The Ringer is Live

I would assume the entire profits are made by the podcasts and that the website itself, while often producing very good content, is a credibility earning drag on the bottom line.

 

They are. Eventually they’ll just be cut. A free Web site is not sustainable.

Further, culture writing has fallen off a cliff in recent years. The left is so infatuated with Trump, Trump, Trump - and later pandemic, pandemic, pandemic - that the finer points of some album or a NBA rotation don’t have the same teeth into an audience. Increasingly, too, culture writers have to be tricky not to upset the leftist wing of readership.

first-grade right wing culture nuts are thus grabbing more of a foothold. Ben Shapiro is often wrong, but he’s free to opine as he pleases. People are drawn to that freedom.

 

We have yuge problems going on right now. Maybe Bill will come to understand it's not really a great time for "An Oral History of Mrs. Doubtfire."

Disabuse yourself of the idea Trump is interesting enough on his own to warrant what you call infatuation.

 

So, I found this kind of bizarre: The Ringer did a story on Hank Aaron and included a line about the nickname "Hammer" being a tool and Aaron solely viewed as a workman. It seemed like a very strange reach.

The story was written by someone who just graduated from school and never held a full-time gig before this one. Is it just me or is The Ringer assigning this to a story to someone with that level of experience a little too much?

Hank Aaron Forced America to Change. It Never Changed Enough.

 

I for one cannot believe ageist Bill Simmons hired someone with zero professional experience and lacking the expertise necessary to put a story into its proper historical perspective.

 

Send him to a Coach K press conference.

 

I think they assigned it to (maybe?) one of their few people of color on staff. I mean, as of late, Simmons has been in a passive-aggressive pissing match with his own union. The independent contractors they have for podcasts are somewhat racially diverse, but I doubt the news desk can ask one of them to handle an obit on Aaron. That writer's other pieces are about Lovecraft Country (TV) and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (film), so I'm not sure how much they knew about Aaron going into it, and it reads like they just dumped everything into the piece from half a day's worth of web research.

 

the crazy thing is there’s a half decent story in there. A column on “what does Hank Aaron and his legacy mean to POC who’s only tangentally a baseball fan.” I would read that over a half done obit. Who’s going to the Ringer looking for a traditional obit?