RIP Sports On Earth

Shutting down immediately.

Farewell to Sports on Earth: Our final column.

 

Will Leitch just wrote the farewell piece for Sports on Earth.

Farewell to Sports on Earth: Our final column.

It was a weird site. (Full disclosure: I penned two of the more than 14,000 stories that appeared there, thanks for not mentioning me, Will!) Gannett displayed its usual lack of patience in trying to build up the site and then MLBAM just sort of ignored it, turning it half into a depository for fluffy MLB stories and half into a place for fly-by coverage of major sporting events. It was there, even if we mostly forgot it was there.

(Clip and save this for when The Athletic runs out of venture capital and closes up shop, because all of these job-saving Internet sportswriting ventures end up the same way.)

 

Shit! @Inky_Wretch beat me by four minutes. Please delete/merge, mods. Stupid Inky!!!!

 

I am ashamed that I didn't know it was still going.

The "online sort-of-newspaper, sort-of-magazine" does seem like a really tough nut to crack. It had a ton of talent, especially in its original incarnation.

 

I must live a sheltered life. I never heard of Sports on Earth until this topic thread.

 

I think I had once heard of this website. I read it for the first time today. Can't say I missed much.

 

Leitch's writing is the little paper cup of coleslaw that comes with every order: unnecessary, flavorless, often goes straight into the trash.
Can't even be rendered into a useful glue.

 

Wasn't SOE that site Joe Posnanski started up? Or is that something else?

 

Goes to its grave as the stupidest named sports site of the 21st century.

 

Don't think he started it. Have some buddies at MLBAM and sports on earth, or whatever it was previously called, was there before '12. Remember my buddy saying the guy who ran it before it changed, was kind of a douche.

edit:

It was part of MLBAM and they ran the MLS web site, before they took "a gaggle of talented writers hailing from all corners of the vast journalism chateau."

Major League Soccer partners with MLB Advanced Media to run League website and 8 official team site

 

I can't remember the last time I saw it linked on social media timelines.
I don't like to see the demise of any media site, but it seemed like it hung its fortunes on the sugar product manufactured by Posnanski, and then when he left it had no direction to take.