SB Nation pulls Daniel Holtzclaw longform piece

At the risk of pissing off a long-time acquaintance on this board: Please, I'm begging you, enough with the Glenn Stout pity party. He chose to work for a shitty company that didn't/doesn't think one needs journalistic training to be a good journalist. He chose to work for a shitty company that paid low wages inappropriate for the type of work it expected to produce. He chose to work for a shitty company that treated LONGFORM like it was a blog post about the New York Mets. He chose to stay there long enough to build himself a fully insulated fiefdom. He chose to entrust a sensitive story--off a single paragraph pitch, for fuck's sake, pretty funny considering how he demanded layered pitches at the start of the SBNation days--to a guy barely equipped to write a high school gamer. He chose to run the story after editing it. He chose to defend it like the fate of the Republic was at stake.

Enough, enough, enough. Glenn Stout got the blame he deserved. He probably deserved even more. None of this changes because he's your friend and you're one of the select few writers he deemed worthy of his time on his way up the totem pole. If anything you should be furious that he has besmirched the longform name with the SBNation disaster.

 

Of course I post that after DD hits one 650 feet. That's the story of my life.

"Ass in seat" always infuriated me. How about those of us whose asses are in press box seats hundreds of nights a year? Zero regard. But hey, I'll hang out here with my ass in a seat at the American/Canadian border and determine what Good Sports Writing is.

 

Wait. So some of this is on Canada? I KNEW IT!

 

Great post, DD.

 

Here is how I approached mistakes and sccrewups when I managed a department:

I would get with the people who responsible and say, "How did this happen? How can we keep this from happening again?"

Bottom line, it seems in most cases the best thing to do is to learn and go on rather than blame one person or try to deflect the blame from you or your area.

 

I can't express my thoughts any more perfectly than Double Down has. Agree 100% on everything RE: Stout, though there's still a lot that bugs me when it comes to Hall's role.

The report itself read to me like a whole lot of buck-passing and back-patting. We'll do better! OK. How? The editorial staff sure looks as though it's still made up largely of Hall's boys. What are the credentials of a Brian Floyd? It sure reads both from the Deadspin report in February, and even in this internal memo that handled him with kid gloves, like Floyd was completely ineffectual as a Managing Editor.

 

No way was it $5,000. I'd guess less than $1,500, which is what I was offered for what was going to be a major story for them, before it fell apart.

 

Yup, that is the figure I've heard too. Between $1500 and $2000 were the rates. You have to remember that a lot of how SB Nation Longform pitched itself early on was as a platform for writers to get recognized and get chances they wouldn't get elsewhere. So money was being traded for opportunity.

 

Money Traded for Opportunity should be on SB Nation's masthead.

 

I almost never go to SB Nation. Right now one of their lead stories is titled "Ranking the Ole Miss allegations by zestiness."
The intro to the piece says, "Some of what the NCAA alleges against Ole Miss is fairly serious, and not just in the bubble of collegiate athletic justice. On the other hand, some of it is not.
What follows is a ranking of each of the NCAA's 13 charges against Ole Miss -- not by their NCAA-defined infraction level, but by zest."

pretty sure the writer and all the editors there have no idea what the actual definition of zest is.

 

Not pissed off at all. I like Glenn and that probably affects my view of things, just as my hatred of Gawker probably affects my view of that situation. I don't see him as faultless here. It was a bad story and he didn't see how bad it was. But I really don't get how everyone else skates here, and I think that's where your dislike of Glenn is perhaps coloring your view. How Spencer Hall comes back from vacation, presumably hears about a contentious conference call between colleagues about a story running at noon that day, and it isn't the first fucking thing he deals with, I have no idea. (He did manage to tweet a bunch, though.) Now, you could argue that Glenn shouldn't have even had a story in that situation to begin with. He's the ultimate gatekeeper. Fine. I get that. But if we're looking at systems, which this report supposedly is, I also see him as a guy set up to fail—given what really amounted to an impossible task. (Remember, these features originally were supposed to run DAILY, which goes to show how ill-informed these guys were about how this stuff works).

I don't like that any of this happened, but I'm not mad about it. I don't see it as a black stain on longform, the craft or the idea of it. Sure, it gives some ammo to the "schlongform" crowd, but fuck them anyway. I think conversations like this are good, and I think this whole thing casts the outlets that do it properly in a brighter light than they might be otherwise. Because this shit is hard. Is it hard compared to putting out a small paper with a skeleton staff? No. Is a great feature still a little miracle of a machine? Yes. Is it just lucky when that happens? No, it is fucking not.

 

[QUOTE="Mr. Mediocre, post: 4056053, member: 148900"The report itself read to me like a whole lot of buck-passing and back-patting. We'll do better! [/QUOTE]

It reads like a bunch of people are in a clique.