The Sports Media Thread

[The_Admiral]

All your favorite writers will either pop up on other sites or get one of their dads' colleagues to fund a new playplace for them. Nothing will end, everyone who matters will be taken care of. Barry Petchesky graduated from Columbia University; he's not gonna be out on the street.

[Still MIGHTY]

Barstool dancing on the grave of Deadspin.

 

So, forgive me if I don't feel like being on the side of El Presidente.

[The_Admiral]

Perseverating on being diametrically opposed to Dave Portnoy at all times is a big part of why they're in this mess to begin with.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

The writers 1. clapped back against being told to stick to sports and 2. annoying autoplay ads. When told to suck it up, they 1. notified their readers something was up and 2. mass resigned to protest garbage management.

 

But one of them went to a good school so :censored: them.

 

What will be left is santized just sports like ESPN or Yahoo, or the kind of Man Show coverage that exists because those guys don't feel shame and their readership hates women as much as they do.

 

So :censored: us, I guess.

[The_Admiral]

Again: Megan Greenwell walked out one door and right into another. There's no reason to believe anyone else who quit on principle today won't do the same. This is soap opera for posting, right down to the big bad wrestling heel Dave Portnoy. Peter Thiel didn't kill Gawker, they just had to hide it inside Deadspin and Jezebel. Univision going broke owning the remains of Gawker didn't really kill it, and everyone SCDPing out won't kill it either. Maybe the real Gawker lives within us all (if we went to Oberlin). 

[Red Comet]

If there's a market for progressive sports coverage, whatever these people congregate around will show that. If there isn't, there isn't. After all, Gawker is a private company and that means they get to do whatever they want, right?

[The_Admiral]

Technically, there's not really a market for most internet content. Venture capitalists just throw money at websites until the money runs out. It's all a house of lies for people who have earned the comfort. There's definitely a huge readership for the Deadspin crew, that's undeniable; the extent to which it can be monetized is much trickier.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Yeah, they'll all land jobs elsewhere, but that's only part of it. Deadspin was greater than the sum of its parts and won't be easily replicated.

 

CCSLC exists not because people think Chris Creamer or whoever is operating the main site does an exceptionally great job. People remain in this community to interact within this community. Folks have tried splinter sites in the past, but they always came back. I'm not sure where "back" is with Deadspin.

 

There have been a lot of beloved internet sites/communities than have withstood a mass exodus of writers. Of those, I think only Engadget --> The Verge really maintained a consistent level of quality and readership.

 

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Bill Simmons is launching a new Book of Basketball...but as a podcast, obviously.

 

Question is whether I have the patience to listen to him whine through the "player empowerment" era and underrate LeBron (who he would otherwise love were he a Celtic)?

[Digby]

3 hours ago, the admiral said:

All your favorite writers will either pop up on other sites or get one of their dads' colleagues to fund a new playplace for them. Nothing will end, everyone who matters will be taken care of. Barry Petchesky graduated from Columbia University; he's not gonna be out on the street.

 

2 hours ago, the admiral said:

Again: Megan Greenwell walked out one door and right into another. There's no reason to believe anyone else who quit on principle today won't do the same. This is soap opera for posting, right down to the big bad wrestling heel Dave Portnoy. Peter Thiel didn't kill Gawker, they just had to hide it inside Deadspin and Jezebel. Univision going broke owning the remains of Gawker didn't really kill it, and everyone SCDPing out won't kill it either. Maybe the real Gawker lives within us all (if we went to Oberlin). 

 

Pulling some class war take on this doesn’t really make any sense considering the instigator of this whole thing is some private equity empty suit trying to go from the 1% to the 0.8%.

[The_Admiral]

Well, doing that by buying an internet publication with a famously petulant staff and then alienating them is a really stupid way to do that, because without talent, what else do you have of value but the office furniture? Private equity isn't the good guy here, but I'm not sure Deadspin is either, no matter how much they and all their journalist friends insist that they are the last beating heart of journalistic integrity in America (they're not or it never would have come to this).

