I dig Grantland a lot...

i voted paper but brightside seems to be winning atm

thought it was pretty funny how they just c+p'ed p4k's best of the decade list

kanye is still in his prime

― Treeship, Monday, August 26, 2013 12:05 PM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah in the same way that Kobe is.

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/85512/mileytaughtme-the-lessons-were-learning-from-mileygate

No ILX discussion of FiveThirtyEight/Nate Silver going to ESPN for a Grantland style multi-author site?
First piece is hosted on Grantland.
http://www.grantland.com/fivethirtyeight/story/_/id/9802433/nate-silver-us-government-shutdown

Kinda curious where this is headed - ESPN doing politics? Bring together all the stat nerds from around the sports spectrum (even though they don't work nearly as well in other sports as in baseball)?

re: Grantland itself, now that you can safely ignore Bill Simmons content and Klosterman/Carles write rarely if ever, it's gotten to be pretty awesome, missteps like the song poll aside (and that was clearly Simmons exerting himself, right?).

it was discussed somewhere, i'm not sure where. he was on the bs report shortly after it was announced and it sounded like he has pretty ambitious plans w/ grantland the definite model. sounds like the times was not a happy fit and w/ the stuff coming out about krugman lately i'd say it's safe to say there's a culture of cluelessness there. there was some spec that he was moving more towards tv and he confirmed he'll do things for abc news re: politics and for olbermann re: sports but from the podcast it sounded like that was a very minor thing, that it definitely wasn't why he left. i think those pop culture polls are more a vestige of vulture being a template for the site than any push by simmons (doubt he'd heard half the songs on that poll tbh).

American Politics Thread 2013: I'm a cool Rodham grandma in the USA

didn't really say anything particularly interesting tho

yeah there's a couple of posts back in july, but they don't say much interesting either (for some reason morbs thinks he's only going to be writing about baseball now, which uh isn't the case). some stuff here - http://deadspin.com/espns-nate-silver-is-here-to-answer-your-questions-951328525

http://deadspin.com/can-jason-whitlock-save-espns-black-grantland-from-hi-1586606960

posted this in the race thread but figure it'd be just as relevant here

sort of what i suspected was going on

thought revive might be for this pos:

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-if-i-play-this-rb-singers-music-will-he-help-me-have-sex-chart/

http://grantland.com/features/its-not-crazy-its-sports-the-subterranean-stadium/

i watched these errol morris docs on tv last night, they were all pretty good but this one was the best.

writing a feature at an adult awards festival is so passé but since it's molly lambert doing it i'm willing to make an exception:
http://grantland.com/features/porntopia/

http://www.businessinsider.com/espn-has-suspended-bill-simmons-former-website-grantland-2015-10

sucks for their good writers

Yep. The Grantland writers on non-sports stuff will need to find other outlets. Some of the sports writers may still survive on ESPN.com

FiveThirtyEight and The Undefeated will survive

@joe_sheehan
We get the sports media we deserve.

The Dissolve, Grantland ...

oh cool I can shelve the proposal I was going to send!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5VCY28_Xo

aw this sucks, I really liked a lot of their non-sports writers (I'm sure their sports writers were good too, I'm just not that into sports). Also enjoyed some of the podcasts.

FiveThirtyEight and The Undefeated will survive

the unkindest cut of sll

Jalen Rose's NBA stories were the unsung MVPs of Grantland.

http://observer.com/2015/11/why-we-should-mourn-and-cheer-grantlands-demise/

I didn't read their film coverage enough to weigh in on this:

Grantland was the epicenter of this cult of the upper-middlebrow. In a well-crafted (if somewhat overwrought) eulogy of Grantland for The New Republic, Alex Shephard and Mark Krotov highlight the site’s Paul Thomas Anderson Week, a multimedia, cross-site event that brought a tremendous amount of firepower to examining the filmmaker in every way imaginable. The event produced a lot of incisive commentary, and with its combination of various media and diversity of lenses, demonstrated the huge potential of web-native publishing. But it’s worth noting that Grantland on PT Anderson was an impossibly perfect combination of subject and venue. Mr. Anderson, an incredibly gifted filmmaker, occupies the upper-middlebrow perfectly, making movies that are labeled “indie” but which are treated like an event by our press, the kind of movie you usually take in at a specialty cinema but which aren’t impossible to find at the multiplex. Again, this isn’t a critical judgment of Anderson’s work, which is fantastic, but a recognition of a certain sweet spot in our culture industries that signify good taste without inviting accusations of pretension. It’s hard to imagine Grantland devoting a week to Lars von Trier, let alone Wong Kar-Wai

that's not wrong but lol at evoking two of the safest canonical "highbrow" directors i can think of

Anderson’s work, which is fantastic

no

(and I liked the last two)

lol i've seen several things name checking that pt anderson week, none acknowledging the reason it happened was simmons specifically is a big pt anderson fan.

