Numlock Sunday: Kelsey McKinney, Defector

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Kelsey McKinney, a sports and culture writer who’s appeared in Numlock before.

Kelsey is one of the founders of a new sports site being launched by a number of Ex-Deadspin writers and editors called Defector Media. I’m a big fan of Kelsey’s work — you may know her from stories like The Only All-Girls Tackle Football League in America and What A Foul Ball Can Do, as well as her newsletter Written Out.

We spoke about how the ex-Deadspin crew hatched a plan to start their own media company, how they managed to develop a business model on the fly in the face of a global economic catastrophe, how 2020 destroyed the concept of “sticking to sports” — the day we talked was the day the NBA players got the league to commit to using their arenas as voting sites …