SB Nation pulls Daniel Holtzclaw longform piece

Whatever your feelings about Glenn Stout, I read that report as there was a lot of blame to spread around—systemic failings—and it all landed on one person.

 

100%

 

Couple of thoughts:

• Eight weeks seems like a short amount of time from pitching a story like that to turning it in. And then publishing six days after that. Why the rush?
• There seemed to be an awful lot of "that's not my job" and "that editor is just asking for changes because she's a climber." Hell, in newspapers where I worked, a copy editor was not afraid to bring up issues to the writer or editors.
• I still feel sorry for Arnold. This is not the kind of story that you turn in and it gets minor copy edits, concerns are pushed aside and it is published.

 

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that Deadspin's two stories about this were dropped at 5:25 pm and 6:05 pm. They have no interest in highlighting the managerial incompetence of Spencer Hall in this matter. How does he skate on this? Sorry, but if you're an editorial director -- albeit of a blog network of 300-plus blogs -- you're never really on vacation. You're checking your email and you're available. Especially when it comes to a topic as incendiary as this. He passed the buck to Floyd, who apparently felt steamrolled by Stout.

The first person to read the story was senior editor Kurt Mensching, who recalled thinking it was “just a really, really bad story.” But, Mensching said, he thought it was “above his pay grade” to raise any issues with it and just made some minor copy edits.

What a clown show of editorial structure. You're a senior editor and you feel that pushing back against Glenn Stout is above your pay grade? Fire 'em all.

 

I know I come from the cushy, privileged world of monthly print magazines, but the SB Nation publishing schedule—the turnaround times, the volume of stories and words, the singular responsibilities—gives me the fucking fear sweats.

 

Report's good PR for Slack, though.

Looked at the site that was linked few pages ago from the investigator who maintains Holtzclaw is innocent. There were some interesting things on there, even the DNA stuff (especially after reading a big Atlantic piece on the many issues with DNA in criminal cases). As I wrote early in the thread, there's nothing wrong with writing about a person convicted of the most heinous of crimes. Many people have been convicted of heinous crimes and were later exonerated. But I am changing viewpoint on what I wrote back then; it really was impossible to write this story and try to humanize Holtzclaw in this format, especially with the way many SB Nation Longform stories had been written. It carried the tone of some of the worst SB Longform stories....but instead of being about a 20-year-old high school football game, it was about a cop raping multiple women.

There very well might be stories to write about Holtzclaw. Stories that could shed doubt on his conviction. But it won't be through psychological profiles or sympathetic viewpoints about a football career that didn't take off. They will be investigative pieces. They'll be based on facts of the case. Or maybe it'll be a 10-part series on Netflix in 15 years. But it won't be something like the SB profile.

 

For all of the journalism basics this outfit lacks, it managed to make the classic mistake of assuming its best writer (Hall) would automatically make the best manager. Some habits never die.

 

Part of the problem with the turnaround times is the money they paid just didn't justify taking much longer with a story—from the writer's perspective I mean. I got into some weird shit on Twitter for saying that money equals quality—that makes me a snob, I guess—but good long stories take time, and if you're not getting paid enough, putting in that time just doesn't make sense. $5,000 might seem like a lot for a single story, for instance—I don't know what Jeff got paid but I'd wager it was something like that—but if you spend eight weeks on it, you're making a little over $600 a week. Take more weeks and your wage drops even lower. So you're asking writers either to do quick, skimming work or take a financial hit to do it properly. Both scenarios suck.

 

I liked the part where they said you formal training isn't a requirement to become a good journalist. How fucking stupid is that? Would that fly in any other profession?

"You don't need formal training to become a good mechanic. Here. Fix my brakes."
"You don't need good medical training to become a doctor. Here, operate on me."
"You don't need good space training to become an astronaut. Here. go to Mars."

What a fucking sham, this whole thing.

 

I'd certainly hope this wasn't the only story he was working on for two months, even if he was getting paid $5,000. At that rate he'd be making $30K a year. Might as well write gamers for the local weekly. Money does equal quality. There shouldn't be a hard deadline for a story like this. It's not like Holtzclaw is going anywhere or some time-sensitive issue is hanging in the balance.

 

Reminds me of my first (and second, actually) newspaper job. Small daily papers in the middle of nowhere.

It's really insane, seeing all that spelled out on paper. Scary.

 

Let's pretend for a moment that Bill Simmons was running SB Nation instead of Spencer Hall. Simmons is away on vacation, reads a draft of a problematic story and instead of speaking up, assumes his deputies will take care of it. He returns from vacation, the story runs, and he's "getting settled in" as controversy erupts.

How does Deadspin's post about this report read? Little different maybe?

Oh look, here is how that would have been received.

http://deadspin.com/how-grantland-screwed-up-the-story-of-essay-anne-vander-1505368906

You won't find an answer in Simmons's characteristically self-obsessed, if searching, apology, in which he spends a bit more space talking about the ambitions he holds for the site, and a bit less about Vanderbilt, than is really necessary. It serves as an extension of the site's premise, which is that the principal appeal of sports is that sports are what sportswriters write about, and that therefore their doings are of more significant appeal to readers than those of their subjects. This fixation leaves a gap in Grantland's apology that resembles the one in the original piece, a hole suggesting a set of questions that aren't quite answered.

The breakdown that took place here could have happened at any shop staffed by reporters and editors who aren't as sufficiently attuned to trans* issues as they could or should be, which is to say nearly any of them, including this one. This particular breakdown, though, was a fractal of the Grantland problem in general, which is to say the Bill Simmons problem. It has to do with a set of ideas: that function is a pleasant but in the end unnecessary corollary of form, that the point is less the product than how it's perceived, and that success on a large enough scale is self-justifying.

