Deadspin was found dead in the water when a memo released Oct. 28 telling the staff to “stick to sports” lead to the entire editorial staff quitting the sports blog en masse. It’s impossible to consider the Deadspin story without thinking about how its parent publication faced the same fate three years ago.

Gawker toppled in the summer of 2016 at the end of a tumultuous 13-year run dedicated to news and gossip. Like in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, the summer tensions of Gawker’s demise left a layer of thick sweat along the digital landscape that we haven’t been able to wash off yet.

Gawker Media, parent to sites like gossip blog Jezebel and Deadspin, was at the fulcrum of years of controversy and drama, notable for its “dirty” fighting style. Its fall wasn’t unprecedented. They had made enemies with venture capitalists and lawyers with the money and inclination to swallow up the media.

In the site’s last post concerning its closure, which is still up as the domain remains a dormant specter of a continuing digital-media war. As Gawker Media founder Nick Denton wrote in 2016 when Gawker’s site shut down, “It is a fitting conclusion to this experiment in what happens when you let journalists say what they really think.”

The ethics of Gawker are beside the point. For better or worse, Gawker had journalists saying what they really thought in a new, brash way.

You can’t really talk about digital media and journalism anymore without talking about a new form of tech-based oligarchy. Like its original parent company, Deadspin has found itself the newest installment in Denton’s proposed “experiment” of allowing journalists to say what they think.

In a leaked memo, G/O Media editorial director Paul Maidment wrote to his staff, “To create as much great sports journalism as we can requires a 100 percent focus of our resources on sports. And it will be the sole focus.” G/O, which acquired much of the Gawker Media conglomerate, is part of a new system of attempted technocratic control over what is and isn’t under a journalist’s purview.

Staff response was quick and decisive. GMG Union’s statement on the resignations noted on Twitter, “‘Stick to sports’ is and always has been a thinly veiled euphemism for ‘don’t speak truth to power.’”

The issue at heart is a question of what we as journalists are allowed to write about in a media system dominated by media conglomerates for whom traffic trumps content. “Stick to sports” means your voice is only valuable if it raises our market shares.

To confine Deadspin to one thing is to ignore its publication history. First-person essays and political commentaries were routinely published, drawing readers just as much as their sports content. Their operation was establishing a conversational, easy tone with readers, one that let them tweet “Go [expletive] yourself” to President Trump after he reposted their content.

“Deadspin will write only about sports,” but Deadspin isn’t only its domain — it’s also its writers who wrote about subjects that interested them in any capacity and made a career off of that editorial freedom.

While G/O claims that the phrasing of “touch on sports” was broad enough to include a vast array of subject matter, it doesn’t matter. Broad or not, the issue of ownership over voice — especially within the framework of a digital-only medium — is what’s at stake.

The Deadspin story has made such an impact because it reminds us of what we have to lose. It reminds us of similar stories from publications such as Village Voice or LA Weekly, which both saw similar mass firings. When we give technocrats control of our media, independent journalists suffer. Not only do journalists suffer — so does the information and stories that inform us of our world.

As digital media continues to become increasingly popular compared to print, we must change how we structure these industries in order to prevent censorship and inauthenticity. The better stories fit target market advertising, often the worse they service our needs as readers. What sells isn’t always what we need to read, and the more publications that realize that, the better digital media can be in the future.