Simmons on sports writing

What exactly has Simmons risen to? He's a couch potato blogger. His pop-culture references date his stuff 10 minutes after its written. It's stream of consciousness crap that is so frequently mind-numbingly stupid it's tough to imagine anyone drawing enough from it to start a damn thread.
Simmons and Jim Rome = made for each other. Small wonder ESPN has credibility issues when these guys, Skip Bayless and Stephen A. "I've been fired more times than a Ponderosa steak" Smith are the network's stars.

 

The three people you mentioned:

- All have more exposure for the work than a very high percentage of this place put together
- All make more money for their sports media work than many of the individuals who post at this place
- Enjoy more popularity and readership/viewership than the bulk of sports journalists. Oh, excuse me . . .REMAINING sports journalists. Which brings me to my next point . . .
- Don't have to worry about layoffs, or really ANYTHING, financially speaking.

They are all in an enviable position. I know it's cute and all to say "I would never work for ESPN!!!! They have credibility ISSUES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Do they, now? With WHOM? People in a dying old-media industry? Not enough to keep ESPN from printing money while also driving much of the sports conversation in this country.

We would ALL take the money. We would ALL enjoy being in Simmons' position. He has an impressively high level of readership, brings home a boatload of money, and he does what he wants, when he wants.

Those who say they wouldn't want that . . . go ahead, keep clinging to the old ways. Relevancy passed you by long ago.

Am I a huge fan? I go hot and cold on him. He was terrible on TV this week. His fanboy tendencies would make me want to slap him if the Lakers hadn't beaten the Celtics in game Seven in 2010.

But let's not apply some kind of personal dislike, or disapproval, that makes one actually ask "What has Simmons risen to?!?!?!"

The pinnacle of what he does.

He doesn't have to be one of those people who "open a vein to WRITE!!!!!" he doesn't have to subscribe to YOUR notion of what is interesting or "credible."

Sure, YOU think he sucks. But who the f$#% are you?

 

Probably somebody who knows more about actually covering a game than Simmons does, which really doesn't take much.

I have no problem with Simmons. I just think he's talking out of his ass on this one.

 

This is essentially what I was thinking.

 

ESPN is making money now, because of the rights fees they command from cable and satellite providers.

Once the sports leagues figure out they don't need ESPN, and, for at least the big boys they are getting close to that point, then ESPN will start losing dramatic amounts of money.

For as much as people talk about print's problems, local broadcast is already there and the national networks will sink faster than the Titanic.

Why does a sports fan need Bill Simmons when they can go to a message board and hear the amen chorus from all the other fans? Simmons' readership is huge but I suspect fickle, with the occasional dissent, that readership fades.

If the traditional gatekeeper model is failing, then Simmons fails with it. Just because where he publishes isn't traditional, what he does is.

 

There will always be a market for Simmons's puerile work.
Because there will always be 23-year-old dinks.

 

On the ESPN note, I've gotten out of the sports industry and away from all the sports nuts like myself. With that, whenever ESPN is on when I'm out or with a group of mixed interests people nearly everyone hates on ESPN. People know it is a horrible company full of a bunch of fluff. The ONLY reason they watch is because it is where they can get recaps of the day relatively quickly. Obviously, they watch for the games too.

Eventually the games will disappear to channels owned by the leagues. Right now ESPN is paying like crazy to keep them but in the long run it will be more profitable for the leagues to do it on their own. When that happens ESPN will crash pretty hard. They won't die but people will stop watching all the fluff because they really don't get anything from it.

Now it is debatable that any sport outside of the football is capable of building a network well enough that they can get it to be a standard channel for cable. Then again more and more TV and the internet are mixing together. It seems quite possible that in the future TV will simply be streamed over the internet and TV's will also be home computers. You can already have it this way if you want it with DirecTV actually.

 

You mean . . .

Soon people might be able to watch TV over the Internet?

And access the Web from their televisions?

Wow, I sure can't wait for this brave new world!

 

MLB.tv/Extra Innings
NHL GameCenter
NFL Sunday Ticket
NBA League Pass

Already there ... now, the cable networks are desperately trying to hold onto their dying business model of forcing people to buy channels they don't want (e.g. "basic cable"), which is why Big Ten Network won't stream anything to someone who doesn't already get BTN on cable, why MLB.tv blacks out any game of a team anywhere close to you (sucks to be you if you live in Iowa and have 8 teams blacked out) ... to protect the TV rightsholders who are still trying to give people a reason to have TV.

But "foreign" broadcasts pretty much make those moot, too, because we can stream practically anything.

 

Although I usually will stick up for Simmons, I do find it interesting that despite his protestations he could cover games from his couch, he filled his latest column with details one could only obtain from being at the game to hear what players were saying and see what was happening off the court.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8085525/lebron-makes-leap

 

what strikes me about these e-mails is how narrow simmons is. he tends to turn everything back toward the nba.

 

This is a fascinating topic. I've been lurking for a long time but figured I'd finally make the plunge and start posting.

The one thing about the quoted text here that has sort of bugged me -- working for sports both in the traditional sense and in the "new media" sense for the last few years, is the idea from legacy media folks that readership and sports clubs "need" the newspaper. I think that's where things have gone terribly wrong.

As far as I understand it and have always understood it, the newspaper "needs" the readership and sports clubs.

Somewhere a long the line, this sense of entitlement has developed where -- and perhaps as a result of the shrinking safety net -- sports journalists seem hell bent on insisting to both their readers and the teams they cover that they, the journalists, know what everyone wants.

On a daily basis, though, I encounter circumstances which indicate otherwise.

I'm no genius and don't have a fix, but I can tell you that, by-in-large, the sports journalism community has no idea what everyone wants. And that's something that its readership and sports clubs definitely do not need.