What a weird complaint.

"It’s testament to a phenomenon that’s far broader than Grantland, and for which the site bears little blame: the rise of the sports snob, the guy who just can’t believe that someone could think something so dumb."

I think this dude hasn't hung around a lot of sports fans because this is not a remotely new phenomenon particularly with baseball.

zach lowe, on his most recent couple podcasts kept referring to grantland as "a website that still exists" right up until Friday's entry.

fairly certain he's going to land somewhere, his being one of the strongest hoops minds out producing work right now, i just hope it comes soon

completely disagree with the passage on bill barnwell. barnwell vs received wisdom is where he is valuable. freddie casually switches from talking generally to talking specifically about other football journalism in particular but he is ignoring the high volume churn of tv pregame guys, commentators, talking heads, internet commenters - those are the collective loudest volume opinion on football and they're dense with dumb epigrams and misguided cliches that could do with being dismantled. and he's being generous to the main body of football journalism anyhow; he's misunderstanding his own (apparently limited) experience for universal experience. anyway, it's when barnwell is putting original ideas forward rather than rebutting wrong ones that he stumbles the most.

I'm think I'm mostly going to miss Shea Serrano. Like Mike Tanier when he got booted from Sports On Earth, I can't see him landing much of anywhere that he can do what he does best - hip hop, R&B, bad movies and sports, all at the same time - unless maybe he winds up at Deadspin. I could still pretend I'm boggled why Tanier didn't end up at Deadspin except for the fact they already have Magary doing their weekly NFL thing, and Serrano going to Deadspin also seems redundant somehow but maybe not. SBNation, I hope, but then what happens to all the rapper quad charts?

Rembert Browne and Brian Phillips are also really important to me but the idea that they don't end up doing great things somewhere else just seems absurd. Phillips in particular seems like he could anywhere, I just worry that nobody else will ever let him do this:
http://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-hakuho-yukio-mishima-novelist-seppuku/

On the sports side, I'm curious what Jonah Keri's ESPN reportage will look like. I don't think he's going to slot in well as a hot take artist who can drop in at Mike & Mike.

I never listened to it, but I loved both Emily Yoshida and Molly Lambert from the "Girls in Hoodies" podcast, and that there was a "Girls in Hoodies" podcast to offset the "Men In Blazers," etc. Yoshida going to The Verge made me sad.

Oh shit, what's going to happen to Jason Concepcion's "Ask The Maester" weeklies?

literally the only 2 articles this site ever ran than were memorable to me were the action bronson one and the gunplay one, maybe also that dude who was so hilariously far off-tm abt true detective season 1

basically every grantland writer will get hired to to do exactly what they were doing at grantland, if they want. this will be good for their readers but less good for the writers because only a few of them will be able to make espn money outside of espn. the sports writers will just ported over to big box espn.

Jason Conception must be pissed about cancelling his dothraki classes

that freddie post is interesting in its assessment of cultural criticism but it's completely insane to me that while writing about a publication that died because of finances he's unable to connect the economic reality of cultural criticism to what he calls "upper middlebrow" i.e. if a publication that did an entire week's worth of cross-platform content on paul thomas anderson couldn't survive then the last thing that publication needs to do is dedicate those resources to wong kar wai

Yeah, and neither seems a sound strategy if views and making money is your goal.

Jordan I wish that was true and I'm on the other side of the business from you so what do I know really, but seriously, the chances Jason Concepcion gets to do all these things: http://grantland.com/contributors/jason-concepcion/ (keep hitting 'more') seem basically nil. The piece where Jason and Rafe Bartholomew went to go witness the Filipino basketball scene together isn't going to happen anywhere else, and I loved that one.

