Lupica: "I don't do that" and other great outtakes from The National story

If you look at the sports websites that have lasted and succeeded were all grown slowly.

 

The National was actually Sunday-Friday at the start. And it had three different editions for each weekday issue. The "cross-country" was the bulldog and sold in outlying cities; lots of features and two-day old news. The 3-star printed in the late evening; the 5-star was the final and printed in the early morning, maybe 1 a.m. I know because I worked at a paper that had a contract to print the National. You'd see Dow Jones trucks coming and going at crazy times.

 

Different medium. Does not necessarily translate to newspapering.

 

What I mean is they were not only asking people to pay for the product but in most markets pay more than they were paying for a complete metro daily newspaper with a large sports section that gave the readers really all the sports content most people could consume in a given day. I don't think you can make an equal comparison, or even nearly equal comparison, to something that not only was free but was delivered via a new technology that had its own appeal to some people regardless of the quality of the content. The National was a newsprint product and had to play by the same rules as any other newspaper. Most daily newsprint startups in the past half-century started small and died before they had a chance, so I don't think that would have been a smart move for a newspaper in 1990.

 

I was kind of hoping for a hed like "The Greatest Stories that Never Sold."

 

I really love the Grantland site.

That said, I give it 18 months...

 

Considering ESPN's deep pockets, it doesn't have to be successful in a money-making sense. As long as the ESPN suits want to keep it going and want to keep their lips around Simmons' schlong, then Grantland will last awhile.

 

This is just the kind of literary writing they should be looking for, all vivid and shit.

 

I think Yahoo! Sports is, in its own way and on a smaller scale, similar to The National Sports Daily. They have truly fantastic talent: Wetzel may be the best sports columnist in America; Passan, Wojanarowski, Rogers and Iole are must-reads for fans of their sports; King, Cole, Cotsonika, Brown and Carpenter are fantastic; and they've built the best blogs in many sports, notably the exceptionally strong Ball Don't Lie and Puck Daddy. This became even more obvious with the creation of The Post Game, their version of The Main Event.

In a way, SI.com, CBS Sports, ESPN.com and (formerly) FanHouse were building toward the same thing. All of those sites pluck people. Only ESPN can offer the ridiculous over-the-top events and stories, but I think Yahoo is more in the spirit of The National.