I dig Grantland a lot...

linked to all the time by espn prob doesnt hurt

oh ok it's a sports thing

i thoguht it was just doing a worse job of being gawker-lite than the awl or something

its jarring to see ESPN.com have taglines like "Chuck Klostermann just came home from seeing Creed and Nickelback...on the same night!? *turntable scratch*

yeah i imagine the pop culture stuff is a fractional part of their traffic

lol the OP of this thread

grantland........ i still read simmons religiously and chris ryan's EPL stuff is great, and keri is pretty good tho i think he made more sense on fangraphs

the pop culture stuff, i'm not quite sure if they've really found their voice yet, tho i recognize that the target audience is still, like, two decades older than me

i feel like their target audience is *grasps blindly at straws, lights money on fire*

also they seem at the backend of the news cycle on a lot of pop culture stuff, but i'm not sure how important that is -- also it sorta seems like aside from tv recaps they're aiming for "you're a 45 year old trying to retain coolness, here's all the stuff you missed today that other people have been flogging for the last six hours"

which i'm sure there's a market for... just not for me

there's a pretty cutting edge piece on their front page right now about how nicki minaj's "starships" is newsflash not a good song

also i think i've picked up a lot of purposeful non-investment in the tone of their music writing, which again is prob not "important" but kinda gets at me

long thread but important

bill simmons IS bill simmons IN the book of BASKETBALL

also here's his sports version of "adele_plump_female_musicians_sex.php"

http://deadspin.com/5878436/tennis-players-bill-simmons-would-do-another-classic-from-the-secret-sports-guy-vault

also also worst thread title ban NYCNative

Charles P. Pierce's articles are good (because he's a good writer who hopefully is getting paid wheelbarrows of cash by ESPN to slum)
Jonah Keri's 'The 30' weekly baseball round-up is also good

you could set the rest of the blog on fire, the wonder and amazement they have at the audacity of covering omg reality tv is fucking horrible

oh also barnwell on football is solid

Simmons idolizing Malcolm Gladwell probably tells the uninitiated everything they need to know.

pretty much agree with the general consensus on this thread that the pop culture stuff is mostly bad, but the sports writing has occasional gems. i really liked colson whitehead on the poker tournament, and i enjoy the wrestling pieces though admittedly i know nothing at all about wrestling.

pretty much off topic except that it's sports writing, but i read this recently and it is pretty much the best piece of non-fiction i've ever read about poker:
http://www.amazon.com/Positively-Fifth-Street-Murderers-Cheetahs/dp/0374236488

i highly recommend

yeah that's considered a classic. i think i have it at my parents house somewhere

also it sorta seems like aside from tv recaps they're aiming for "you're a 45 year old trying to retain coolness, here's all the stuff you missed today that other people have been flogging for the last six hours"

Somehow this description of it made me realize I am OK with being in Grantland's target demo. And realizing that me passive-aggressively saying I'm OK with that means I've been there for years already.

I guess I didn't really know this was Jonah Keri's outlet now.

Grantland is brimming with NBA playoff excitement. You may have already noticed.

?????

this is the only thing i've seen on grantland worth reading

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7789978/a-racetrack-killing-history-organized-crime-hot-springs-arkansas

Grantland is great for me because it allows me to a) catch up with cable shows that I can't be bothered downloading but get bought up in polite conversation amongst hipster circles in my part of the world and b) sometimes read some non-retarded writing about North American sport.

all of their articles are too long

this is one of the best non-specialist pieces abt stan lee i've ever read:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7906504/the-surprisingly-complicated-legacy-marvel-comics-legend-stan-lee

the Greg Oden piece is really good and IMO exactly the sort of thing this site *should* be doing

I like this site, even though I find Simmons really annoying, unless he is talking about any team in the NBA except the Celtics.

Charles Pierce is excellent.

imo the site has like a 40/60 hit/miss ratio which really isn't all that bad. i do think they've assembled a pretty good stable of writers. the pop culture stuff seems to be kinda bland but it's not offensive which is probably half the battle.

