SB Nation pulls Daniel Holtzclaw longform piece

I actually did read the lengthy story, because I didn't want to comment on it, or the decision to pull it off the web site, without doing so.

"It starts off with expressions of full sympathy for Holtzclaw, hinting that perhaps there are two sides to this story. It tells only one."

This, more than anything, is what really derails the story and makes it so it can only be characterized as a major "Fail."

Had Jeff Arnold make any attempt whatsoever to include viewpoints and quotes of any of the victims, including Ligons but not just her, or had even put in anything from any of the jurors who must have had considerations, information and viewpoints that differed from the slew of the former football player/cop's supporters, it would have strengthened the story dramatically and put him and his project on much firmer, safer ground from a journalistic standpoint.

That said, I would not have pulled it from the site. Not by a longshot. Edit: (I say this presuming that when Double Down suggested it might have been better that the story was killed, he meant that it should have been killed before it was posted to the site. I would've agreed with that).

As an little aside, I found it ironic that SB Nation pulled a story revolving around cases of rape and sexual assaults, and then put among its reasons that "it gets real fucking messy with race."

Geez.

 

Catching up with this, scrolled through the archived piece when I got home after work ... Holy hell, that was awful. Above and beyond the error of publishing it in the first place, I'm not sure it was even proofread (based on the sheer number of typos I saw), much less edited (as BDC also noted).

 

Besides the horrible subject matter, this was such a poorly-written piece because it was a written longform cliche. Start with an overly descriptive lede and nut, write as many words as possible regardless if they make sense or not, then finish STRONG. Dude was probably already writing "2016 Best Of American Sportswriting Selection" on his resume once it published.
I hate guys who write for awards. I competed against some who wrote the cliched underdog story and wrote it in that same style. Always blamed the "judges" for them not winning. Suddenly I'm out of the biz and they start getting awards. And yes, I just made this about me being awesome. Sorry.

 

Awards are a poor metric of quality. On both sides of the ledger.

DD, your feedback was brilliant. In addition to a woman, was it read by a black editor? I don't know, you'd think a story delving into race like this might benefit from that perspective.

 

I bought my wife a metronome, and it cost a lot more than 10 cents.

 

Here is the women he abused in their own words.

Quite the contrast to PR piece that was written.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/daniel-holtzclaw-women-in-their-ow#.gng4GE5qG

 

I'd be interested to hear from Glenn Stout, who I know reads this board and posts here occasionally. I deeply respect the work he's done as an editor and I'd like to hear a detailed explanation for the thought process that got this pitch approved and ultimately published.

 

What good's a metronome without a bell to ring?

#gimmedatding

 

However poor it is, I've seen few other metrics. People who claim to loathe the culture it creates still win them, which is to say they didn't object to their work being entered to win them.

And, again, it's true: Long stuff wins awards. And long stuff is invariably written by people who have the time to do long stuff, and usually those people do long stuff for a living, so it's a goal of many a journalist to reach a point in their career where longform is an option, for it is often an entry point to adulation, freedom and better salaries.

And, in an Internet age, it was inevitable that some platform - or many - were just going to start publishing shitty longform and getting away with it because it's just naturally assumed that, if it's long, it must be good, and a mark of quality. It's a newspaper ideal (look at the space we apportioned for this story, it must be good, because this space is precious) carried over to the Internet, where space is limitless.

The Holtzclaw piece would only appear on the Internet. Only there. Never anywhere else, ever. At a newspaper, it'd be 700 words, three sources, top of sports page, a footnote in history, that's it. A magazine wouldn't even bother.

When DD talks about writing 500 words first, he's right, but those 500 words were, of course, all the space a given publication allowed for the story. You had 500 words. You had to learn how to tell story artfully and quickly in 500 words. You were forced to learn economy and brevity.

There is no such 500-word allowance on the Internet I read a story a few days ago - not offensive in content -- that was 3,000 words and could have been, I don't know, 1,200? It sucked. It was like a bad chapter of a book. And whereas an editor would have been able to say, in the past "you got 1,000 words, tops" the editor won't even bother saying it unless she or he is sincerely interested in brevity and economy for the sake of it. So DD's right, but I don't know who's going to force young writers to go short when they write for the Internet. The longer they write, the longer the potential for the "time on page" stats to go up.

