SB Nation pulls Daniel Holtzclaw longform piece

Probably true.

 

Reading now, via Deadspin's link, and all I have seen so far is two teammates saying he couldn't possibly have done this because he was such a great guy and never got into trouble. Ridiculous.

 

I really don't think so. I think, in fact, that one of the longform writers you know (cough cough) was one of the first people to blow the story up, and it led to the snowball that brought it down.

 

Good to know.

 

What kind of ungainly horseshit was that story?

It reads like a book nobody wanted to publish that was shortened into Longform.

The last graf reads like the ramblings of a lawyer half in the bag.

 

I read the first two grafs and was wondering what in the absolute fuck was going on.

Writing 12,000 words for the hell of it is irresponsible. Using 10-cent words (metronome?) instead of 2-cent ones is just stupid.

I like watching train wrecks, but I'm not wasting another 40 minutes on this.

 

Wow. That is a lot of time I will never get back. But it's a good lesson in what not to do. How that got published like that is beyond my comprehension. But it hits all the good stuff. Steroids? CTE? Football withdrawal? Poor guy. Yeesh. This pretty much sums it up:

 

Waiting for Caleb Hannan's take.

 

A chill ran up his spine

 

A solid reference, as both operations and editing teams appear to value "outside the box" thinking more than operations and editing.

 

We — and by "we" I mean it both in the larger sense of people who read it, and in a very narrow sense of writers who attempt to do it — need to rethink some things about "longform." Like, right away, or we're going to be swallowed by our own bullshit. And today is a great lesson.

1. The template, or the ambition, or writer, needs to stop being the justification for the length. This story has a million things wrong with it, but the fact that it ran at 12,000 words is insane. Just insane. I don't know that I'd want to read 12,000 words about my own family, much less an athlete.

2. Do not blindly share stories. Even by your friends. I don't know why this started, maybe because people wanted to seem like they were part of a community of people friendly to ambitious work, but that's how the Dr. V thing got spread around. People just blindly RT'd it without giving it much thought. I will admit I was guilty of it. Never again.

3. Stop lowering the bar for "longform." In fact, stop calling things "longform." SB Nation calling themselves "SB Nation Longform" and then publishing a lot of stuff that is really not good is not helpful to young writers. It's not helpful to the "longform" community. It's bad all around. I know people want chances to show they can take big swings and they want to get paid to write features. I get it. I've tried to be supportive of it. There still have to be high standards. Right now, the standards aren't high enough. No more journeys of self discovery without reporting, please. I've resisted saying anything about a bunch of them because it seems petty, and who am I to throw stones, but dear god, some of them needed to be put under a pillow, not tossed onto a "longform" vertical and published.

4. Dear god, have a woman on your editing staff. Hell, put a woman in charge. (We just did, and she's great; also my editors the last four years have both been women.) You can't tell me this piece was read by a woman. I refuse to believe it. Some of the language in here too, about how essentially, who should we believe, the cop whom everyone loved, or the black women with previous brushes with the law, is so offensive, I'm speechless.

5. It stuns me how frequently people fail to understand that a long story (3000-plus words) without some kind of narrative tension is worthless. Deadspin did an excellent job of describing this as basically the local news interviewing the shocked neighbors—“He always seemed like such a nice kid”—over and over again for 12,000 words. If there were some kind of mystery as to how Holtzclaw became a monster, and the writer was able peel back that mystery slowly, maybe this could have been a 5,000-word piece.

6. I didn't know Holtzclaw as a former college football player who had a tryout with the Lions. So that was mildly interesting as a jumping off point. AS A JUMPING OFF POINT. As a friend said to me tonight: How do you not sit down with the prosecutor? Or even attempt to speak to the victims, their families, their attorneys? How do you not go through court testimony and what I assume is reams of evidence introduced at trial? Of the 12,000 words here, maybe 11,000 are spent on Holtzclaw love of football, lifting, and his friends defending his innocence. The whole thing should have been reframed as the total denial people are in about what a monster he is.

7. If you want to write long features, you need to accept that you're going to have to rewrite them. And rewrite them. Especially on sensitive topics. I once went through 6 drafts on a 5,000-word story. By the end, I was nearly broken. It sucked. But in the end, it was better. If you can't pay an editor well enough to devote time to it, you have to scale back your longform ambitions. Maybe that happened here. Maybe this was the third or fourth draft (dear god). I still think it happens a lot, where long stories get published without a magazine-like process (and fact check! and discussions about tone!) just because no one has time, and they think it's ok to cut those corners.

8. I feel a little bad for contributing to the hurricane of outrage on this, but only a little bad. I don't generally like to rip other writers because I know how fricken hard it is to do. But this was too egregious not to say something. It was someone swimming in the deep end without a life jacket. I don't really blame the writer that much. This story would have been difficult for a really experienced feature writer to pull off, and walk the tightrope he was trying to walk. (Even typing that, I think the whole premise is flawed.)

9. Some people hate it when I say this, because they feel like the business has changed and it doesn't work this way anymore (and maybe they're right), but I never wrote a 1000 words until I learned to write 500 words. And when I showed ediors I could write 500 words, I got to write 1000. When I showed I could do that, I could occasionally write 2500. If you can write 3000 word stories, you can occasionally (rarely) write 5000 words. Anything beyond that, you better have a hell of a story, and it sure as hell better have tension throughout the story. Tension — driven by a central question or mystery — that demands I read to the end to find out what happened next.

10. If you want to publish "longform," if you want to be in that business, or that rare air, or whatever you want to call it, you have be willing to kill stories. I've had one killed. It sucks. It's uncomfortable and sad and someone probably doesn't get paid, but that's part of the gatekeeper process. This story, when it came in, should have been deemed unfixable. And as difficult as that might have been to admit, killing this would have been a far better outcome.

 

Looks like he nuked his Twitter now.

As a former co-worker of his, it's surprising he lasted this long before imploding. A fucking clown from beginning to end.

Wouldn't surprise me if he's giddy about this and how it got his name out to the masses.