ESPN mag hires Chris Jones

JackReacher · Nov 2, 2011

Mizzougrad96 said:

It's still not enough to get me to subscribe.
Click to expand...

Can you read Mag stuff online for free? Or are all the stories under the Insider thing?

Mizzougrad96 · Jan 1, 2015

JackReacher said:

Mizzougrad96 said:

It's still not enough to get me to subscribe.
Click to expand...

Can you read Mag stuff online for free? Or are all the stories under the Insider thing?
Click to expand...

Pretty sure you have to be Insider.

Azrael · Nov 2, 2011

Not all stories are behind the Insider paywall.

Ace · Nov 2, 2011

Congratulations, Jonesy.

Can you do something about the design of the mag?

drakescoffeecake · Nov 2, 2011

This really struck me for whatever reason. I don't mean to compare him to greedy Wall Street banker types, because Chris Jones seems to be a good person, and deserving of everything he gets. He's awesome. That said, this hit me with the OWS parallel: The math is the same. Chris Jones is the 1 percent. The rest of us, we are the 99 percent.

People everywhere are getting laid off. He (and very deservedly, don't get me wrong) gets an ESPN mag column on top of his Esquire gig.

He's the 1 percent.

I wonder, in journalism, what percent in talent, ability, whatever, you need to be to "make it," these days. Me, I figure I'm in the top 10 percent. Maybe even the top 8 percent. (Indulge me my delusions, I'm anonymous.) Hey, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, you're a stud at that level. You could have a great, steady, comfortable gig. Now ...?

I figure you need to be in the top 3-5 percent to truly "make it" in this business these days. To either have a full-time gig at one of those major sites and/or not be constantly looking over your shoulder for that next round of layoffs.

Everyone else is either working for free or near free or, as I said, is living with the doom of layoffs just around the next bend.

There's the top 2-3 percent (Forde to Yahoo!, Feldman leaves ESPN and lands another great gig! Whitlock napalms yet another bridge!).

And then there's the rest of us. Again, not comparing those guys to greedy Wall Street types. But in this business, at this point in time ...

I'm close to that level. I think I'm close.

But in the end, I am the 99 percent.

(Bracing for the post that says it has always been this way, in every industry, and you just have to want it bad enough.)

Sorry to veer off on a gloomy tangent. But the ratio, the gap between the very top, and not just the bottom, but, well ... EVERYONE else ... was smacking me in the face.

Congrats to Chris (not "The") Jones.

Small Town Guy · Nov 2, 2011

But Drake, there's also more opportunities than ever today for that "99 percent" to have their work seen. Thirty years ago, no one was going to see your work, even if you were one of the best, unless you did actually know someone or worked your way up.

Today, everyone can see your work and sometimes that's the right person and suddenly you're in that 1 percent - or 5 percent or whatever. Yes, you still need a bit of luck for the right people to see your work and they have to have an opening at their place, but great writers don't have to labor in anonymity these days, sentenced to be stuck at a weekly paper for the next 15 years.

I'm just thinking of guys like Simmons, Henry Abbott, Bethlehem Shoals, Drew Magary and countless more who have been discovered, who probably wouldn't have been decades ago.

I understand the occasional frustration but I don't think it should break off into despair. And, just because, here's one of my all-time favorite posts here, which addresses a bit of what you talk about, in a roundabout way:

'll ditto what IE has said this morning. The old institutions are crumbling as the ground falls away beneath us. But destruction means creation, and as many businesses and futures as the internet revolution might foreclose, it will create an equal - or greater - number of opportunities for those strong and determined enough to survive the transition. It's worth remembering that while the act of storytelling has been a constant in our species, writing for a living has always been a tough racket.

That said, this is indeed a challenging age, and there's a palpable sadness in a lot of the posts here. These I take to be the regrets of younger writers who feel they've missed something.

So here's a quick story about dreams and disappointments and the inexorable grinding motherfucker of time and change.

It took me too many years to get to Paris. I was 50 before I walked through it. But that city and everything it stood for has been vivid in my heart and in my mind from the time I was a little kid. As it is for many of us, Paris was almost entirely a creation of my own imagination, a fantasy capital for the writers I most admired and the poets and artists of every generation.

