In late September, I put the higher ed administrator hat away for a hot second and geeked out at Blogs With Balls, the seminal national conference on new sports media.
BWB4 appropriately featured panelists from Grantland and an entire panel about Deadspin. I qualified that with “appropriately” because deep down inside, writers at both publications have all have achieved the pinnacle of every insomniac sports blogger – they make a living writing both ridiculous and serious sports nuggets. (Also, they can wear jeans and faux faded vintage sports tees to work.)
In the Deadspin panel, amongst the discussion of Brett Favre and his privates, there was a discussion of Deadspin‘s long form, non-sports specific work. And within that (all too brief) discussion, Deadspin editor AJ Daulerio mentioned that they want to find a place for that “men’s magazine” style of writing. He specifically called out “men’s magazines,” and didn’t just say “long-form.”
During the first week of October, Grantland announced a collaboration with humor publication McSweeney’s to offer a “best of” compilation entitled Grantland Quarterly. The topics covered will span sports, entertainment and social commentary. Readers will be able to subscribe to a year worth of the publication, or order individual copies for $19.95. Each issue will be edited by site founder Bill Simmons and former GQ editor Dan Fierman, and will include a few print-only exclusives. In a quote to the New York Observer, Fierman says,
“If our site has a problem it’s that we move so fast that readers miss stuff,” he said. The print journal serves up the site’s greatest hits in a medium better suited to long-form journalism.”
Here we have two sports heavy sites, founded and edited by sports journalists, who are trying mightily to carve out a niche as the online men’s magazine. And by men’s magazine, they mean they are striving to be the 21st century version of Playboy’s articles, GQ’s interviews and Details discussion of entertainment and social topics. They want to write long-form pieces for the sake of being wordy, which sometimes results in both sites taking topics deserving of brevity and drawing it out like taffy.
But wait – what’s so wrong about just writing about sports? And why is the only “respectable” journalism “long-form”? And why do the powers-that-be at both sites believe that men’s magazines are the only places where respectable sports and cultural journalism occurs?
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Deadspin seems to be grasping at this long-form, men’s mag model after “mistakingly” going in the tabloid direction with its exposes of ESPN’s inner workings and Favre’s exploits (which, mind you, had been long out there, but carefully forgotten – it’s funny how Super Bowl titles erase irresponsible behavior and painkiller addiction.) Deadspin no longer wants to be seen as the sports version of TMZ, but that may just be what they’re good at. Readers turn to them for that. Why abandon sports for exposes of gender bias, interviews with little known comedians and ponderings about middle age?
And Grantland striving for the men’s magazine model isn’t surprising. The site needs a focus, and trying to fit that model could give a sometimes schizophrenic site just that. Currently, Grantland resembles an entire bulk foods aisle in a supermarket. You want essays on movies? Those bins. You want pondering on reality TV? Those six bins in the middle. You want sports? That entire wall over there. Bill Simmons achieved popularity for blending pop culture with sports in the same articles; the next logical step to him was to combine the two on the same website. Many of the writers are promising, but the site serves up too much variety mixed with a ton of inconsistency, and the combination keeps you from making it a regular destination site. The lack of focus will doom Grantland, and I doubt labeling the site a “men’s magazine” or a haven of long-form journalism is enough of one to solve its issues.
Adopting a long-form journalism model is dicey for any website, given that internet usage studies have shown us that anything “below the scroll” is often disregarded. In a world further dominated by internet usage on hand held devices, brevity will be even more useful. Banking on the average reader hanging on for 2,000 plus words is a risk.
In addition, are sites serving a variety of topics useful in this day in age? Isn’t internet usage training our consumption to include various sources for various subjects, and to curate them all on our own (through Google Reader, through Facebook, through Twitter)? Why then is any one site trying to be everything to everybody? Why do we need the magazine model when readers essentially are their own magazine editors?
What happened to writing clearly written and interesting stories on sports? What happened to just wanting to be good at that? And why do the writers and editors of both feel that they need to grant themselves credibility by labeling their sites as wanna-be “men’s magazines?”
“Self-indulgent” is the term that comes up so often when I venture into Grantland. It reads like the writers are getting paid by the word.
I don’t know if I would go with self-indulgent. Having long ago found my niche as a feature writer rather than a beat writer, I can genuinely appreciate TRUE “long-form” journalism – a story that is far too interesting and complex for a summation (and sometimes even far too long for one feature).
When I look at Grantland I sometimes see pieces like that – legitimately interesting features. I think this process was initiated by Simmons himself – though not because he’s great at long-form as much as because he became very adept at weaving sports and pop culture together with little regard for how lengthy his writing became. He foolishly assumes that a)that counts as long-form journalism and b) that there are a lot of writers other than himself who are good at it.
They are trying to blur the line between quality, long-form journalism that typically takes a lot of legwork and a lot of writing skill versus basic stream-of-consciousness writing where the length of the piece is dictated only by how much the writer can think of to say.
Ok. Maybe I agree with self-indulgent then 😛