[rams80]

3 hours ago, the admiral said:

Perseverating on being diametrically opposed to Dave Portnoy at all times is a big part of why they're in this mess to begin with.

 

There's nothing wrong with being diametrically opposed to something that spawns on the locker room floor.

[rams80]

3 minutes ago, the admiral said:

Well, doing that by buying an internet publication with a famously petulant staff and then alienating them is a really stupid way to do that, because without talent, what else do you have of value but the office furniture? Private equity isn't the good guy here, but I'm not sure Deadspin is either, no matter how much they and all their journalist friends insist that they are the last beating heart of journalistic integrity in America (they're not or it never would have come to this).

 

The problem is that modern sports journalism is either so utterly access driven that even Maggie Haberman would pointedly inquire about the beat writers' journalistic integrity or functionally a bunch of teenage males talking in a locker room.  Deadspin didn't really fall into either category, and therefore did kind of fill a valuable niche that will now be unfilled.

[The_Admiral]

 

 

RIP blogging. It ended with Barry Petchesky. He was the last one. There will never be another. All content henceforth will only be Dave Portnoy declaring himself the king of bum fights into an iPhone camera, for we have lost the last blogger.

 

Post your favorite memories of blogging. There's no more blogging.

[Digby]

13 hours ago, DG_Now said:

Yeah, they'll all land jobs elsewhere, but that's only part of it. Deadspin was greater than the sum of its parts and won't be easily replicated.

 

CCSLC exists not because people think Chris Creamer or whoever is operating the main site does an exceptionally great job. People remain in this community to interact within this community. Folks have tried splinter sites in the past, but they always came back. I'm not sure where "back" is with Deadspin.

 

There have been a lot of beloved internet sites/communities than have withstood a mass exodus of writers. Of those, I think only Engadget --> The Verge really maintained a consistent level of quality and readership.

 

 

I think the Grantland-to-Ringer is a good reference point. Worked out nicely for Zach Lowe and the rest of the NBA shot chart crowd. Otherwise I dunno... the Ringer still doesn't have a fraction of the power or interest Grantland ever had, even with its podcast network.

 

[Digby]

Quote

The Wall Street Journal revealed that G/O had made a $1 million deal with Farmers Insurance to deliver nearly 50 million impressions; the only way to get that many impressions, it turned out, was to spam readers and thereby effectively defraud its sponsor. Hilariously, it didn’t even work: Farmers pulled the advertising deal amid the outcry, The Daily Beast’s Max Tani reported on Wednesday.  

 

per:

https://newrepublic.com/article/155565/deadspin

 

Very cool.

 

 

[CS85]

I'd be surprised if there wasn't a snarky version of The Athletic with many of these cast off Deadspin, Sports On Earth, Onion/AV Club/etc writers to do their own thing.  I'd subscribe, as I imagine would others.

[The_Admiral]

14 minutes ago, CS85 said:

I'd be surprised if there wasn't a snarky version of The Athletic with many of these cast off Deadspin, Sports On Earth, Onion/AV Club/etc writers to do their own thing.  I'd subscribe, as I imagine would others.

 

Magary quit this morning, and because he's not only their bell cow but the guy with a family and a massive head wound, I would take this as a sign that the gears are turning to get the Deadspin No Homers Club up and running very soon. A subscription model would certainly make sure they're beholden to no one but their readers, but that might be a risk this early on. 

 

Hard disagree on the notion of Deadspin being more than the sum of its parts. If anything, it was less than the sum of its parts: terrific longform journalism and investigative reporting brought down by ten times more vapid, paid-by-the-pageview blogsnark and petty grudges with other rich people's crappy kids. 

[CS85]

6 minutes ago, the admiral said:

 

Magary quit this morning, and because he's not only their bell cow but the guy with a family and a massive head wound, I would take this as a sign that the gears are turning to get the Deadspin No Homers Club up and running very soon. A subscription model would certainly make sure they're beholden to no one but their readers, but that might be a risk this early on. 

