You may have noticed the lack of new posts the last several months. I apologize; clients’ needs have taken precedence over the need to impress my insights upon an ever-shrinking segment of the world, plus there was this little thing called “110-mph straight-line winds” that turned my life literally topsy-turvy.

The clients are as important as ever, and the effects of the straight-line winds are the gift that keeps on giving, but something needs to be said here, so all that will have to wait a bit.

If you’re unfortunate enough to have received an email from my home address, you may have noticed that the tagline at the bottom of my messages reads, “Kit Kiefer invented the snarky retort when editing Baseball Cards magazine in 1987.”

Of course, that statement’s a lie. But let me explain.

I obviously didn’t invent the snarky retort, not in a world that includes Dorothy Parker among its past members. However, we tried to restore the snarky retort to its rightful seat of honor during my residence as the EIC of what was then a major national-newsstand magazine with readership in the hundreds of thousands.

For a bunch of clueless driver’s-ed students handed the keys to a Viper, we did a few things right: We hired even more reckless individuals, put them in a Mercury Capri filled with cigarettes and baseball cards, and sent them on a road trip to Cooperstown. We called dirtbags dirtbags. And we clapped back hard, without regard to the strength, influence, or the advertising budgets of the forces on the other side.

I drove multiple ad managers to the brink with some of the comments I made or let pass, but the results were undeniable: Baseball Cards made money hand-over-infielder’s-gloved-fist.

Still, times happen and things change, and I moved over to the marketing and consulting side of the house, designing products for a new generation of journos to dismantle – which truth be told, they rarely did with the giddy panache with which we attacked pictures on cardboard, kids’ products marketed to adults in ballooning numbers, driven by the unbridled greed of the major sports leagues and their players’ associations.

It was only later that a new generation of sportswriters came along and took to heart the notion of saying what needed to be said in a way that elicited laughs amidst the indignation. Foremost among those is Deadspin.

Even if doesn’t have a shred of Baseball Cards DNA in its makeup, I love Deadspin. It’s what I’d be doing if I were 24 again and still possessed of the notion that those rules don’t apply to me. It’s bawdy and raucous and big-F’n Fun, and it has the balls to hold itself up to the mirror and report on what it sees.

(Well, maybe not anymore.)

Deadspin did one of those mirror-looks earlier this year when it published a scathing takedown of its current management, their old-boy ways and fetid track record.

I can only imagine the chutzpah it took to see this piece through to publication the right and ethical way, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t go well for those responsible, because its chief defender and standard-bearer is now elsewhere.

Beloved editor Megan Greenwell announced her departure for Wired last week, and alongside the heartfelt roasts from her coworkers there was a commentary from Greenwell herself.

If you care about media and you read anything this week – hell, this month, this year – it should be these three pieces.

In considering the original takedown and Greenwell’s fin-de-siècle signoff, it’s important to note that the original owner of Deadspin was Gawker Media, while the current owners were sloughed off of Forbes.

As Greenwell wrote, comparing the two, “The only idealistic belief at Gawker Media was that a journalistic enterprise could make money without scamming people; the guiding principle at Forbes and sites of its ilk was that scams are good as long as they make money.”

The scammers vs. the idealists: That’s how it’s been and always will be in media, only now it extends to all the leather tanneries and wood-window manufacturers and data grinders that think they’re in the content business.

For every content creator who knows innately that quality sells, there are way too many self-styled experts who believe that it’s all about volume and keywords and tricking people to stay on a page a little bit longer and consume a few more empty words in hopes that they might be coaxed down the funnel into a sale.

It’s the Venus Fly-Trap School of Content Marketing, and it’s sickening.

Greenwell put it this way in talking about Deadspin’s new boss, Jim Spanfeller:

“The unstated, fuller version seems to be that he believed he could simply turn up the traffic (and thus turn a profit), as if adjusting a faucet, not by investing in quality journalism but by tricking people into clicking on more pages.”

Greenwell had a few more choice words for the bosses. Whether CMO or publisher or agency head, anyone who has content somewhere under their purview needs to understand this:

“The journalists at Deadspin and its sister sites, like most journalists I know, are eager to do work that makes money; we are even willing to compromise for it, knowing that our jobs and futures rest on it. An ever-growing number of media owners, meanwhile, are so exceedingly unwilling to reckon with the particulars of their own business that they refuse to accept our eagerness to help them make money. They’re speaking a language no one else does, proud of their own inability not just to not fail, but to not understand the terms on which they’re failing. The tragedy of digital media isn’t that it’s run by ruthless, profiteering guys in ill-fitting suits; it’s that the people posing as the experts know less about how to make money than their employees, to whom they won’t listen.”

Unfortunately, that scenario isn’t exclusive to digital media. It’s the lay of the land for content creators everywhere who struggle to get acceptance for the idea that the best way of using content to meet business priorities is by taking an organic, quality-first approach to its creation and dissemination.

I’ll leave you with one last thought from Greenwell that ought to be burned in the cortex of anyone who commits a word to the digital realm or wonders about the future of traditional media.

“The business model – publish stories that people wanted to read, supported by advertising – worked exactly as it was intended to,” she wrote.

Media done right works. For all the hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over the future of media and marketing, it comes down to that. It was that during the heyday of Baseball Cards magazine, and it’s that now.

As for you and me, the content creators of the world, on one hand we’re kinda screwed, and on the other we’re kinda saved. If we create the content that people actually want we might get fired, but what’s getting fired? As Cary Grant said about divorce in the screwball comedy His Girl Friday, “You've got the old-fashioned idea that divorces are something that last forever – till ‘death us do part.’ Why, a divorce doesn't mean anything today. It's only a few words mumbled over you by a judge.”

In the end, the only thing to do is the only thing you can do. Be boldly yourself. Don’t pander. Don’t accept “because” as an answer when “why?” is the question. Press the rules past their boundaries, and keep pressing. Be the new inventor of the snarky retort.

Megan Greenwell would want it to be that way, and so would I.

The Eternal Sunshine Of The Snarky Retort