The Ringer is Live

Like a lot of the differences between Canada and the US: Yeah, we have them, but not like you have them.

 

I couldn't care less about Greek life, anywhere in the world, honestly.

Just answering a fellow Viking follower's question.

Nothing against them, just not on my radar.

Did you know Nye's closed, typefitter?

It was time, the place had changed over the last decade or so.

 

This is Canada Day, I have to share.

Honest to pete, I have this knife in my office and was using it today as a letter opener. I was there in 67:



Back to The Ringer, I'm off.

 

I'm more or less rooting for The Ringer to work. I was ambivalent about Grantland from the start, but the earliest taste of The Ringer...it may not be my taste, but it's not trying to be a Literary Enterprise, as the original iteration of Grantland - during moments when Bill Simmons must have been pulled in an odd direction by Eggers - was trying to be. I felt - and I concede the site got better - a twinge of "here are writers between their novels getting ESPN paychecks to peer into their navels."

This Ringer, on the other hand, seems like mostly young, eager writers pounding out content and not quite as averse to journalism.

Two things:

1. Again, I think you gotta be smart about how content is played on the site. Joe Buck, the best piece on the site by probably the best writer on the site, shouldn't be down the site as far as it is just because it was written two days ago. And it shouldn't be that far down under stuff that's just filler analysis. On mobile, it's the 15th thing down on the scroll. For the time and quality spent, that's too far down.

2. I'll be curious to see if The Ringer zeroes in on the anger prevalent in culture today. the story of this year - even in pop culture - is kind of how pissed off Americans are, about many things, about anything, and I wonder if Simmons or someone else tries to examine and tackle that. Maybe I'm wrong about where I think America is, or, more to the point, where youth is, but it just doesn't feel like a year, or the next couple of years, in which millennials will retreat into their craft culture and pop-up restaurants and obsessive TV show recaps at the expense of the world at large.

I'll be blunt: Any pop culture site that doesn't find a framework to examine, explain or plumb the depths of the Trump phenomenon, at this moment in time, may be missing the point. Simmons had long steered clear of that stuff, mind you, but...

 

Didn't they have a Jon Favreau (the speechwriter one, not the Gutter one) piece the other day? Hiring an Obama insider doesn't necessarily signify incredible political analysis ahead, but it seems like a pretty clear sign they're at least going to attempt to engage with it.

 

Yes, there's a podcast with him and I'll guess he'd write at times. Ill be curious to see if he can speak into the phenomenon, or connect it to culture.

 

I certainly won't root against The Ringer, but I'll be surprised how often I go there. How often would you have gone to Grantland if it weren't front and center on ESPN.com. The Big Lead and Deadspin at least break news, but unless The Ringer is going to be doing something unique, I don't know that it'll be a daily destination. For now it is bc I want to see what they're writing, the direction, etc. A site needs time to get its legs, so I'll reserve judgment for now. Except for the site name (awful) and the soylent green color scheme (vomit).

 

I think one of the reasons I'm rooting for it is I just have so little appetite for it. I want to be pleasantly surprised.

 

There's some thought it doesn't make sense to just leave a story up on the top for three days, as it's kind of an eternity in online time. I tend to feel a bit more like you do, but I've had more than a few digital folks where I work tell me it's not really as important at I think. There's also the fact more and more traffic is Facebook and occasionally twitter driven, and the homepage has been deemphasized. You'd like a spot to hold something high, but it seems more websites are going toward a more linear layout to better work on phones/tablets. Makes it harder to keep older things around without other fallout.

This is another website tangent, and I'm not sure if its part of deemphasizing the importance/power of an individual writer, but for some reason ESPN has made it a nightmare to find an individual writer's content. It's really irritating.

 

very true. They used to have a commentary section that made it easy to find columnists. Not anymore,.

 

Props for identifying the actor Favreau through his best role, not Swingers or Iron Man.

 

Anyone who claims otherwise can blow me where the Pampers is!