The limitless space of the Internet allows for all kinds of mistakes that the finite space of magazines and newspapers never made possible.

 

Honestly? It became a brand when Longform.org and Longreads became a thing. That's when it was essentially "branded." Before, places just published features, and many of them were long. (Many of them were too long.) Then there was an effort to curate them, to find a place for them to be found, then there was an effort to get in on that prestige, then writers and editors started chasing that prestige, then the standards fell because not everyone should be (or is capable of) doing long features, and that's how a story gets pitched about a serial rapist by someone who covered his college football career; and that's how it gets greenlit by someone who needs "longform" to fill a vertical that promises "longform"; and that's how a really bad story, tone deaf and not intellectually considered, gets framed with some narrative tropes and slapped with the tag "longform" and published.

It's great that SB Nation pays money for independent writers to write long features. But you know what? I bet they can't afford travel expenses on top of what they're paying for a story, which is how a writer from Michigan pitches and writes a piece about a cop from Oklahoma. I can't imagine Arnold, even if he had the skills to dig into Holtzclaw's court file, would have been able to go to Oklahoma and talk to the prosecutor or the women Holtzclaw raped. So that's how we end up with a story that's almost entirely interviews of people he knew at Eastern Michigan, which is really isn't even half the story. It's like 10 percent of the story. The reason why newspapers traditionally didn't (for decades) do a lot of big narrative features like magazines isn't just space or the talent of the reporter. It's expense. You can't tell me this story can be done well — done right — without touching down on Oklahoma soil. Essentially SB Nation is trying to write stories like a magazine, but on a shoestring budget. That's why you see so many personal narratives published in their longform template. Some of it is ego, but some of it is necessity. They can't afford to put someone up in Florida for two weeks to follow a trial, or chase down a reluctant subject. And if they assign a story and pay for it, they feel like they have to get something for their money. That's a newspaper mentality, and a bad recipe for feature writing.

I'm sure some of this feels like piling on, like wanting to keep "longform" (/wanking motion) exclusive. I feel bad for the people involved, who I'm sure came at this with good intentions, and are good people. But think about it like this: Let's say "longform" is essentially the Ruth Chris Steakhouse of Journalism. (We can quibble as to whether or not that is true, or whether it's actually a backhanded diss, and only a clown would ever chose a chain restaurant for a steak, but just bear with me. It's a metaphor for something that is considered classy.) It's expensive to set up a Ruth's Chris, right? You have to invest some time and money into it, and you can't really call it a Ruth's Chris if you're actually serving steaks you could get at TGI Fridays. But a dude comes along, and he's pretty well respected and liked, and he's like "Hey, I really want to run a Ruth's Chris, but I need to do it with a $20,000 budget instead of $150,000. I still get to call it Ruth's Chris, right? It's just as good. Don't you dare tell me it's not."

Well, it's not.

That doesn't mean your steaks don't have value. (Hey, sometimes I love going to ̶B̶l̶e̶a̶c̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶R̶e̶p̶o̶r̶t̶ Taco Bell, so TGI Fridays seems amazing!) But if you boast about how great they are, when you brag about how you'd take your waiters and chefs over anyone in the business, the blowback is going to be swift when you serve a steak on a fancy plate with mad cow inside and mold on the potatoes.

 

I can get with this.

I submit it would be worse to have $150,000 budget and blow it on chefs who didn't really like to cook steak and occasionally tried their damnedest not to cook steak, only to have the owner declare that Ruth's Chris corporate needed to give even more money to not produce steak because a segment of the eating public got a kick out of a Ruth's Chris cooking most things but steak.

In other words, Grantland.

Grantland dealt a greater blow to Longform than SBNation has. Who are we kidding? Simmons had all the money any longform organization could ever want, he had the cachet, he had the writers and he had the editors. He blew it.