The Simmons Site

I like the jelly beans and peanuts analogy. Fine offerings by themselves, but they don't work well together.

 

So a newspaper shouldn't have a sports section on the same day it has an arts section?

 

Oh boy. That site is a mess right now. While you can access the main site and some stories through http://espn.go.com/espn/grantland/ many archives and blogs are still unavailable because grantland.com is an expired domain name. Apparently someone (Simmons is already getting blamed, it seems, but it's probably ESPN's fault) forgot to make sure the domain name was current.

Read more about that here http://www.businessinsider.com/whoops-bill-simmons-lets-his-grantlandcom-domain-expire-2011-6.

There better be people trying to get this fixed fast.

 

Didn't they just acquire this domain? They bought it from someone, right?

So, how could it have expired already?

 

I'm not really sure the analogy works. Simmons has made a whole career out of mixing sports and pop culture, and a lot of Klostermann's novels mix the two as well.

 

Exactly. It's his site. While ESPN is promoting it, it's not branded under he ESPN banner.

They've decided their target market will appreciate articles on sports and pop culture. Nothing wrong with that.

They've probably also decided neither topic has been covered in this manner before.

Now, it's all about execution. If done well, it can be great.

 

To your last point, the pop culture stuff has sucked, thus why it seems out of place.

 

Does anyone else think the Grantland.com address expiration is a ploy by ESPN.com to redirect more readers to their main site?

Yes, Grantland.com was/is under the ESPN.com banner, but perhaps by bringing all readers first through either the main page or an ESPN.com/grantland (or whatever that address is), they can bump page views on the mother site.

Or am I really overthinking this?

 

Yeah, I think so ... I really think it's just a mixup over domain transition.

 

It's up. Have no difficulties with access.

 

Yeah. This isn't uncommon on the Internet.

 

I'll look forward to reading their definitive U.S. Open piece in a few weeks.