‘Root’ writers pressed to write more to ‘offset’ colleague’s death

The staff of The Root spent the beginning of 2025 mourning the death of a colleague, Stephanie Holland, “a gem, a wonderful collaborator and an all-around good person,” as her colleague wrote after the writer died December 31.

A few days later, the deputy editor of The Root invoked Holland’s death in an email imploring the remaining writers to produce more content on behalf of G/O media, the private equity-backed firm that has been selling off the remnants of the Gawker empire for parts.

“We need each of you to write four trending stories daily. This will bring us closer to standards expected of daily writers across the industry, as well as help us offset the tragic loss of Stephanie,” The Root’s deputy editor Dustin Seibert wrote in a memo to staff. “If you are working on a slideshow, you are still only expected to provide two more trending stories that day.”

Seibert’s instruction came in the course of a memo outlining “some new approaches to our workflow in the interest of maintaining both the quality of work that our readers are used to as well as achieving the metrics that our superiors expect from us.”

The mandate and its explanation stunned some staff, one of whom sarcastically remarked to Semafor that it was just more “fun times at G/O,” which has limped along as it attempted to sell off its media properties, reduce costs through staff cuts, and generate web traffic.

A company spokesperson said in an email that the comment is “out of context” and that the memo “included reasonable, industry standard goals that had been already communicated to the staff weeks ago.”