****

I like Spencer, maybe against my better judgement. His editor's note at least owned the failings of this piece, and took the blame. But when people talk about Gawker playing favorites, then destroying people they don't like, covering for those they do, isn't this a prime example? They have literally not been critical of Hall at ALL in this mess. If you're going to play ombudsman to the world of sports journalism, bill yourself as "sports news without access, favor or discretion" do you really get to ignore the "favor" part when you want to protect some people?

No one involved at SBN seemed to understand how in-depth narrative feature writing should handled. If you have a controversial story that some people hate, what is the harm in holding it a week (or three weeks) to get it right? This is not a magazine where there will be blank pages if you don't run it, or lost advertising because you have to kill part of the book because you can't fill it with content. I know editors who would have argued so hard against this piece running, they'd have gotten fired before signing off on it. Stout still doesn't seem to understand why it was so terrible. Everyone wants to blame him, and that's fine because it's clear his bad judgement was the main reason this piece was a trainwreck, but none of them should skate blame.

But I just keep circling back to the Bergeron stuff. Here we have a quasi-sympathetic story about a man who preyed on black women, and a black woman read the piece and had issues with it, and she was referred to as "a climber" by her superior for raising these issues. If you're writing a sensitive piece like this, why wouldn't you WANT someone to help make sure you didn't lose sight of the victims here?

To me, all of the following seems true:
1. Stout had good intentions with the SB Nation Longform site
2. Stout is someone who is/was/has always been an advocate for real journalism & real storytelling
3. What Stout was being asked to do, one LF story a week on a shoestring budget, was absurd.
4. Over time, Stout became particularly defensive about the perceived quality of his project
5. Some of the stories were good. Some of the stories were real bad, and would not have run anywhere else. Some of the stories he was slipping in the "notables section" of BASW to validate the site, and the work SBN was doing, were shit. This circle of validation was bizarre. "This stories are good because BASW says they're good, and they're in the back of BASW because I say so." Um... no. And getting your stories aggregated by Longform or Longreads, and pointing to this as evidence they are great, is nearly as flawed. Those sites have become almost self-fulfilling, and this alludes to some of my earlier posts in this thread. They need "longform" to aggregate to keep their reputation as the gatekeepers of quality, and so they just start linking to stuff that calls itself "longform" without reading that much of it. Does anyone really believe the guys running Longform.org are reading 30 longform pieces a day and sorting the wheat from the chaff with a critical eye?
6. SBN liked the prestige of having a "longform" section without understanding it needed way more resources and time.
7. Stout's ego and Twitter bragging, which I assume was done in part to "sell" the pieces, became borderline insufferable. I don't think he realized this at all, but OMG, it was hard to read. No, Glenn, the long essay about Bobby Knight that began with the writer singing songs from Frozen in the car with his daughters was not "better" than Frank Deford's "The Rabbit Hunter." Lowering the bar for what we consider great work is not worth a few extra hate clicks on Twitter. You have been, for two decades, the pseudo-gatekeeper for what we consider "great" work in this profession. I thought you were like a Yoda of Sportswriting. To quote Bob Seger, I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then. I get that maybe reading so many pieces a year, a week, a day, could make you a little punchy, but posting pics of you throwing "rejected stories" into the fire was insulting. Boasting that "pound for pound, I'll take my staff over anyone, because we have our asses in the chair, every day" was just bizarre. I get that you wanted to back your people. And maybe everyone boasts too much about how great their stuff is. (And if you think the anti-establishment crowd doesn't do this, that it's just the longform circlejerk literati, look on Twitter next time the Gawker crew posts an ambitious longform attempt. It's just as big of a circlejerk of blind praise.) Maybe this is a lesson everyone should pump the brakes. This isn't a rap battle where the best boast wins.
8. SB Nation is a great example of how the virtual "modern office" is not sufficient replacement a real one. Slack and conference calls might seem helpful, but stories like this don't run when people get in a room and argue, or when they can swing by a desk and say "Hey, that story is terrible. Can we talk about how to fix it or kill it?" Maybe this is a relic of journalism, and maybe this environment can't exist anymore, but maybe then you have to scale back some of your ambitions to match those realities. The whole "Thanks for being so receptive to changes!" that Bergeron meant as sarcasm and Stout took as genuine could be a scene between Pam and Michael from The Office.
9. Hall is a great writer and smart guy who got a job "managing" others, likely as a way to say "You're our best guy! Stay here and run stuff!" and that's a bad, bad way to pick a manager. I hope he'll grow/learn from this. It makes you realize, some of the best decisions a manager every makes are ones we never hear about, because they avoid disasters like this.
10. No one covered themselves in courage here. Not even this "review" which curiously omits, or quickly glosses over, some of the changes that Stout and Arnold were asked to make to the story. There is a lot of vagueness here that seems meant to place 95 percent of the blame on Stout. If people DID recognize what was wrong, why not fight harder? Yes, maybe Longform was supposed to be his specialty, and it seems pretty clear he condescended to many of them when they suggested he was wrong. But they let him down too. Being like "Oh well, that's Glenn being Glenn" doesn't let you wash your hands of blame. It wasn't Stout's blog. It was a major website, and a story read by lots of people. If Hall was the only one who could have overruled Stout, maybe get Hall on the phone? Or, like, message him on Slack? I have Slack on my phone. I'm betting Hall wasn't vacationing in an Internet free-country.