They are at least trying to be relatively intelligent. Most of ESPN content, on all of its platforms, is written/produced by morons, for morons, so to see at least an attempt at being smart is somewhat refreshing.

it's certainly better than it was! the character pieces are definitely good, especially the Amarillo Slim one

i really wish this wasn't the kind of thing molly lambert wrote for grantland:

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/59116/tabloids

What is an example of something she has written that isn't a complete waste of time.

i like her stuff from thisrecording.com:

http://thisrecording.com/today/tag/molly-lambert

would much rather read about sweet celeb gossip than some stupid bullshit about telephone poles

http://ll-media.tmz.com/2012/01/26/0126-leo-erin-heatherton-zip-line-launch-ex-1.jpg

i find the celeb gossip stuff really boring and i don't even get that she's doing anything interesting w/ it? idk, celeb gossip is maybe a cultural blind spot for me and maybe there are grantland readers that are like, "thank god molly lambert is finally breaking down gossip in a compelling + vital way, this was much more important than when she was writing critical theory about gender identity." seems like a waste to me.

mordy totally otm grantland wastes the great molly lambert :(

i like gossip a lot but i don't get that feature

all the hyperlinks in her thisrecording pieces drive me up the wall, because im incapable of preventing myself from hovering each one and evaluating if its worth opening in a new tab. i hate it!!!

haha. i still read grantland, i like that there's a writer powerful and popular enough that a mega corporation would give him an entire website and staff just to keep him happy. as far as simmons toys go it's no 30 for 30 but i do appreciate that it does have some interest in longform stuff, that it's clearly guided by someone who's interested in some idea of 'good writing' as opposed to standard seo stuff. nobody w/ any familiarity w/ simmons can be surprised by the gap between it's sports coverage vs it's pop culture coverage - model for sports coverage is the national and golden age si, model for pop coverage is vulture. he's a guy who's seen almost famous a million times (and will let you know) but has little to no interest in actually reading lester bangs. feel like stuff like the lambert tabloid thing is simmons pandering to some idea of what he imagines his wife wants to read or providing cover for his sorta odd interest in stuff like reality tv, celeb gossip, etc.

yeah that feels about right

grantland is a blackhole

at the beginning of grantland she wrote more sustained celeb gossip type pieces, like a "normal" version of her stuff for thisrecording. i remember liking the one about jennifer aniston. i just don't get the almost-copying-pages-of-us-weekly-verbatim new-style lambert columns. they're unreadable!

yah they're pretty useless

she doesnt tweet v much anymore either

:(

i miss you, molly!

maybe she's working on a book? i hope so!

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.

@BenLindbergh
Haven't told my parents about Grantland, because 1)I like that someone still thinks it exists and 2)I'm testing how irregularly they read me

NYC event

http://www.gelfmagazine.com/gelflog/archives/nov_23_grantland_appreciation_night.php

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-second-coming-mtv-news/

not sure if we have a beefs thread for this but the breathless praise for grantland at the start of this piece just reminds me how weird it is that there were grantland readers who actually thought the non-sports stuff was the good part of grantland

wes morris was actually good, rembert was fun. i would actually occasionally read it whereas now the only non-sports stuff i'll even look at on the ringer is serrano or concepcion in funny blogpost about some hbo show mode, every other non-sports writer i react to the sight of their byline the way i did to steve hyden's on grantland. the sports writing isn't as good at the ringer either though it's fine enough, i still check in. i think in a weird way the ringer misses a jonathan abrams than a lowe or barnwell; like they're still doing something like the analysis lowe and barnwell brought but the really solid features abrams could turn out they don't really even seem to attempt. even if #longform doesn't generate the clicks and was responsible for the worst moment grantland had, it's still the kind of brand building thing that can give a patina of 'quality' that can make ppl think they're smart to love/read a sight even if they really go there to find out what character on game of thrones j.r. smith is. it is kinda funny that the sports writers i really enjoyed at grantland stayed at espn and the ones i kinda loathed ended up at si.

I very much miss the Grantland versions of Rembert, Brian Phillips, Emily Yoshida and Molly Lambert.

<3 katie bakes but it seems like a struggle

how weird it is that there were grantland readers who actually thought the non-sports stuff was the good part of grantland

yeah sorry folks but the fact that ppl read this stuff makes me think they live in an alternative dimension where there are 48 hours in a day or something

got what a shitty hypocritical post. sorry

not sure if we have a beefs thread for this but the breathless praise for grantland at the start of this piece just reminds me how weird it is that there were grantland readers who actually thought the non-sports stuff was the good part of grantland

― k3vin k.,

I read Morris and Mark Harris all the time.

Rembert Browne's recaps of Designated Survivor almost make me want to start watching the show

the recent simmons-jalen podcast has some fun inside stuff on the early grantland days and how jalen got started

the simmons/jalen relationship is super heartwarming btw, very clear they are close buds and care about each other. basically everyone who’s worked with bill says he’s a great guy it seems

i loved that pod. jalen is a good personality. i listen to jalen and Jacoby on occasion. hilarious that jalen basically stalked bill as a fanboy.

Former Grantland and SI.com writer Jonah Keri sentenced to 21 months for domestic abuse.

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/disgraced-montreal-sports-writer-jonah-keri-sentenced-to-21-months-for-domestic-abuse-charges-1.5831494