they didn't. Given that Megan Greenwell quit in August and left with a salted-earth blog post.... well, maybe they didn't. Maybe the writing was already on the wall. These guys bought a "sports blog" without any idea of what it actually WAS. They just saw a site with a ton of traffic, and then clogged the crap out of it with auto-ads and told the staff "write about sports, or else", even though a large majority of those clicks were not there to read "sports news". So should the staff be fired for not doing what they were told? Eh... they were doing what they've always done, and that's running articles that generate a lot of traffic. As I said, I think it's a lot more nuanced issue. If you want box scores and game recaps, ESPN and every other cookie cutter sports site has that.