The IMCT Media Criticism Thread

[Dr. Medulla]

Holy shit — ESPN just killed Grantland.

I figured it was a matter of time. It really was Simmons' baby and stories were trickling out that after he was canned the place was a filled with paranoia and scheming, leading to a talent exodus.

[Inder]

[Dr. Medulla]

This … does not surprise me. Simmons may have a knack for attracting talent and maybe even knows how to nurture it, but he's thin-skinned and given to vindictiveness. I can see him seeing his first priority as hurting ESPN before treating his former staff humanely.

[Low Down Low]

Should have been canned after that disgraceful story about the transgender putter designer, Dr V or whatever her name was. Totally mystified by the aura that surrounds Simmonds. He is just a sportswriter, right?

[Rat Patrol]

Should have been canned after that disgraceful story about the transgender putter designer, Dr V or whatever her name was. Totally mystified by the aura that surrounds Simmonds. He is just a sportswriter, right?

Blogger. Or, rather, the first to do a fan-perspective blog when no one was doing that and have it take off and spawn a genre. Then the first to do a fan-perspective loose-structured podcast when no one had quite found a workable middle ground between structured broadcast-like format and total free-form 'guys on a couch' format. He outlived his shelf life by a half-decade on the former...the latter inherently depends on topic by nature of the format as to whether you're going to get a podcast that clicks vs. one that doesn't, but he still does some interesting stuff there.

I don't disagree that as a first-person voice his shelf life is pretty much expired, because his ego is too big to plausibly write like the fan on the couch when he's a media power broker with access to powerful people in his day job. The stagnation in the quality and perspective of his writing reflects that, as does how poorly he comes off in interviews and on Twitter.


-------------------------

Putting on my J-school hat and delving into the business side of how this works. . .

Simmons has legitimately shocked the world at how skilled an Editor-in-Chief and Producer he is. Grantland was not just this thing where they stuck him on the masthead, threw a one-time was of money to hire a few high-profile Chuck Klostermans and other dinner-party friends of Simmons, then installed an invisible babysitter behind him to run the place in spite of his ego. I would've never expected that place to actually have legs beyond its initial splash, but he really did run the day-to-day there. And when the original A-list writer roster started to fade away (Klosterman hasn't submitted any pieces in a year), his second-wave recruits of mostly young-and-hungry unknowns ended up being the workhorses who produced far and away the most consistently great writing on the site and gave it its legs. It got better the more constrained his budget got, because he just kept churning out this talent factory. And it worked because the talent and the editors loved working there, and got encouraged once they developed a high enough profile to start getting longform freelance gigs for other magazines. I can't overstate how rare that is. It's the only way to make that form of published journalism work these days while print is dead, budgets no longer allow for much in the way of full-time Editorial rosters, and freelance writers are there to be abused. While the site still got tiny share of clicks, they were high-value advertising shares because repeat site visitors were staying and reading for a long time. That's what any attempted mainstream media offering in online longform journalism aims to establish: a small but max-value audience. And 19 out of 20 of those ventures always end up failing because those long-duration repeat page views are so hard to capture, and so hard to retain once captured. Grantland was an exceedingly rare success at that biz model, and on Editorial structure. Vanishingly few outfits are able to establish that deep a talent pipeline that quickly, and then get a transient talent base (because, let's face it, the pay sucks for writers these days) to stay for the sheer enjoyment of how the operation is run. So while Simmons wasn't the first to do longform journalism in this sub-site format, he was one of the first to make it work "in its era" with the challenges that come with monetizing it. Especially with how thin the line is between success and failure with longform these days.

Also deserves kudos for the producer spot on the 30-for-30 documentary series, which is some of the highest-quality documentary content on TV. Granted, that's a big team they have in place behind those and Simmons was more one of the cogs on the team instead of a lead guy...so that series will probably keep going on relatively unaffected. But...another example of taking on a new medium and killing at it.


So his streak of first-to-success with a given medium stays more or less intact. And as an editor to others he succeeds with the sort of ease where as subject of editors he'd become a terror to work with. HBO ends up a great place for him because of the access to both the production values on the TV side for more 30-for-30 type content, and the Internet appendange with which to launch another Grantland-style subsite. And there's not much question that he can start from ground zero and put together an organization ready to go for it. As an executive he's got those bona fides. I would just hope we don't have to hear too much of him as a writer beyond keeping his head out there with the podcasts, because writing (and talking about his writing) is his liability and where he becomes his own worst enemy). I can't think of another lifelong writer who became editor and became the inverse-natural at it. Most can't set aside their writing ego enough to not micromanage once they get up to the EiC level. This guy's arguably at his best in that role...if you just take the column away from him.



As for burning his employers out...well, yeah. It will happen with HBO, too. Then again, that's S.O.P. with "star" editors, and some of them who keep getting recycled over and over again (Tina Brown, for instance) have nothing left for bona fides except their own self-marketing as stars. It's not as if there's anything about Simmons' downsides that's going to scare anyone off given who else keeps getting extra chances in the industry long after their Editorial bona fides have faded out. But if talent recruitment and team-building are the #1 places where he's got the magic touch now, short shelf life can almost be baked in from Day 1. If HBO puts the commitment into building a permanent site, whenever things come to loggerheads they'll have the self-sustaining organization left behind to keep going. The reason Grantland didn't become that place is because ESPN has suddenly become so high-achievement at destroying its own creations. This was just the highest-profile example of how their current management team is laying waste to their properties. They installed a frickin' lawyer to manage Grantland...how is that a move that isn't a self-fulfilling prophecy for a staff exodus. I don't think "make a scene, orchestrate my own exit, then steal all the talent" was Simmons' game plan here. The way their talent recruiting worked, the freelancers he started with as recruits were starting to get 2-year contracts for staff Editorial positions and semi-exclusive rights to what they could write only for ESPN and what of less direct ESPN relevance they were allowed to farm out as freelancers to other outlets. And it was cost-controlled. So if Grantland had a stable management transition he was not supposed to have a corpse to strip-mine for his next venture. And the site should've been well-positioned to keep going at more or less the same level. Since he was the one signing off on those staff contracts when the bosses put up the money, that was his own design of the organization. Grantland got shut down because ESPN top management scuttled the whole thing...probably unintentionally at first, intentionally once it started snowballing on them after the work environment turned to poison. It didn't die because their #1 star left.

