Discussion: Bill Simmons

Discussion for article #242366

Raise your hand of you’ve never heard of Grantland. I’ll be the first.

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Simmons has got a point, but I simply don’t care enough about it.

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Great site but I guess this is what happens when you call Roger Goodell a liar (which is true). Can’t bite the hand that feeds you, otherwise known as the corporate motto of ESPN.

It is a little frightening that such a fool as Goodell can wield this much power.

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Second!!. WTF is it?

Sports social media site–or something. I know, the Internet has hardly any of those.

When Simmons was the Sports Guy he was entertaining until for a while until the pop culture stuff got stale. Grantland never made any sense to me. They’d have pseudoacademic rock and roll articles written by people with aggressively pedestrian tastes, for example. Why did that exist, and why was it on a sports website?

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hey, I have pedestrian tastes! and I liked the site. just another day in corporate America, though.

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They had great writers, Charles Pierce among them. Really sorry to hear of this.

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Well, Pierce is a great writer (maybe the best in America–thankfully he still has the Esquire gig). The others, not so much. Barnwell is very astute, but I wouldn’t say the stable was. Klosterman is the epitome of the pedestrian pedant. Once you justify buying multiple copies of Kiss releases, there is nowhere left to go.

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Don’t even know what Grantland was, much less why I should care.

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Like there’s a dearth of political sites with comment sections full of complaining commenters?

Ever dawn on any one that some journalists might be interested in the fate of other journalists with a well-known entity like Grantland? (Yes, I know you’ve never heard of it until now). Is it somehow ruining one’s day because it appears here on a Friday?

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It was an interesting experiment, just not sure that the kind of writing in which they specialized matched up well with the ESPN audience.

What is with all the “what is this” and “Who cares” comments?

This is a classic progressive story about something Disney owns being kicked to the curb because it’s not generating billions. “Who cares about what it is?” More like “Does anyone care about all the families that are being affected by accountants?”

This isn’t the Yahoo News comment board people. I’ve worked at Disney, I’ve seen how they can treat people like cannon fodder. Have a little bit of respect.

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Like there’s a dearth of political sites with comment sections full of complaining commenters complaining about complaining commentators. :wink:

Well-said. Most of the writers @grantland are better than what we often see here at TPM. Wesley Morris is now @ the NYT. Rembert Browne decamped to New York Magazine. Barnwell, Zach Lowe, Kirk Goldsberry.

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Let’s see here. Television based companies love sports programming because it brings in huge revenue due to the fact it’s live and viewers can’t really bypass commercials. Disney/ABC owns ESPN, which is the dominant entity today in sports programming. In turn, the NFL is probably the most significant source of revenue for ESPN, which gives Roger Goodell and NFL owners significant leverage over not only ESPN, but also CBS, FOX, NBC, all of whom show NFL games. This can actually become a freedom of speech issue when one entity has so much power in the media.

Agreed. Grantland operated at a very high level. Not to say everyone was equally proficient but they employed a lot of serious talent.

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But not nearly as frightening as the power that a fool like President Cruz can wield.

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How do you not know? It’s like this website where there’s like some stuff and its this sport thing where you can go and read some sports or like this thing and ESPN and stuff. And it’s on the internet I think.

Pretty important stuff, actually. Sports internet stuff and all. It’s blowing up over on TPM.

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