 

Hard disagree on the notion of Deadspin being more than the sum of its parts. If anything, it was less than the sum of its parts: terrific longform journalism and investigative reporting brought down by ten times more vapid, paid-by-the-pageview blogsnark and petty grudges with other rich people's crappy kids. 

 

 

If anything this GMG Union battle and now exodus will serve as something of a strainer, where the crinkled, gurgling Stick to Sports MAGA toadpeople can plant the flag at Deadspin, choking down the thoughtless blogvomit about how Mitch Trubisky sucks and how big Teddy Bridgewater's penis is.

 

Busy day.

[The_Admiral]

I had to dig into the Wayback Machine as I always have to do with him, but my all-time favorite internet writer Freddie deBoer (ret.) really articulated the love-hate relationship with Gawker properties that I came to share. It's almost ten years old now, but Ashley Feinberg mourning the death of blogging lit up the one brain cell that retained this from all those years ago, and I don't think much has changed since: https://web.archive.org/web/20120114151521/http://lhote.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-think-about-gawker.html

 

Quote

Credit where it's due: I think Gawker has been a smarter, funnier and more entertaining website that it once was for over a year now. I've been a rather scalding critic of Gawker, at times, not that I have the kind of audience where that matters much. There was a period for awhile there where the site was really quite a :censored:-show. The bloggers working there had seemed to have taken the criticisms from the notorious n+1 piece and decided, ":censored: it, we'll double down on empty sarcasm and cruelty." But it really has improved, I feel like, in the last year or two.

Why? It's funny, because judging by the comments, many people who comment there seem to prefer Gawker be meaner. To me, though, it's much better when it tones down the cruelty. Not just because of that whole morality deal, but also because usually it's meanest when it feels the most aggrieved, when whatever particular blogger gets it into his or her head that he or she is striking against some wrong doing or, even worse, taking someone down a peg. Please: you are not a modern day Oscar Wilde, your bloggy musings aren't a corrective for whatever minor injustice you are railing against, and nobody asked you to return balance to the Force.

And this is the thing: Gawker is at its worst, its absolute worst, whenever it allows itself to lapse into self-mythologizing. Do you remember when MTV used to run specials about the Video Music Awards every 6 hours or so? They'd create these documentaries, about MTV, made by people from MTV, and show them on MTV, over and over and over. And the content would just be people who work at MTV talking about how cool and hip and crazy MTV is. This kind of self-fellatio would be offensive even if it weren't for the fact that MTV is :censored:ing painfully uncool and filled with employees who are exactly the kind of people who used to sit around in high school pining for the day they could work for MTV. You know, the people who think a cable conglomerate can be cool.

Anyway, that's the sort of attitude you very occasionally get at Gawker, this same sort of self-mythologizing. It's just as bad when Gawker does it. To be fair, this mostly happens when Nick Denton himself rears his head, as in the second half of this post here. But it also comes up a lot, for example, when Gawker bloggers insist on trumpeting every bit of bad news about the newspaper and magazine industry, and declaring again that (wait for it) the Internet is the future! That get's tiresome. I wouldn't be surprised if that stuff, too, came from Denton's edict; it's long since been revealed that Nick Denton is history's greatest monster. Either way, the whole "there's, like, a holy war between old and new media, and we're winning" shtick is lame and tired, and every time they trot out those cliches, my eyes glaze over and I find myself instinctively clicking over to Fleshbot. Yes, magazines and newspapers are in trouble, no, neither you nor I nor anyone knows exactly what's going to happen, no, blogs and "the Internet" are not going to replace what is dying, and no, you aren't some culture warrior valiantly flailing away at the old guard. Look, a pretty accurate gloss on Gawker would be "Brooklynite whites who would rather work for Conde Nast or The New York Times talking about Conde Nast and The New York Times." That's no insult; I live in Rhode Island, I write navel-gazers about post-structuralism that nobody reads and I own a Jeep that is missing its back window. This is the Internet; there's no need to stand on false pretenses.