As a J-school case study, ESPN having two hands around its neck is the bigger discussion to dissect than Simmons...even when mainstream interest focuses just on Simmons. The Worldwide Leader is hemorhaging money and viewers because their own top-level management is laying waste to the whole bloody empire and chasing all the talent away across the board. Bristol, CT is my hometown and the horror stories about the rock-bottom morale coming through the woodwork from the thousands of employees on the main campus point to the whole shebang being an unstable terrordome of internal fear-mongering. Like you see at any large corporation when the MBA sharks get installed at top level management and start looting the place. Their latest round of layoffs are being investigated for breaking the law about due notice when a layoff round exceeds certain number (100+ people?), because everybody is finding out about the layoffs on Twitter and then being thrown out of the building same-day by HR thugs. It's not just Grantland writers and Simmons who got that treatment. Every secretary and statistician and sound guy who's getting thrown out on the street in divisions company-wide is getting the same treatment.

[Low Down Low]

Thanks RP, an interesting and hugely informative post. I guess what perplexes me about Simmons is that he seems to have forged a reputation or fame/notoriety by purely being a blogger/sportswriter/editor or whatever. I'm kind of old-fashioned when it comes to media, I guess, I like my writers to find good stories to tell, to set the agenda, not actually be the agenda themselves more often than not. That's the point when they start to disappear up their own arseholes (cf Rick Reilly). Don't know about Simmons' podcasts, but found a lot of his writing a bit rambling and lacking focus, which is the problem for me with long-form journalism. Too often they just go on and on because they can and the one thing journalists hate more than low mileage rates are space restrictions. The print editions at least imposed discipline and, I believe, tighter copy.

Anyway Simmons mostly writes about sports that I wouldn't really be interesting in that much, so it's possible I'm doing him a disservice here.

[eumaas]

http://www.mintpressnews.com/60-minutes ... rs/211135/

[Dr. Medulla]

http://www.mintpressnews.com/60-minutes ... rs/211135/

Y'know, there was a time when there was a measure of truth to saying that the media had a liberal bias (like, the 60s and 70s). Now, whenever I hear that charge, it's like a mocking joke.

[eumaas]

The role of the media is to paraphrase press releases, obviously. Not investigative journalism. Let's have a law!
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/opini ... d=fb-share

[Dr. Medulla]

The role of the media is to paraphrase press releases, obviously. Not investigative journalism. Let's have a law!
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/opini ... d=fb-share

Property rights, property rights, property rights!

[eumaas]

[Dr. Medulla]

I think there is a puncher's chance of that kind of split with the Republicans after this year, tho it might be the yo-yo's who fuck off and leave the "impure" party to the establishment reptiles. Trump and Cruz have each been grabbing about 50% of the support. One is unashamedly fascist, the other a dubious mix of social conservative and libertarian, but each fundamentally appeals to the angry marginalized guy who is looking for revenge (see Weimar Germany).

[Flex]

I've actually been wondering about that. It's not like major party realignments are unheard of (there's a great timeline of American political parties out there that illustrates this), or breakaway parties getting formed, and it seems like there's a major corporate/populist split out there right now that's increasingly difficult to do coalition building around.

What worries me in that scenario is that I don't think three major parties would be viable and a left/right populist coalition seems totally impossible (what party could handle Bernie and Trump in the same tent?), so I'm afraid that left-populism (or whatever you want to call it) would become even more marginalized than it is currently. I mean, pickings are slim as-is right now, but it still seems like there's plenty of room to go even more downhill.

Anyways, I hate the two-party system.

[Dr. Medulla]

I've actually been wondering about that. It's not like major party realignments are unheard of (there's a great timeline of American political parties out there that illustrates this), or breakaway parties getting formed, and it seems like there's a major corporate/populist split out there right now that's increasingly difficult to do coalition building around.

What worries me in that scenario is that I don't think three major parties would be viable and a left/right populist coalition seems totally impossible (what party could handle Bernie and Trump in the same tent?), so I'm afraid that left-populism (or whatever you want to call it) would become even more marginalized than it is currently. I mean, pickings are slim as-is right now, but it still seems like there's plenty of room to go even more downhill.

Anyways, I hate the two-party system.

Canadian federal politics of the past sixty years would largely justify your concerns. We have the Conservatives, occupying the right and parts of the middle; the Liberals occupying the middle, chunks of the right and left; and the NDP, who have largely been the social conscience confined to the Opposition. It takes fuck ups from the big two to increase the NDP's vote total. The Liberals end up being the "viable" version, tho so watered down that nobody's getting drunk on that shit.

[Rat Patrol]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hil ... 5c91820a08

No way! Next you'll tell me that there's this special kind of photo "shop" you can send your pictures to that makes people "dissapear" so others instantaneously forget they ever existed.