Ongoing Grantland issues

Pierce wrote a pretty decent piece a day or two ago on Draft Kings and FanDuel and the continued grifting of America thru sports gambling.

 

Here we go again (also, Holly Anderson is angry):

 

She expanded on her precisely worded criticism:

 

Adios

 

i.e. we need more money to pay SAS and Skip to yell at each other all morning.

 

I enjoyed reading many parts of Grantland. I doubted, from the very beginnning, that it would last, it did not, and it could not.

Few, perhaps none, of those Grantlanders will extend much blame to Bill Simmons because they've been conditioned by him to think it's ESPN's fault, much like children wouldn't blame parents who bought a house well beyond their means and maxed our credit cards because that child had been conditioned to believe it's the bank's fault.

It's not the bank's fault, if, for no reason, that ESPN is going to honor contracts. That's the right thing to do.

As for the site itself, from the very beginning, Simmons couldn't be modest. He had to have a literary journal and McSweeney's and Pitchfork and the AV Club and Football Outsiders and a way station for novelists between books and the world's leading NBA analysis site and The Atlantic Monthly and Sports Illustrated and about 12 other things, all at once, and he made the site obese.

Really, truly, it was a hipster's buffet. Imagine one of those in food world. Full of swiss chard, monkfish, beets, pomegranites, stone-ground breads. It'd be the greatest restaurant ever to about 5% of a given city. It would also close, and someone would inevitably ask: Who the hell thought it'd be a good idea to truck in a bunch of leeks and kale?

 

Wow. I did not see that coming ... this soon. Obviously I saw it coming eventually.

 

Here is a person who is enormously talented using social media for one of the worst reasons. And she's right about Miller. But, of course, that's how media writers and star lovers are. That's how they've always been.

Simmons was better before social media, too. I suspect we all were.

 

Someone on Twitter claims that Adler tweet was the first notification -- even to staff -- of the news.

 

Adler linked a press release.

I'm sure, if someone wasn't checking their email, it would have been the first notification.

ESPN did the right thing. It's awful, of course, to have to do it, but dragging it out for months on end...why? What for? To what end?

I say this knowing parts of my own personality...writers are some of the most emotional, sentimental, passionate, angry souls on the planet about 98% of the time. So social media will be scorched earth for days and weeks over this.

Young writers saw Grantland as a beacon. They thought it stood for something more than Ma and Pa ESPN letting bad boy Bill have the run of the house. These are people, as I like to say, who haven't read literary journals. Those exist by the benevolence of universities so big and bloated it couldn't care less, but, one day, when the statehouse lawmakers look to gut the tax dollars given to schools, they'll be gone, too, and there will be an emotional bloodletting there, as well.

 

Holly Anderson has been emotionally stunted on Twitter before she ever made it to Grantland.

 

I listened to the Miller/Deitsch podcast a couple of weeks ago. They might as well have had Simmons on as they were basically parroting his viewpoint.

The site didn't continue because ESPN didn't want to deal with Simmons' demands. Whether that was a smart/stupid/financially prudent decision, once that decision was made, the rest of the writers should have either left or got in line. Acting like a bunch of children on Twitter and other social media likely made the decision easier for ESPN.