Fox Sports cuts web writing staff

Grantland closes its doors.
MTV News swoops in, saves them, there is room for real writing on the Internet!
MTV gives up on writing, goes to video, there is no room for real writing on the Internet!

Some of us are old enough to recognize this from 2000 and the dot com bust. Rinse, wash, repeat.

 

I went to MTV News once or twice after all those Grantland folks landed there, to see what they were doing. They were doing nothing I gave a shit about. I thought they were gonna be a challenger to Rolling Stone and the like. They weren't.

 

You mean a bunch of Bill Simmons proteges wrote boring shit nobody but them cared about? No way!

 

Way

 

It's funny how history repeats itself.

 

Since 2015, according to network insiders, overall traffic for MTV News’ digital content has declined. According to Omniture, average number of unique views for MTV News editorial content was down 64% for the period of October 2016 to June 2017 versus the period of October 2014 to June 2017 — fiscal 2015, prior to Fierman’s hire, versus the current fiscal year. By the same measure, time spent was down 59%. Traffic for editorial video streams was down 97%.

 

Imagine that. Videos on MTV. Just not the type of videos we wanted to see.

 

This was excellent.

 

Hey, I'm old enough to recall when it was all videos, all the time. lol

 

Video killed the writing star?

 

Has there been an oral history of Grantland yet?

 

If MTV News didn't do it, who would?