LeBron James, as Prince, hosts Cavs teammates for Halloween Party (Pics & Video)
November 2, 2015Cleveland Browns Week 8 Winners and Losers
November 2, 2015
(Ed. Note: Apologies for the delay. Real life threw me a hurdle this morning, one which I used to be able to jump over with more ease in my younger years.)
Happy Monday, you guys—especially if you’re a fan of the Kansas City Royals who just so happened to stumble upon a Cleveland-centric website because you’re still awake from last night’s festivities. For the Royals to not just win, but win in the fashion they did, is the ultimate fan high. To win Game 4 on what amounted to just two plays and then come back after looking completely defeated for eight innings of baseball to stun an entire country in the ninth? Playoff baseball at its finest.
I know that there was a lot of rhetoric heading into this season that implied Kansas City’s World Series run in 2014 was some sort of fluke that was bound for regression. After they managed to improve upon last season’s contention—their stars becoming brighter, their front office adding more and more pieces—and actually win the whole damn thing is great to see. If I’m an Indians fan (which I am, by the way), I’m looking at those AL Central standings and reminding myself that my team was 13.5 games worse than the World Series title winner, a team that didn’t simply aim for a potential Wild Card spot. And if I’m an Indians fan, I’m watching this—and dreaming.
I had hoped that my feelings regarding ESPN’s shuttering of Grantland would change—or at least lessen—over the course of a weekend, but it turns out they’ve just been magnified from their original state. My initial thoughts surrounded the loss of what was literally the only homepage I visited on a daily basis. As someone who spends most of his reading time consuming sports and pop culture—today’s music, movies, television shows—the site was a damn gold mine. It was an on-line venture that covered the world of sports with well-reported, carefully analyzed stories mixed with sharply written commentary. Brian Phillips’ story on Japanese sumo wrestler Hakuho was easily one of the most beautifully written and produced pieces the Internet has ever seen (right up there with a story on the Iditarod by the same author). That Charles P. Pierce’s work was oftentimes published in their sports-based blog, and not the feature well, spoke volumes to the quality of the work. Oh, to be able to craft a lede like such:
Once Roger Goodell, his attorneys, his flacks, his band and street choir, and his orchestra finish their intensive study of gaseous anomalies in Foxborough, they might finally tend to other league business. Specifically, they might notice that one of the NFL’s signature franchises, the one that plays its games in the sphere of influence of our nation’s capital, is turning into such a huge, chewy cluster of fuck that you couldn’t un-cluster it with a chainsaw and two cruise missiles.
But then I began to think: This isn’t about me. There will always be quality work out there, it will now just be more inconvenient to find it as it won’t be packaged in one, easy-to-navigate place where literally every link you clicked just oozed with perfection. I began to think about all of the writers and editors. Many of the contributors had other gigs—Pierce, for instance, is one of the nation’s leading political scribes for one of the nation’s most-read magazines. What would this closure mean for all of the hard-working folks who poured their souls into their work, competing with the best the web had to offer on what was a daily basis? Well, thankfully, it appears that all of the folks who called Grantland home were just as humble and affable and gracious as we had all assumed. This was just a sampling of what was shared over the course of the 48 hours following the bombshell from Friday afternoon.
Like many others, Grantland (along with ESPN The Magazine) was a place for which I would fantasize about writing in the event I were to do this whole writer thing fulltime. While I knew deep down that I didn’t possess a modicum of the talent of guys like Phillips and Pierce and the litany of other incredible writers who inhabited the site’s “Contributors” page, it was a dream (that’s what fantasies are, right?) to be good enough to get so much as a story on the Triangle, let alone be in the same company as guys like Jonathan Abrams and Jordan Ritter Conn and their host of quality editors—no different than dreaming of opening for your favorite band. To see similar feelings of those who do have the talent just makes the end of this era that much more of a bitter pill to swallow.
Following ESPN’s announcement, many a folks ran rampant, searching for some inner meaning to what the closure meant. While it is evident that Simmons was a leader of men/women, a visionary who happens to always be ahead of his time (in addition to being a pain in the asses of those above him), it’s also evident that Bill knew exactly what keystones to pull to make the entire thing crumble. As I stated in a While We’re Waiting… earlier this fall, taking four editors from the top of the masthead was a crushing first blow. While many only see the bylines and fail to realize how much work editors put into pieces, Grantland immediately became a table with one-and-a-half legs once Mallory Rubin and Chris Ryan and Sean Fennessey jumped ship.
