23 Comments

This was such a great discussion. The part about Gawker’s tone and orientation (civility is bad; bullying is okay because we’re the good guys) gave me flashbacks to Jezebel 10+ years ago. In fact, “tone policing” was a common topic on Jezebel for years.

Someone should write a piece about how Jezebel pioneered a lot of what we now see on “feminist” Twitter. They were sassy and nasty and outright cruel to their various targets, and 100% convinced they were the good guys. Like, “Hey, this guy said obesity is bad -- he’s clearly a worthless piece of shit who should die in a fire.”

I’ve also been pondering the argument that for many people in media, the social incentives are bigger than the financial ones. I think there’s something to this. After all, if you’re writing for online outlets you’ve already made a decision that money is not your top priority (since the pay is terrible). It’s not a stretch to imagine the same people prioritizing social status over money.

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Sep 10, 2021Liked by Ethan Strauss

Woo hoo! Freddie's a Bulls fan!

You guys mentioned Substack and Patreon and how so many people are signing up for them. But I'll add something else: people are doing it because they really hate Woke Media Inc. and the cancel culture it fuels, and they crave something else. Those people (and I include myself in their numbers) don't want to go over to the Fox News/Breitbart crowd because those guys are gross. So they opt for something in between, something that truly speaks to their frustration.

I've never voted Republican and likely never will. I'm as saddened by the abortion law in Texas as anyone left of center can be (especially the part that encourages ordinary people to be little narcs on each other). And diehard anti-vaxxers frustrate me as well. But you wanna know what else? I really, really hate Woke Twitter. Like REALLY hate them.

I'm a diehard Chicago Bears fan. If Woke Media Bluecheck Twitter had a football team, and they played the Green Bay Packers, I would root for the Packers to annihilate them. I would want Aaron Rodgers to throw 10 TD passes on them. That's how much I hate them. They're bullies. I want them to lose at everything.

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Sep 10, 2021Liked by Ethan Strauss

Magary's profile of Al Michaels was excellent. Probably the best thing he's ever written. I'd urge anyone to seek it out and read it.

A handful of years back Drew had a brain hemorrhage. He wrote extensively about his recovery and the toll it had taken on his young family. How it taught him to enjoy the small things. He was a different writer at the point, more vulnerable, more willing to question himself. But at some point he reverted back to his old self and became angry again. Making dumb jokes about obese Bills fans and racist Jazz fans. I don't know if he's actually this angry (I suspect he's not) or that's the only way he knows how to write. At any rate, it's a waste of talent.

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Sep 11, 2021Liked by Ethan Strauss

Ethan. Happy for your success. Listened to the pod on my run this morning (before reading the article). Speaking as a member of the "I know of Ethan because I'm a Warrior Fan" crowd I'd offer a suggestion. I'm a 50 year old man and I've had no memorable interaction with Gawker. I very much enjoyed your discussion with Freddie but I spent the first half wondering why Gawker is significant. I would just ask that you keep in mind that while I suspect most of us subscribers are supportive of your more diverse content, I think many of us might need a bit more of a prologue to be brought up to speed. Continued success.

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He didn't stick to sports.

Unlike Simmons, Magary isn't a sports guy, he's a media critic - he doesn't write sports columns, he writes culture columns that are about sports.

Sports is a great topic - there's a reason every city has a sports talk radio station. Sport journalism is brutally cutthroat, and you're an analyst or commentator, not a play-by-play person or reporter. You start your career standing out with tone and meta-stories about how terrible and boring the rest of the media is, like any other enfant terrible- at a certain point, you're prestigious and popular, and you get to do what you want and then you coast on that as your image until you're played out and irrelevant.

