Grantland so far

Not that a Grantland backlash is unexpected, but I think some people are acting like they hurt themselves clicking on articles they didn't really enjoy.

 

The only reason why I watched Sherlock on PBS last night was because of the recommendation from Grantland.

And. It. Was. Awesome.

 

I'd print that, frame it, and hang it on the wall in my house if I didn't prefer my SJ membership to remain secret and anonymous. Well said, sir.

 

I suppose the "definitive" statement on the viability of Grantland is whether it makes money and is truly popular. But that's really hard to assess; it's subsidized by ESPN, and it's taken ESPN's most-read writer, too. If ESPN wants it to be a success, it will be whether it is or not. It isn't like the public is going to know.

I *get* what you're saying, of course -- if you don't like it, don't read it -- and I can assure you: I don't read it that much.

For one thing, I'd have to read it all fucking day.

But what I see are serious problems with the conceit of the site, covered up by the fact that ESPN owns it. The ideas behind it - just throw big-name writers and novelists at stuff, make few if any solid editorial choices, lard the site with content, redesign it on the fly so it becomes far less clean and is now busy with pictures and links, fail to have any consistency of writing and voices...there appears to be no plan.

Katie Baker, a good enough writer, is a fine example. ESPN has no stake in hockey. None. Has a bias against it, in fact. Baker's writing appears consistently, she does a good job...and the Facebook recommends (some in the low teens) suggest no one cares. Why have a dedicated hockey writer on a site where the parent network couldn't care less? Because Bill Simmons like hockey.

And that's just dumb. It is.

 

Is it because Simmons like hockey, or because he likes letting writers do what they like? She likes hockey, so she can write really long multi-subject columns on it, and I never finish any of them.

 

So they should only write about a subject if its popular? I thought the whole point of the site was to move away from stupid click-driven sites that just aggregate work elsewhere and troll for clicks.

If the writing is good there's value, WTF do I care if a story has more Facebook likes than another one?

 

She is terrible, if they are going to write about hockey get someone who knows what they are talking about.

 

Some of your criticism of Grantland certainly has merit, Alma, but this is silly. Why should the New York Times write about literature or Broadway? Why should The New Yorker publish poetry? Or, in an analogy that's perhaps more apt, why should Pitchfork write about it when Wilco or Ryan Adams or Uncle Tupelo releases a record? (The entire genre of alt country being hockey, in this analogy.) Why does the AV Club review episodes of Veronica Mars four years after it went off the air, especially when the show was never that popular in the first place? Why not simply have someone tasked with writing about Two and a Half Men each week, followed by the annotated Big Bang Theory wrap-up?

Because that editors of those publications have decided to make decisions they feel have some sort of larger cultural value that resonates beyond popularity. That's what blogs are supposed to do -- cater to a specific audience, not a broad audience. I mean, this is a site that devoted about 4,000 words to the oral history of Friday Night Lights, a show that was nearly canceled three different times and drew approximately 1/10th of the viewing audience as a regular episode of American Idol. And it was fabulous, and not something I could find anywhere else.

Frankly, I think it's a good thing that Grantland is allowed to do its own thing without daily interference from the larger ESPN brand. The company is letting Simmons experiment, because the alternative was probably to lose him. There seems to a common theme threaded through a lot of the Grantland criticisms here, and you can essentially boil it down to "It's the not the site I want it to be, or expected it to be. It's falling short of my expectations, or what I would do if I had that much money and hiring freedom at my disposal."

I think criticism, when constructive, is good thing. And I think a lot of the criticism has been constructive. I think Versatile point is a certainly a fair one. He understands the approach, just wishes the execution was sharper. While I'm certainly a fan of giving writers freedom, and I would argue that too much editing goes against the ethos of blogging, I think it's a fair point. There is definitely stuff that could use a tighter edit. I doubt Simmons or even Dan Fierman (who runs the thing) would disagree with that entirely. They'd probably love to take a little more time with some stuff. But they also produce a lot of stuff that's edited perfectly, like Jonathan Abrams features (which never have first person in them). I think editing is certainly a relationship built on trust, and I know a little bit about dealing with newspaper editors I don't trust, so I can maybe see where Simmons might be wary of having someone put their hands on his copy, or the copy of writers he wanted to hire. That is the blessing and the curse of a lot of internet writing. There are a lot of people -- Simmons among them -- influenced by David Foster Wallace. And there are certainly people who would make the case that DFW's writing could have used a harder edit, but he was such a genius, it was better to let him go and see the gems his beautiful mind unearthed. No one on Grantland is within eight touchdowns of Wallace as a writer, but his mindset is still the inspiration. If you want to snicker at the irony of a website backed by corporate dollars declaring that the freedom to fail outside the editing grasp of its Corporate Big Brother is essential to its ethos, go ahead. But I sort of love that someone paid Charlie Pierce to go all scorched earth on Penn State, and no one suggested he tone it down or dial it back under the guise of "fairness" or "prudence."

I guess I just think no one here should expect Bill Simmons to cater his website to their own personal tastes. We have a lot of people here, and elsewhere, who seem to be disappointed this isn't trying to be the New Yorker of sports writing. Or that it's failing in its mission (which I can't recall anyone ever declaring) to save longform. Simmons is doing something he thinks will connect with readers, something different that pretty much all modern sports writing (at least sports writing that has corporate backing) and it does seem to be resonating with a certain audience. If the argument is "Well, it's OK, but I see places where it could be so much better" then I think that's an interesting debate. But if the argument is: "This annoys me that it's not what I want it to be, or what I think it should be..." then I guess my answer would be that it's a shame you didn't build the following that Simmons did over the last 10 years, because that's what gave him enough corporate capital to make this thing happen.

There is a part of me that feels about Simmons the way people feel about Zuckerberg and Facebook -- just to a much smaller degree. Were other people doing similar stuff at the same time that Simmons was? Could someone else have invented Grantland and done it better? Maybe. But they didn't. To paraphrase that line in The Social Network, if those people were the inventors of Grantland, or if they were convinced the world wanted or needed a different Grantland, then they would have invented Grantland.

 

The big problem with Grantland is that it's wasting tons of its very limited Internet space on articles I don't happen to find interesting.

 

Let me unpack it further: I think people have a false sense about the virtues of the site. Without ESPN backing/subsidization and Simmons just writing what he always writes and putting it on this site, it's crashed and burned already. The site, right now, resembles a sports-lit journals edited by graduate assistants, featuring undergrads. That's a worthy goal if you're doing lit journals. But they've fallen into the ocean, too. The writing/subject matter got so esoteric and subsidized by the universities that it stopped publishing well-crafted, thought-provoking work and started publishing -- with a few annual exceptions -- mildly emotive, idiosyncratic musings that had no market.

 

I enjoy Grantland and even bought one of their quarterlies ... but I can do without long articles on John Cena and Mad Men rankings.

 

There are things right and wrong about Grantland, but one of the reasons I went there in the first place, and one of the things I still most admire about it: They don't care about hits, they don't measure success by hits, and the writers are never told their hits. Yes, I see Alma's point about going so esoteric that you lose any sense of real value, but for me, just the idea that there is a place for words on the Internet that doesn't use math or logarithms or whatever soulless factory farming a place like Gawker uses in their veal fattening pens is a fucking stone-cold modern miracle.

To be honest, I don't care about the rest of it. Could the execution be better? Of course. That's true of most things that aren't masterpieces. But for me, in a perhaps strange way, it's enough that a place like Grantland even exists at all.