Berkshire cuts?

This is your best work ever.

 

Somebody as to spea p for te non-sits

Even Fredrick can get tired and make typos.

 

There's something to this, although what can pass for Internet "insight" in some markets is...interesting.

But, yes, they're not exactly Supreme Court judges anymore. And Sullivan - though I liked his work, he's an old-school columnist who's tough on teams - is not the mold of the modern, younger columnist. The modern, younger columnist is more of a feature columnist who wants to tell stories, advocate for people (usually athletes), inveigh against the institutions of sports such as the NFL and the NCAA (but not the NBA), tweet about pop culture and barbecue and be vaguely or overtly liberal in doing so.

 

Unlike Alma, I don’t view younger writers’ views an inherently political thing. The majority of the youngs don’t care about gay marriage, for example, because it doesn’t affect them directly. “Who cares whom my friend sleeps with?”

Now whether that’s because of selfishness or evolution of beliefs — I lean toward the latter, otherwise we wouldn’t have so many so-called social justice warriors — is up for debate.

 

The old-school columnist who is tough on teams gets read. The features/pop culture columnist gets read by what I suspect is the smaller Grantland/Ringer/Twitter echo chamber.

 

You need a columnist who's a mix of both, otherwise folks will tune him/her out.

 

Gay marriage doesn’t come up a lot for a sports columnist. It’s more of a worldview - a reluctance to criticize really anyone, but especially athletes, critiques of institutions, mild skepticism as it relates to intangible qualities like chemistry, toughness or leadership dynamics, confidence in analytics, etc. I’m generalizing. But that’s the bent. And because they tend to be good feature writers, hiring editors like it.

 

This. Absolutely this. My eternal fear as a columnist was that I'd reach the point where I was predictable, that is, people could tell what I'd say on any topic before I said it. That happens occasionally to every writer, of course. As it turned out, my columnizing ended before I felt I'd reached that point.

 

Setting aside the political hobby horse, is there a big benefit to having the top voice of the section be someone who regularly shits on teams readers nominally like?

That seems like an interesting discussion if nothing else.

 

I don't know that a predictable "regularly shits" would be a good read, any more than a predictable "regularly sucks up to" would be. But the latter is what you get in an age where leagues and teams run their own websites, regional sports networks, etc. I believe readers appreciate a fair, independent voice that is not afraid to call a team out when it is warranted. You also have to know your stuff ... the days of a big-city columnist parachuting in on one team one day, another team the next, and declaring himself the expert in everything are long gone. If you don't lean on your beat writer and develop your own sources and relationships, you'll be called out, and rightfully so.

 

Jim Murray was pretty popular for a long, long time. Of course, he was also genuinely hilarious. As someone who found writing humor pieces absolutely terrifying when I tried to do them (some were funny, but I died out there a few times too), I found that awe-inspiring. Still do.

 

It is interesting. I think it's - and I don't love this word - nuanced. Some franchises wear different expectations and fans follow accordingly. And sometimes, a shitshow is a shitshow.

I think the bigger movement is what I like to call the Posnanski movement. Now, Joe's a wonderful feature columnist, and, at times, he'd criticize when he had to, but mostly he was known for winning awards for writing great feature columns. Chess with Priest Holmes, etc. Good stuff. Rick Reilly wrote that stuff, too, until he got kind of strange with his work. And then there was a whole generation of sportswriters for whom Gary Smith is a beacon. (Even though Smith isn't a columnist.) And somewhere in there, the job became a lot more about telling the athlete's story, working with them, humanizing them, as it did being a voice for the reader. Yes, a balance is good. But balance doesn't tend to win awards, and awards are probably too important in the sportswriter culture, and the currency of being admired as a sportswriter is either those awards or the collected cool that comes from being tight with certain athletes.

On the whole, what was true of sports journalists became true of many journalists at large. (Or vice versa, I suppose.)

The hard opinion columnists today tend to be Bill Barnwell types, who operate inside a strict arena of analytics, where the numbers and long-term proof is their source, and this has its own group of acolytes who like the science of it.