If you read Grantland for the sports coverage, then yes, many of those writers will probably get to do the same stuff somewhere else, but we're missing them doing any of the other stuff they got to do, which to me was the main draw of the site. I didn't ever care that much for the straight coverage of major league sports, I cared about when they went sideways into unfamiliar territory or got to approach the major sports from angles that only worked in the context of that particular playground.

Again, like Sports on Earth before it got all serious and boring. At least the Dissolve just elected to die quietly instead of turning into a strict review site.

kind of agree, amidst the middlebrow grantland also ran some pretty offbeat stuff. i wasn't a big reader of their features but was re-reading that weird existential sumo story they did yesterday, not sure where else anyone will get to do that.

Yup.

IMO, the Brian Phillips travel pieces are about as close to John McPhee's old school best as we get.
One could argue that kind of journalism has been superseded by television expedition stuff like Top Gear specials, Parts Unknown and Dirty Jobs, but only one of those three things is still going and who knows how long Bourdain wants to keep that up. For me, prose always wins out, but now we know it can't ever sell ads like teevee, and that just spells bad news for history.

fdb is terrible and stupid as usual, his commentary revealing his own anxieties more than any actual truths

But there’s also a profound distrust of any art that’s cast as stuffy, or elitist. Opera, ballet and experimental theater are all routinely derided for their supposed elitism, even as they struggle to merely survive in a brutal financial landscape for the arts.

yes those roving bands on miscreants laughing about opera and ballet heavens.

Not Merzbow, but Chvrches. Not The Paris Review, but The Atlantic.

who will speak for the paris review i ask you, who who.

I’ve found his work difficult to enjoy, for a simple reason: essentially everything he writes is written against some other opinion or attitude.

physician, heal thy etc

Grantland writers looked out from the very center of trendy, hip, knowing opinion and spoke as if they were speaking from the margins.

did i just say "physician" already? crap

In the era of the Internet, our opinions often feel like what we are, like we have no self aside from our opinions. And what better way to define a self than by contrasting it with all the selves it’s not?

yep, more of the same. dude can't read the back of a cereal box without somehow feeling like its putting him on the spot for not fitting in with its cultural construction of individual consumptive desire or something.

http://observer.com/2015/11/why-we-should-mourn-and-cheer-grantlands-demise/

I didn't read their film coverage enough to weigh in on this:

Grantland was the epicenter of this cult of the upper-middlebrow. In a well-crafted (if somewhat overwrought) eulogy of Grantland for The New Republic, Alex Shephard and Mark Krotov highlight the site’s Paul Thomas Anderson Week, a multimedia, cross-site event that brought a tremendous amount of firepower to examining the filmmaker in every way imaginable. The event produced a lot of incisive commentary, and with its combination of various media and diversity of lenses, demonstrated the huge potential of web-native publishing. But it’s worth noting that Grantland on PT Anderson was an impossibly perfect combination of subject and venue. Mr. Anderson, an incredibly gifted filmmaker, occupies the upper-middlebrow perfectly, making movies that are labeled “indie” but which are treated like an event by our press, the kind of movie you usually take in at a specialty cinema but which aren’t impossible to find at the multiplex. Again, this isn’t a critical judgment of Anderson’s work, which is fantastic, but a recognition of a certain sweet spot in our culture industries that signify good taste without inviting accusations of pretension. It’s hard to imagine Grantland devoting a week to Lars von Trier, let alone Wong Kar-Wai

― curmudgeon, Monday, November 2, 2015 3:58 PM (7 hours ago)

grantland was pure middlebrow, like probably exactly what dwight mcdonald had in mind when he used the term

Yes those Charlie Pierce and Wesley Morris pieces were pure middlebrow

The sports blogger Tom Hitchner wrote recently about the tendency of sports commentators to find random, dumb, uninfluential opinions to dispute, even when those opinions are held by almost no one, simply to represent themselves as the wiser and cooler party. Too often, writers at Grantland played into this tendency, engaging in verbal eye-rolling about the idiocy of those who might disagree with them rather than just making their case.

I think this is OTM about a broader trend but I wouldn't pin it on Grantland. I feel like Freddie is very sharp on how online discourse works but I always have to filter out his various tedious bugbears about popular culture.