Joe Posnanski gets his own "longform" website

It's pretty obvious he wants to create something like Simmons's Grantland or Nate Silver's 538.com. I don't even think it's necessarily some ego trip or a copycat thing - a lot of people don't like working for other people. Hell, I'm one of 'em.

 

He had that at Sports On Earth.

It's tough to imagine his brand returning to where it was pre-Penn State scandal. He was the favorite columnist of much of The Sports Twitter-verse before that.

 

Agreed on all counts.

An interesting case study could be done comparing he and Simmons, and why one reaps millions while the other can't seem to find success trying to take the next step to being his own brand. He's had a bad streak. The Big Red Machine book didn't seem to be particularly well-received, either.

 

Posnanski has mastered his craft, and his flame burns clear and bright.

Saturating the market with more Longform will lead to an increase in opportunities to publish, but maybe not in overall quality. There will be a lot of good and also lesser pieces finding a home now since they must fill the sites.

With any luck, this one won't descend into SB Nation's all-too-common crutch of the stories being largely about the writer's own experiences reporting the story.

 

Simmons sells his own personality, and his podcasts with his friends and his first-person POV in his books are a completely different approach from Posnanski's. It seemed odd for him to leave SI, and he's seemed largely adrift since then. It's been a while since I've read his stuff, but I still think he's a terrific writer.

 

That book was awful. I went into it thinking it was going to include story of how the team was built in the late 60s/early 70s and how it fell apart after free agency. Instead, he chose to focus only on the 1975 season, which has been recounted in 100 other places, and many times better (including in Tom Adelman's The Long Ball).

 

I think we're dramatically overstating Posnanski's market reach (popularity) even at its peak. As a rough barometer, consider that Posnanski has ~100,000 Twitter followers and Simmons has ~2.7 million. Posnanski has 1/27th the followers of Simmons. Comparing them makes no sense, because Simmons is in a different stratosphere. Posnanski is an old-school sports writer who happens to be held in high esteem by other sports writers, and that seems to be enough to trick old school editors (MLBAM editors are all former newspaper guys) into thinking that he has a following they can monetize. But the mass appeal just isn't there. I'm not sure any of my sports fan friends (late 20's, early 30's) would know his name other than to say, "Yeah, I think I read something by him once."

Part of Posnanski's lack of appeal is that he never spent enough time in a national, multi-platform role to diversify his reach (and wheelhouse). Sorry, I don't care who wrote it, I'm not going to spend any length of time on a piece on Ned fucking Yost.

 

Are readers really clamoring for more longform? Do they really want any longform?

 

Definitely not correct. It seems like he's a decision maker with this site, an EIC of some kind. He had no such control over anything with SOE. He may have been the big show pony, but he sure as heck wasn't running things.

 

Agreed. And he's written about Nedtober more than once already.

 

Yeah, I enjoy most of what I read on Grantland, but almost always first spot what I read there on Twitter. I don't generally check the site to see what's there.