Think about how Simmons' career has evolved, he starts as populist "Boston Sports Guy", attacking rich journalists for mailing it in, being a shameless homer about sports and writing skeevy "this is my readers" stuff in mailbag columns. Once popular, he creates Grantland, a "prestige" glossy mag where his column lives to draw readers into a collection of high minded, high budget writing to tickle his ego and let those in Bristol feel like they work for Conde Nast. IT turns out it's too expensive, it's not popular and it dies. After that plays out, he has his sellout phase at the Ringer - a focus on analytically driven (both in topic selection and content) stories and inexpensive, high revenue podcasts (with a side of labor strife). I see the Ringer as a mainstream/center-left "I don't need to buy my friends" to the frat boy Barstool.

Magary (and Deadspin more broadly) starts the same but once popular transforms into writing about what they want, which is culture. They don't need to "stick to sports", they can write about whatever they want. Unfortunately, they run out of interesting things to say and ways to say it (I think you focused a lot on this in the podcast), and ignoring the advice of the people in charge who understand that there's a perfectly good topic you can write plenty of things about - end up writing the same screeds for a decade, because it's what's fun. What is Defector but a crystallized image of what it's creators imagine Deadspin was?

Fundamentally, Simmons's content is interested in the sports and how they're going on a day to day - his post apex podcasts will still have some inane trade proposal or an overreaction to LeBron bombing out of the playoffs or Mac Jones looking good in a preseason game. Magary's stuck making the same observations about Bills fans being from rural New York (are they drunk? fat? Drunk, fat and having sex in a parking lot?), an owner being rich and out of touch or (most importantly) more popular media outlets not being nearly as smart as incisive as Drew and his friends.

Deadspin was a good website, but it stopped being one long before it ended and the world doesn't need either zombie versions of it. Grantland died a good website.

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Magary was always much meaner and nastier than Simmons. He was too vicious and too over-the-top-vulgar too often to get that kind of wide crossover appeal. And now he's just another dime-a-dozen woke writer.

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Trying to think about the gap between a Magary and Simmons, it strikes me that Magary kind of got pushed out of his space and never really found another one. He wasn't willing to be mean and crass enough to match a place like Barstool, but mean and crass was his brand. He had stuff he did beyond his main schtick, but it wasn't good enough to carry him (he wrote that OK book at one point?).

Magary's writing had a more focused audience than Simmons', one more iconoclastic and less welcoming. It didn't help that he was more a part of the culture of places like Deadspin and KSK than a true contrast, as Simmons was to a much larger platform. But I think what makes them most different is how Simmons pivoted. He left being a writer (and thinking in written terms) and started being a podcaster, which is a better fit for his more manic energy and persona. And on top of that, he became a talent assembler. So if I like Andy Greenwald or Shea Serrano or Jason Concepcion, some part of their shine boosts feelings about him.

A part of me wants to push back a bit on the idea of the new Magary as inauthentic. This might authentically be him. He just went from being unpleasant about sports and the sports world (which can be funny and has mostly low stakes) into being the same way about politics, which can be both shrill and annoying (and while maybe I shouldn't care about Drew's opinions on sports, I REALLY don't care about his opinions on politics). Just because your approach is interesting in one arena doesn't mean it will necessarily flip into another.

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What this leaves out is that Bill Simmons is, by all accounts, a VERY good media executive. He has a great eye for talent, decent management chops, and bloodless ruthlessness. Scuttlebutt is that he was going to end up running ESPN before everything exploded. Denton is a better analog than Simmons, I think.

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I read Drew's work for quite a while, but eventually stopped when it became clear that he no longer actually liked sports. He became more interested in other topics, often political (which is all fine and good).

But when you work at (ostensibly) a sports site, and your audience loves sports and poop jokes, to then come repeatedly to read stories by someone who no longer cares about sports and thinks many players and fans are idiots (or worse), well, you end up with fewer readers (or at least sports readers).

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Ok I just visited Gawker for the first time since the Obama Administration to check out what you guys were talking about and HOLY SHIT what have the done with that website

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Time to follow up and do a pod 100% focused on the Simmons career arc.

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Transcript please.

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Great podcast

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Leaving aside that Simmons was a pioneer in that space and any iteration that followed him was bound to be different, I think the main reason is the change in Deadspin's voice and content starting around 2012-13 became more niche and built for twitter, and not mass, popularity.

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