SB Nation pulls Daniel Holtzclaw longform piece

How exactly did Simmons himself blow it himslef?

What about his site (other than him) did you not like?

 

Oh, the ground's been covered and covered, and you may not agree with me. It doesn't give me pleasure to cover the ground. But so long as we're going to talk iffy investments, if you're going to ask "hey, what's hurt online longform?" my first answer isn't Glenn Stout and SBNation. It's Grantland.

The criticisms of the Holtzclaw piece are rather valid. Very much so - and SBNation, too. It's an easier target, though. A less-cool target, outside of Spencer Hall, who is deemed cool, although he/SBNation/whomever spent however much money and however many hours reporting a well-written but perfectly unnecessary piece about Myanmar's chinlone tradition, a story for which no reader ever clamored.

But the "hey, this has to be done a certain way" argument goes both ways. Grantland did not fail - and a rather high-profile failure it was - after a rather short stint because of a lack of resources. It had those.

 

If you're going strictly on running a site that operates in the black, then yeah, I guess Grantland was a failure. But people will be talking about how much they loved it for a lot longer than the majority of sites that operate in the black and don't have much influence. Grantland was undoubtedly influential, and you seem to think it's only influence was on long form writing, which is odd because most of their content was not long form journalism.

 

Their influence was bupkus, in terms of money (which actually does matter) or in terms of any significant readership.

Zach Lowe was the breakout star. He wasn't the breakout star because he was on Grantland. He was the breakout star because he's awesome, and he would have been the same breakout star on ESPN.com or any other reasonably well-read site.

 

Well when and if SB Nation shuts down, I doubt you'll have 1/1000th of the fawning eulogies we saw with Grantland, so to say they weren't influential at all seems woefully inaccurate.

 

I rarely read longform anymore, and especially on the Internet.
After all, it's the Internet age. My attention span for your incredible story is 3 to 6 minutes.

 

Influential among a small group of navel-gazing journalists isn't the same as being influential.

 

OK, well, then name your top five most influential sports websites of the last five years.

 

ESPN, NFL.com, Yahoo, MLB.com and I guess Fox Sports.

Any of them dwarf Grantland by a factor of at least 100.

 

So it's strictly metrics that determine influence. Gotcha. Except the people who run those sites are influenced by what they read. The same as writers and or directors or other artists are influenced by what they read. You're basically saying that Dean Koontz or Stephanie Meyer are the most influential writers simply because they sell the most books.

 

LOL you keep telling yourself readership doesn't matter. You'll make a great newspaper editor someday.

 

And you keep telling yourself that only numbers matter in regards to influence. You'll be a great bean counter some day.