Clay Travis on Grantland and Internet writing

At my last job, I would say that my work went to a 70-30 online split. I was producing a ton more on my blog than in print just because our space sucked and the immediacy of the blog made it a more useful tool to disseminate information in a timely manner. Basically had something up on the blog every weekday once football practice started, and that obviously switched to a Tuesday-Sunday format once the season started.

 

I do know we went through a time a few years ago where it was emphasized from on high that women buy stuff and ads should be targeted to women. So a slick quarterly women's magazine was produced with lots of ads and photos, and you couldn't get anyone to sell an ad in the college basketball preview section. Because, I guess, women don't watch college basketball.

 

If Simmons cared so much about the people at Grantland, why didn't he re-up with ESPN and give the site some stability?

I heard/read two things which resonated with me. Stefan Fatsis on the excellent Hang Up and Listen podcast said that if you are in a management position with a big company, you need to act like a mature grown up and not pick immature fights. Simmons and I are exactly the same age, and the dumb things that I did when I was in my late 20s/early 30s I simply can't do anymore. Slandering Goodell and daring management to suspend him are the acts of a petulant child. And one article that I read made the point that it wasn't like Grantland was some plucky independent organization. It was a vanity project funded by a patron. It wouldn't have existed if the writers all came together and decided to build some underground website.

Now, he has a broad based appeal and his podcasts built up tremendous goodwill and name recognition at Grantland. I happen to find most of them to be boring -- Greenwald for example is massively annoying to me -- but you can build a pretty good network based upon what ESPN has discarded. I wonder though if there is the appetite for the pop culture content as opposed to the sports.

 

At my old paper, the college beat writers have something in the paper almost every day in the off-season.

In general, beat writers average a couple stories in the paper every day, probably a half-dozen items on the web, from a recap of a press conference (and maybe a full transcript), a couple of newsy items, analysis, blog, maybe a video. Then there is Twitter, et al.

Not sure I agree that beat writers should be writing opinion pieces, but they have a lot more room for opinion than the old days.

In my career, didn't run into many "lazy" sports writers.

 

Why would you expect anybody to take less than they can get elsewhere?

 

I sent the Clay Travis piece to an old friend. Then, to persuade him that he had no wasted his life as a reporter, I sent him this by Brian at MGoBlog. http://mgoblog.com/content/grantland-website-humans

 

Don't agree. ESPN would have let it stay a vanity place. Simmons wouldn't. He tried to equate his site to ESPN The Magazine, which it isn't, not on any level, especially from a journalism perspective. Plus, Simmons acted like a jerk on other ESPN media settings. Grantland is dead because Simmons simply couldn't stand medium significance. He blew it - for himself and all those writers. He blew it. Maybe he can reclaim it wherever he's going, but he blew it at ESPN.

Grantland's site was fine. Fine! But a lot of people, if given the latitude to write like that at their own media sites, could write some of that stuff. They're not given the latitude. They're locked up by editors and publishers, and locked up by a fear that some tinhorn, thin-skinned coach will get all riled up over what they read. Which they might. But who cares.

The lesson to Grantland is: Very little of it is hard to replicate at a local level. It can be done. Sometimes, it is done. But you have to have people willing to turn their staff into something more than drones from the teams. Too many writers still conduct themselves like PR firms, spewing cliches, rattling off meaningless feature stories about some guy's work ethic. Perhaps that was useful when you got great access and could tell some great, un-politically correct stories. You don't get that anymore. It's time to stop.

 

Online guys work harder? That's a really funny statement. Because a lot of these online guys are just average fans like most other people watching on TV and piggybacking off of others' content. Just about every FanSided, SB Nation and Bleacher Report articles cite beat writers as sources for the content they're creating. They don't have to have any reporting skills either, just pull quotes from a press conference you weren't at, or just take them from somebody else and stick them in your story.

There's no questioning team blogs have good editorial content, there's some good stuff out there. The problem, people are mistaking average fans sitting behind their laptops writing stories about a game they watched from the couch as journalists. 85% of those writers make $0.00 a year, and the editors are working for absolute peanuts that's no more than extra pocket cash while the big bosses collect all the advertising revenue the sites rake in.

 

Maybe somewhere in between. If the money was good, maybe ESPN holds on to try to make it work sans Simmons, show he wasn't essential. But cuts are needed, and a not-profitable vanity project with a batch of oft-discontent writers and ties to the black sheep, it's first on the block.

One thing that is interesting with the economics of it (getting back to the top-down vs. bottom down) is when you start something such as Grantland, the expectation is profit. Smaller, more agile workplaces, such as Outkick the Coverage or MGoBlog among others, their main goal is to cover expenses and employ a few people. Breaking even or expanding the product is the only real goal.

 

I am from Denver and read the Post- which I think has a very talented sports staff- most frequently so I took that paper as an example. The Rockies beat is staffed by Nick Groke and Patrick Sanders. I have no idea how hard they work. But the Post's Rox Blog has one post in the last week, about the third baseman winning the Fielding Bible Award. It would seem to me that in the internet era you would want your writers to post something up everyday.

I agree that much of internet journalism is a guy with close to zero knowledge sitting on a couch. But a working sportswriter should be able to spew something out if the guy on the couch can. The beat guy has broader knowledge. It can be a mindless list such as best third baseman to play for the Rockies in their brief history but at least try to entice people to go to the blog daily.

 

When I checked the Outkick site yesterday I saw a banner with their affiliation with Fox Sports and an add for pants. I don't know if would be profitable as a stand alone entity.