The difficult part for me isn’t so much the mediums through which I will have to travel in order to read #ActualSportswriting as much as what it means for that hashtag. It’s clear that for a company like ESPN that has been asked to cut costs, the first thing to go is the low-margin business. Unfortunately, the reason said business is low-margin is because the web hasn’t quite figured out a way to sell quality. For a world to exist where BMWs and Mercedes-Benz can flourish alongside the Kias and Hyunais should mean that the written and visual work created and published by a site like Grantland would be able to coexist with the noise and nonsense coming from First Take. The company already monetizes a litany of “quality” with The Mag, but the glossy model has been well established. When it comes to the web, this would inherently mean a shift if the way advertisements are sold, focusing more on time spent and returning customers and their demographics from both an age and education/income standpoint. I’ve always envisioned WFNY as being a Grantland—or an online version of The Mag—with a niche, regional slant. If ESPN can’t afford to support the real version, who the hell is going to support this one?
For anyone who creates content solely on the web, the closing of Grantland is important whether or not you read anything they produced. Nobody wins when such an important piece of the sports- and pop-culture-writing arc is suddenly dismantled. Most (if not all) of the folks who wrote for Grantland will land on their feet—they’re too talented and competitive not to—and will likely be grouped with a slew of reporting focused storytellers already employed at the dot com. For those of you who continue to come back to these very pages on a daily basis, we thank you. The good part about being independent is that we don’t have to worry about some monolithic board of directors pulling our plug. We will continue to write. We will continue to edit. We will continue to publish. We’ll continue to mix longform stories about watching the Browns from Afghanistan with those about how being a Cleveland fan is similar to being relegated to naming your Ikea-purchased wall hanging. The down side is that it will continue to be a labor of love and all we can do is attempt to learn from this experience in hopes that the greater good will in fact prevail.
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This week’s edition of #ActualSportswriting focuses on those who wrote about #ActualSportswriting in the wake of Grantland’s end.1
“Why Grantland mattered to Journalism” by Chris Cilliza (Washington Post): “Consumers of information in this digital age can get the “what” in lots of different places. (There are exceptions, of course. Carol’s unique reporting on the Secret Service is one.) How you distinguish yourself, as an individual journalist or as an organization, is to spend more time and more resources on people who readers trust to tell them why something matters and what it means for the future.”2
“On Grantland” by Sean Fennessey (Split Infinitives): “The people who worked at Grantland were profound talents. Astronomical. Also, kind. The biggest challenge you’ll find in this line of work is not “Ugh, this piece is a mess, let’s start over.” It’s “This first draft seems sort of perfect, is there actually anything wrong with it?” And the people that I worked with who were capable of the Impeccable First Draft were not arrogant about that — they were open-minded, thoughtful, engaged, desperate to improve. That’s a blessed professional environment.”3
“ESPN Kills Grantland, Quadruples Down on Profitable Shouting and Hysteria” by Robert Silverman (The Daily Beast): “That Grantland never turned a profit isn’t in question. If it could have had ESPN paid any attention to it is a question. But what’s genuinely disconcerting is that ESPN decided that Curt Schilling’s angry uncle Facebook rants and Stephen A. Smith repeatedly carrying water for convicted domestic abusers Greg Hardy and Floyd Mayweather are far more deserving of space on their ledger.”4
“Goodnight and Thank You, Grantland” by David Sims (The Atlantic): “It’s difficult to apply traditional narratives about the death of longform media, or the troubles of digital publishing, to Grantland’s saga and the boardroom power plays that brought it in and out of existence. No doubt media reporters like Jim Miller (who’s already delved extensively into ESPN’s management troubles) will continue to explore the complex dramas that led to Grantland’s birth and death. But for now, it’s wisest just to mourn the passing of a site that will long be remembered in the history of web journalism for sheer quality.”5
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Have a good Monday, ya’all. Get out there and enjoy this Indian Summer.
