Will Caleb Hannan ever address the Dr. V story?

Caleb Hannan: ‘Screwing up has not made me an expert’ | Poynter.

 

This is actually pretty important and it puts Simmons even more in question. From the piece:


In Bill Simmons’ apology, he stressed that Grantland followed a process both in encouraging Hannan to pursue the story and in deciding utlimately whether to run it.

Simmons said that he was involved in the decision to greenlight Hannan’s reporting and that he saw Dr. V as “the perfect character for a quirky feature about a quirky piece of sports equipment.” He didn’t think of the ethical issues around outing a transgender story subject during the reporting process until after he ran the story and faced criticism.

“Before we officially decided to post Caleb’s piece, we tried to stick as many trained eyeballs on it as possible. Somewhere between 13 and 15 people read the piece in all, including every senior editor but one, our two lead copy desk editors, our publisher and even ESPN.com’s editor-in-chief,” he wrote.

But none of this hand-wringing made it to Hannan.

“I did not get that sense of trepidation or excitement or whatever it was on the other end,” he said.

Grantland editors may have been deeply considering the consequences of reporting and publishing this story, but Hannan wasn’t aware of any of that conversation until the backlash began and he read Simmons’ apology.

“As soon as I read that, I immediately thought, ‘My god, if I had found out that you guys were as scared of this as my wife was, that would have scared me, too, or scared me more than I already was. My editor and I, as far as I can remember, never talked about the potential that she would hurt herself because of the story.”

As far as he knew, he said, only a couple of people, a freelance fact checker and an editor, had read the piece before it was published. Hannan said he wishes he had been involved in some of those conversations, wishes that he had known there were alternatives being considered. Some of these conversations may have been more apparent had he been a staff writer, had he been in the same building as the Grantland higher-ups debating whether and how to run his piece.

“There’s a million and one things that come with actually being in the same office or being on the same Slack channel,” Hannan said. “There’s serendipity in this that I’m sure gets lost when you’re just some guy who has written a few short pieces for a site.”

 

You mean the lines of communication between an editor and a freelancer aren't as good as the communication between in office editors and staffers?

Whoa. That's quite the revelation. I'm glad Poynter was able to bring that to light.

If anyone needs me, I'll be on the fainting couch.

 

Not quite. Again, from Simmons apology:

"We first reached the “Is it worth it?” point with Caleb’s piece in September, after Caleb turned in a rollicking draft that included a number of twists and turns.The story had no ending because Dr. V wouldn’t talk to him anymore. We never seriously considered running his piece, at least in that version’s form."

Our decision: Sorry, Caleb, you need to keep reporting this one. It’s not there.

Simmons paints the picture of a collective concern, understanding and communication.

That's quite a bit different than Hannan's "as far as I can remember, never talked about the potential that she would hurt herself because of the story.”

I readily concede it's a minor thing, and probably a thing only I'm interested in. But my contention about Grantland from the very start is that seemed to be a writer's playground with the cool dad allowing just about any kind of musing, navel-gazing and ultimately narcissistic pieces, and this overall process was loose and careless enough to get one writer way out in deep water and ultimately cause great harm to Dr. V and her family over...what? Nothing much. A lark of a story.

 

All of a sudden it's cool to write about cold chills running up spines, or chills of uncertainty running up backs.

Just came across this in a book I'm reading ...

 

LOL. Young Caleb questions the sincerity of Governor Christie's apology:

 

Tad stalker-ish there, YF.

 

You just realized this?

 

Yeah. Following someone on twitter = stalking.

 

Along these lines, has Sabrina Erdely ever published her long-awaited re-reported UVA story that she was working on? It's been almost a year.

 

Has Leah McGrath Goodman even admitted yet that her "founder of Bitcoin" story for Newsweek was wrong?

 

When will OJ find his wife's killer?