A few nights before my wife and I went there at last, we had dinner with some very old friends. One of whom is a writer now in his late 60s.

Coming off his Stegner fellowship at Stanford forty-five years ago this friend and mentor, now a great gray-bearded American novelist, had moved to Paris. He and his wife, young and penniless, had lived in a single coldwater room above the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore on the Rue de la Bucherie while he wrestled his first novel. George Whitman, the owner, had invited them to stay there free as a gesture of literary generosity and good heartedness. Thus my friends slept and worked in a simple whitewashed room bounded by dark medieval beams on the third floor. Out their window was a view of Notre Dame and the Seine beyond the treetops. They scraped by on a few francs a week, enough to buy wine and bread and foul Turkish cigarettes. All of which seemed to me impossibly romantic and beautiful.

At dinner that night, my friend asked us please to revisit that place when we got to Paris, to see how it had changed. We did so. It had changed not at all. But as I stood in that tiny room, I was overwhelmed by a wave of heartbreaking regret. I looked out the same window my friend had looked out of nearly half a century before and was reminded that I would never be a young novelist working and starving in a soft-focus, technicolor Paris. I had missed it. Overtaken by such powerful disappointment, I could have cried.

When we came home, I told my friend as much.

To my surprise, he told me he'd spent his year there feeling much the same way. That whenever he turned a corner, or took a sidewalk table at the Deux Magots, he was overcome by sick regret at having missed the Paris of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Stein. The Paris of nearly a half century before, of 1920, of the Lost Generation. Of his imagination. He had missed it.

"You can never have the Paris you imagined for yourself," he said to me. "You can only mourn it. You have to learn to love the Paris under your feet."

Seems to me this is true of our careers as well, that we can never have things as we imagine them to have been for those who came before us. We can only ever have our own work in our own moment, however flawed and hard and colorless that present moment seems to be.

To regret too much an age long gone, to miss simpler times that never were, to pine for the days of Rice or Heinz or Liebling, of Sherrod and Laguerre, of the Saturday Evening Post or the New York Herald-Tribune, is to disregard the Paris beneath our feet.
Click to expand...

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/posts/2128131/

Mizzougrad96 · Nov 2, 2011

I don't remember the exact stat, and it is a few years old, but 95 percent of people in journalism will never make $50K a year.

I didn't believe it when I heard it, but if you think about it, it's probably accurate. While almost every employee at a big paper might make that much, think of all of the small papers where nobody makes that much.

Chris Jones is an elite, elite talent. I don't think it's accurate to call him a 1 percenter, because he's much better than that.

There are 1 percenters who have lost their jobs in these purges over the last few years. The difference is, they're usually the ones to wind up a few weeks later at ESPN, CBS Sports, SI.com or some other website.

Back page columnist for The Mag? It shows that ESPN probably considers him among the top 20 sports journalists in the business, maybe even top 10.

dooley_womack1 · Nov 2, 2011

Is Boom in a coma or a snowdrift or something?

playthrough · Nov 2, 2011

Ace said:

Congratulations, Jonesy.

Can you do something about the design of the mag?
Click to expand...

Huge plus to not have to plow through all the eyesore stuff to get to him. Flip issue over, open back flap, read one page, toss in recycling.

BYH · Nov 2, 2011

dooley_womack1 said:

Is Boom in a coma or a snowdrift or something?
Click to expand...

Poindexter has his contact info. I'm sure he'll locate him.

Double J · Nov 3, 2011

Terrific news, Chris - congrats!!

93Devil · Nov 3, 2011

Small Town Guy said:

But Drake, there's also more opportunities than ever today for that "99 percent" to have their work seen. Thirty years ago, no one was going to see your work, even if you were one of the best, unless you did actually know someone or worked your way up.

Today, everyone can see your work and sometimes that's the right person and suddenly you're in that 1 percent - or 5 percent or whatever. Yes, you still need a bit of luck for the right people to see your work and they have to have an opening at their place, but great writers don't have to labor in anonymity these days, sentenced to be stuck at a weekly paper for the next 15 years.