- High fives to Jacob for directing me to most of these. [↩]
- Amen. [↩]
- A great look from inside the ship. Blessed environment indeed. [↩]
- I hate that this has become a this versus that debate as there are plenty of other journalistic venues at ESPN, but in the end, it seems to be all we’re left with. [↩]
- Fare thee well, Grantland. #NeverForget [↩]
17 Comments
On G/L: I love longform articles, period. They had some of the best around and some of the most eloquent writers with apparently the best backing of editors imagineable. It is incredibly sad OTL has been marginalized and G/L has been relinquished.
Personally, I’ve been working on an article behind the scenes all summer. The longform guys at sites such as G/L have been my benchmark and pushed me to dive further in the research and push boundaries about who a random schmuck with no real political bearing on the industry should be able to talk with (and with some gentle, encouraging nudges from Scott too). The piece is almost ready, but the benchmark has been dismantled. Sad days.
As terrible as ESPN can be, I don’t understand why they’re being presented as the bad guys in all this. The company invested a whole lot of money in “real” sports journalism and the project failed miserably. Sorry, but that’s the truth. Lets stop pretending that ESPN Jedi mind tricked people into choosing Stephen A. Smith over Grantland. That’s what people like. It’s what sells and what attracts eyeballs. In short, it’s what makes money.
I’d also argue that long form journalism is quite alive, thriving actually. If anything is going the way of the dodo, it’s well paying jobs doing long form journalism. I know I’m suppose to gnash my teeth over this unconscionable loss. Whenever that panic starts to set in, I just remind myself that old journalism is going extinct because of an environmental shift that has made it so anyone and everyone can be writer and publisher. Talented people who would never have been read twenty years ago can now share their gifts and interests with the world. If this kind of egalitarianism means a few less well-paid positions for the lucky ones, I can live with it.
Dinosaurs die; life goes on.
“As terrible as ESPN can be, I don’t understand why they’re being presented as the bad guys in all this.”
Depending on who you believe, ESPN is being accused of not promoting the site in a way that would allow it to succeed. The number of dumb people who prefer talking heads shouting at them through the television will always outnumber those who care to put the time in to reading longform work. The trick is to monetize both. If everything were always about margins, grocery stores wouldn’t sell milk and eggs.
It’s the Seinfeld issue. Seinfeld was not doing well season 1 and 2. But, NBC saw enough in it to give it time (and passionate fanbase helped). Gave it prime spots and allowed good product to mature.
Congrats to the KC Royals now fans of the Cleveland Indians have something to aspire to and aim for…for whatever that’s worth. More importantly I hope the Cavaliers paid attention to how the Royals bounced back from losing last year in the World Series. Lets go Cavs!
I guess I just have a hard time believing that better marketing would have made a difference. It’s not like Grantland was a secret.
I agree on the second point. I think it actually goes along nicely with what I was saying. Journalism is changing. People are looking for a way to make money off long-form articles. ESPN tried something new. It failed. But at least they tried. They deserve credit for that. I’m definitely not going to vilify them because they didn’t want to lose money in a quest to figure out how to monetize one particular form of journalism.
Fair enough. But for every Seinfeld, I’m sure there have been a score of similar shows that were given an extra season and went on to lose money.
Maybe people just didn’t like Grantland? Maybe it wasn’t about the promotion or marketing? Maybe it was an ill-conceived concept?
I guess my point is that we need to figure out a way to monetize quality when it comes to journalism. I know my car analogy wasn’t exactly apples and apples, but the reason high-end cars still sell when low-end ones are available is because of the quality (both perceived and actual). If anyone has the resources to change the game, it was Disney and ESPN.
ESPN is being vilified due to their bailing on something they said they were firmly behind as little as two months ago while promoting noise. They have the ability to control the message, and their message—at least now—is placating to the least common denominator. For those above the fray to take issue with this shouldn’t be surprising. Same happened when the PD decided it was simply going to produce a front page and comics. Just so happens that the people who care about Grantland have larger platforms and are putting them to use. (Should be said that they’re also people who need writer wages to remain at a decent level.)
By my calculations, the Royals wins means the Indians will lose another World Series in 2025.
