Colin Kaepernick, Tatted Up Freak

I really dislike columns about other people's columns. If a column is dumb, I know it's dumb, because I can read. And why would you draw attention to a column that sucks, except for some vague notion of victory over the other columnist? (The wimpiest game of tennis ever.) I'd rather celebrate good things, but you never see that response column: So-and-so is dead nuts right about this. All you see are the "takedowns," which are mostly useless. They change no minds about anything. Nobody read Whitley's column and liked it and then read Hall's column and went, Oh, maybe I was wrong there. It's just an easy chance to take the moral highground in a situation when pretty much anywhere else in the world is the moral highground.

I have no problem with Spencer Hall, and I think he's written some really strong stuff. Really strong. But with Wetzel, he wrote a moralizing column about moralizing columns; with Whitley, he's written a lazy column about lazy columns.

There is a place for the response column, of course, for effective criticism when it's both important and justified. Some of those hawkish war columns come to mind. But most of the time, the vast majority of the time, there was a better column waiting out there—something original and reported. At least then you have a chance of writing something transcendent. Have you ever read a response column and been moved to tears by it? It's like a shot that misses the net. No matter how hard a shot it is, you'll still never score.

This is all just my opinion, obviously. Write a column about it if you feel so moved. You'll change the world.

 

That's a pretty high standard, my friend, and not where I think is where I'd set the bar regularly. I understand your point, how easy it is to traffic in tearing things down rather than building something of your own. But frankly, I like FISKing columns for comedy purposes more than righteous ones. I would say that I might have been moved to tears (of laughter) by Michael Shur's column about Superbike, but it's been awhile. Essentially what The Daily Show does on a nightly basis is critique the news. And I do think there is real value in that. Jon Stewart could, instead, rant about how ridiculous and cynical the political process frequently is with earnestness and sincerity, but by doing it with humor, I think he's able to frequently make his point in an entertaining way. The FireJoeMorgan gentlemen wrote a lot of entertaining things this way, and Charlie Pierce writes a lot of entertaining things this way as well. I don't know if those columns changed the world — pretty unlikely — but they did manage to shred a lot of poorly-drawn mainstream arguments and reveal just how poorly-drawn they really were.

 

There's not one atom of creativity in "demolishing" someone else's argument.
However deft, however clever or "funny."
It's often a waste of effort, and the reader's time.

 

Why is there no outcry over over Drew Brees' teardrop tattoo? Because he's white?

 

I think you have to judge on a case-by-case basis - some of the takedowns are silliness. I've been the target of more than one by fanbois, for example, as have most columnists and beat writers.

However, particularly a few years ago, ours was an industry in need of a few good watchdogs. For instance, the much-discussed Mitch Albom column from the other day. That, in my opinion, screamed for exactly what it got. And, although a lot of the chatter was just statheads preaching to the choir, the critiques and kvetching also reached a more general audience via the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. And, yes, may have served the purpose of changing hearts and minds.

So, essentially, I'm taking a really bold stance here: It can be lazy. But it isn't always.

 

And then you become a joke when all you do is write takedowns.
Where the ranting itself rings hollow and artificial after enough of it.
Meet Drew Magary, folks.

 

Of course there are exceptions. (Like I said on Twitter, Charlie Pierce is an exception to every rule.) But unless someone commits a particularly heinous literary crime—again, like a column urging war when peace is the answer—I'm not sure it's ever worth it. When is Jon Stewart at his best? When he's using humor to accomplish something really important, potentially game changing. It's pretty rare that a sports column rises to that level of importance that it requires a counter-balance. Can it be entertaining? Sure. Can it be useful? Hardly ever. The mob took care of Whitley well enough here. Hall, in this instance, reads like that guy who runs in and punches a guy in the back after somebody else has curled him up on the pavement.

 

Being repetitively shrill is a literary crime.
So is being unoriginal.

 

If God had meant man to have tattoos, he would have allowed the Ohio State Buckeyes to get them for free.

 

So do I think that, for example, sabermetrics and advances in the way baseball is thought about is important enough, stand-alone, to merit the attention that mainstream media columns get?

No.

But do I think that it serves a larger purpose - getting people, using something like baseball as the vehicle, to think more rationally and logically generally about their world?

Yes, I do.

 

Bottom line to me is, I just don't know if this was a column that needed to be written.

Now, was it needed to drive traffic to SN.com? Bingo was his name-o.

 

My two cents on this part of the screamfest only, because it's wrong and silly and makes Stephanie seem terribly bitter, still.
From Deadspin:
FanHouse refugee and TexansChick blogger Stephanie Stradley sent us some extra background on him:
Heard he liked writing about Erin Andrews because none of his other "columns" received real pagehits. Whitley's pagehits for non-asslike, non-EA stuff was horrible. As someone who knew emailed me:
"i actually checked one of whitley's columns from last week—it was particularly idiotic. it got 140 pageviews on the first two days (which is AWFUL). i checked two days later and not one person had clicked on it, still stuck at 140 pvs. THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE."
AOL I don't think edits him any more. Think they have some sort of license deal to give the name of "FanHouse" to The Sporting News. Not sure what the point of that was. They killed the website, and let go most of the writers who actually got traffic, though I heard of at least one who was offered to stay but chose not to.


This is me: Of course AOL/Sporting News edits Whitley and all the other writers. The editing process is similar to newspapers and places like ESPN and Yahoo, and much more stringent than web sites such as BR or SB Nation.

If she's referencing Whitley's time at FanHouse, NOBODY liked writing about EA. We were asked to write about her during the whole peep hole nightmare, because anything mentioning her brought traffic, but most of us agreed to reluctantly maybe once or refused outright. Maybe Mariotti didn't mind writing about her, because he liked writing about everything, but that's it.

And how would she know anything about anyone's page views? She's not inside AOL or Sporting News. She's a blogger in Texas (not that there's anything wrong with that.) Page views aren't even part of the conversation at AOL or SN, so this is just ridiculous all around.
I'm sorry she wasn't retained during the merger because she did good work. A lot of really valuable reporters also weren't retained, but I bet they'd at least do a little homework before emailing a web site to trash a former colleague with erroneous information.