I'm just thinking of guys like Simmons, Henry Abbott, Bethlehem Shoals, Drew Magary and countless more who have been discovered, who probably wouldn't have been decades ago.

I understand the occasional frustration but I don't think it should break off into despair. And, just because, here's one of my all-time favorite posts here, which addresses a bit of what you talk about, in a roundabout way:

Posted by jgmacg

'll ditto what IE has said this morning. The old institutions are crumbling as the ground falls away beneath us. But destruction means creation, and as many businesses and futures as the internet revolution might foreclose, it will create an equal - or greater - number of opportunities for those strong and determined enough to survive the transition. It's worth remembering that while the act of storytelling has been a constant in our species, writing for a living has always been a tough racket.

That said, this is indeed a challenging age, and there's a palpable sadness in a lot of the posts here. These I take to be the regrets of younger writers who feel they've missed something.

So here's a quick story about dreams and disappointments and the inexorable grinding motherfucker of time and change.

It took me too many years to get to Paris. I was 50 before I walked through it. But that city and everything it stood for has been vivid in my heart and in my mind from the time I was a little kid. As it is for many of us, Paris was almost entirely a creation of my own imagination, a fantasy capital for the writers I most admired and the poets and artists of every generation.

A few nights before my wife and I went there at last, we had dinner with some very old friends. One of whom is a writer now in his late 60s.

Coming off his Stegner fellowship at Stanford forty-five years ago this friend and mentor, now a great gray-bearded American novelist, had moved to Paris. He and his wife, young and penniless, had lived in a single coldwater room above the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore on the Rue de la Bucherie while he wrestled his first novel. George Whitman, the owner, had invited them to stay there free as a gesture of literary generosity and good heartedness. Thus my friends slept and worked in a simple whitewashed room bounded by dark medieval beams on the third floor. Out their window was a view of Notre Dame and the Seine beyond the treetops. They scraped by on a few francs a week, enough to buy wine and bread and foul Turkish cigarettes. All of which seemed to me impossibly romantic and beautiful.

At dinner that night, my friend asked us please to revisit that place when we got to Paris, to see how it had changed. We did so. It had changed not at all. But as I stood in that tiny room, I was overwhelmed by a wave of heartbreaking regret. I looked out the same window my friend had looked out of nearly half a century before and was reminded that I would never be a young novelist working and starving in a soft-focus, technicolor Paris. I had missed it. Overtaken by such powerful disappointment, I could have cried.

When we came home, I told my friend as much.

To my surprise, he told me he'd spent his year there feeling much the same way. That whenever he turned a corner, or took a sidewalk table at the Deux Magots, he was overcome by sick regret at having missed the Paris of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Stein. The Paris of nearly a half century before, of 1920, of the Lost Generation. Of his imagination. He had missed it.

"You can never have the Paris you imagined for yourself," he said to me. "You can only mourn it. You have to learn to love the Paris under your feet."

Seems to me this is true of our careers as well, that we can never have things as we imagine them to have been for those who came before us. We can only ever have our own work in our own moment, however flawed and hard and colorless that present moment seems to be.

To regret too much an age long gone, to miss simpler times that never were, to pine for the days of Rice or Heinz or Liebling, of Sherrod and Laguerre, of the Saturday Evening Post or the New York Herald-Tribune, is to disregard the Paris beneath our feet.
Click to expand...

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/posts/2128131/
Click to expand...

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ESPN mag hires Chris Jones

JackReacher Well-Known Member

Mizzougrad96 Active Member

Azrael Well-Known Member

Ace Well-Known Member

drakescoffeecake Member

Small Town Guy Well-Known Member

Mizzougrad96 Active Member

dooley_womack1 Well-Known Member

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ESPN mag hires Chris Jones

JackReacher Well-Known Member

Mizzougrad96 Active Member

Azrael Well-Known Member

Ace Well-Known Member

drakescoffeecake Member

Small Town Guy Well-Known Member

Mizzougrad96 Active Member

dooley_womack1 Well-Known Member

playthrough Moderator Staff Member

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