You have me until this: “Maybe people just didn’t like Grantland? Maybe it wasn’t about the promotion or marketing? Maybe it was an ill-conceived concept?”
People very much like Grantland, as illustrated above as well as the fact that it instantly became the top trending topic on the second-largest social media platform in the world. It almost universally praised in the journo world for its vision and collective product. The issue is not *enough* people liked Grantland given the current monetization structure.
Hey Paul Dolan will be happy just to make it!
I guess I just don’t know if I believe that ESPN can control the message. Does the supply create the demand or vice versa? Maybe. I don’t know. I just don’t see how Hot Take journalism survives without a substantial demand from consumers for it.
Lets also not ignore the fact that ESPN has kept all the GL writers employed and will supposedly let them continue to write for their other properties. ESPN has and continues to do some good journalism.
Honestly, I never liked Grantland. I read some pieces, but it was too all over the place to be a regular web destination. I think it was an ill-conceived concept that misused some talented people. So I really don’t see it’s demise as a harbinger of anything.
That’s what I meant. Maybe not enough people liked Grantland? Maybe the market for an outlet with only long form journalism just isn’t viable? Maybe there isn’t a way to do it and still pay everyone well?
This reminds me of the conversations I have about Star Trek. Any time I talk to other fans, they complain about how CBS/Paramount are idiots for not doing another series. What I try to explain to them is maybe there just isn’t a market to have one. Or, at least, not enough of a market to have a viable show that looks and feels like Star Trek. Sci-fi TV is expensive and most viewers are interested in smart, socially topical sci-fi. It sucks, but it’s true.
The NY Times has the same problem… How to make money off a print publication, whether it’s an old-style daily one that’s rooted in a physical print (The Times), or a new style multi-times per day one that’s rooted in digital (Grantland)? Either way, it’s incredibly difficult and when 100 year old media companies like the NY Times, and newer yet bigger monoliths like ESPN and Disney can’t figure it out it’s telling.
And that’s what’s frustrating about the First Take vs. Grantland debate, monetarily they’re apples and oranges. Regardless of readership/viewership, TV shows get 7 minutes of ads every half an hour. Those ads pay the bills. It’s much harder to monetize digital and print content (particularly in a world where ad blockers are reaching en vogue status, but that’s another discussion almost entirely)
For sure. Agreed on your thoughts on the Times/Disney. Until the landscape changes, it appears that the only way something like a Grantland thrives long term is if someone takes the Conde Nast approach with the New Yorker and funds it due to what it’s quality and intelligence-based brand brings to their portfolio.
Current monetization structure is key here too. Most companies still pay the amount of times you click without regard to how long you are on it. So, clicking less with more time does not yield the $$$ one would want compared to quick hitting reads.
Always thought of it as squirrel reading. “Oh look, LINK! click. Oh, lookie there, LINK! click”
I do not like it but it is the current structure, which is why we get 50 page slide shows rather than 1 or 2 links with those same lists.
In response: That you are unsure as to whether or not ESPN can control the message is a testament to the fact that they do.
ESPN is masterful at Controlling the Message (CTM). I spent years, off and on in my own writings, explaining how they train viewers and listeners to repeat their message while tricking a public, including journo types and wanna-be journos caught in the spin-force of the WWL sphere of influence into thinking the message they were repeating was emanating from their own minds.
Grantland was little more than an artificial satellite derived from ESPN’s message control nerve center; it just looked different to the reader.
Right now minions at ESPN are tracing every mention of Grantland just like they do mentions of the massive brand that pays them; fealty at its finest.
That ESPN subsumed most of Grantland’s writers is one of their older tricks. If these writers are willing to perceive themselves for what they are, they stand being further commercialized by the WWL. If not… well, go back to ESPN’s 2006-08 self and you will see what happens to writers who believe in themselves as writers and not CTM cogs – recipients of a one-ounce golden Goofy at the end of a certain period of tenure.
Rather than launch into any more of an explanation of ESPN’s CTM process (I see it as proprietary information; people roundly agree with my assessments but as no one to date has furthered my research) I will provide you a potential starting point for real understanding of ESPN’s purpose: the name – Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.