Ongoing Grantland issues

Three more orders are written for the gold medal factory.

 

A couple things:

1. Yes, some of the criticism has to do with Simmons. Of course it does. The site, at frequent turns, stood for a kind of navel-gazing fantasyland journalism I just don't believe in - any more than I believe in a literary journal that publishes narrative "poems" that consist of barely connected words scattered around a page - and I knew the source of that was a guy spitballing on the idea of cool. As individual pieces of writing, it was fine and often funny. I liked Simmons as a writer, even if I identified him as middlebrow, which he is. As the ethos of a giant site of journalism, well, it often produced pieces awful in traffic and mediocre in quality. I judge long pieces much more harshly than short ones. Each 1,000 words is a request of my time and a guarantee that it'll be returned to me. I felt like Grantland's whole operation didn't take that seriously. Further, it seems clear to me that no one could successfully tell Simmons to have a better handle on what the site did well and what it didn't need.

2. I've written that 538 is boring, and I think it is. That said, its aims are rather small, and its concept is in up-to-trend. It's not trying to drag me back into 1988 takeout writing, only with almost reporting and grafs that read like existential nonsense.

3. Grantland was getting better, specifically in the NBA area. If Simmons had said to ESPN one day: You know what? Let's gear this whole thing back. Dump the culture stuff, drop the features on lumberjack festivals and the sumo matches, and just go after 3 or 4 things we do really well...Grantland would still be there, and it'd be something.But that means admitting that you don't need to be NYT's Culture section when you're spending someone else's cash.

4. I find the whole thing sad, in the sense that I hate to see things struggle or fail for unfortunate reasons. 538 may or may not work, but, if it doesn't, it won't be because the whole idea is wrong-headed or bloated...it'll just be because it doesn't work.

 

All I can say is, thank god for longform.org.

 

Per Deadspin, Simmons coordinated the exit of four editors on the same day to hurt the site after he left.

 

ESPN has taken Grantland off of its home page, but you can still search on "Grantland" to find older content. For now at least.

 

There's no place to run. This is all so sad.

 

Grantland is gone from ESPN.com and, for now at least, it has been replaced with this:

 

Everything Alma wrote? Nailed it.

 

I agree with most of this. But many times when someone does something innovative we criticize what doesn't work too much and minimize what does. Grantland had a lot of misses but it was the first place I went every morning because it was the location where I was most likely to see something really, really good.

 

Looks like a clip of the ESPN suits gathering up the future paychecks of discarded Grantland employees.

 

I read in Deadspin that ESPN will honor the contracts of the writers but the editors work at will and will be bounced. I would guess that the writers who have regular beats have contracts but how much of their material was free-lance? For example, my guess is that Pierce and others would be free-lance. the

 

The best appraisal of the site I have seen.
I appreciate the hurt- the death of a dream sucks.
But the navel-gazing in the wake of Grantland's death has matched the content of the site.
You would think these guys and gals wrote the Federalist Papers, the lamentations are so heavy.