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Football website editor in virtual ‘lock out’ dispute

The editor of football website whoateallthepies.tv has been “locked out” from accessing its content, the innocent bystander in a simmering dispute involving the site’s former owners.

As sportsjournalists.co.uk reported yesterday, Britain’s biggest blog network and content provider Shiny Media, which founded whoateallthepies and its associated football sites, has gone into administration. While Shiny sold whoateallthepies to another blog content provider, Anorak, earlier this year, the football site is still dependent on its former owners for some elements of its online services.

Ollie Irish, editor of the website who moved with it from Shiny to Anorak, today wrote: “As editor of Who Ate All the Pies, I currently have no access to the site.

“I am locked out effectively because of the dispute between Shiny and the ‘minority shareholder’, which is incredibly frustrating — not to mention costly — as Pies is not involved in said dispute.”

Shiny Media made 17 people, half its staff, redundant in February and sought to sell-off some assets, including its sports sites, as the downturn hit its business. But it continued to commission freelancers widely, and many of these contributors may be left out of pocket by the administration process.

It is understood that a new company, imaginatively called Shiny Digital, and owned by a combination of Shiny Media’s founders and a venture capital company, is poised to take over the company’s assets.

But a disagreement with a minority shareholder has seen one director have his mobile phone and email switched off and blocked, and as Irish, a former senior staffer at Observer Sport Monthly, suggests, this has also extended to limiting access to blog software for whoateallthepies, which remains in limbo.


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