The Bill Simmons Podcast - The New Era of Sports Media and the End of 'The Sports Reporters' (Ep. 210)

Episode Date: May 8, 2017

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Wall Street Journal sports columnist Jason Gay and Ringer editor-at-large Bryan Curtis to discuss the end of ESPN's 'The Sports Reporters' (5:00), LaVar Ball's impact on Lonzo Ball's draft stock (15:00), ESPN's priorities in today's media landscape (24:00), ESPN's attachment to live sports (34:00), the future of ESPN2 (39:00), Adrian Wojnarowski's rivalry with ESPN (48:00), the ESPN news ticker (55:00), the value of good writing in any medium (1:02:00), and parting shots on The Players' Tribune (1:07:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's special 10th anniversary episode of the Bill Simmons podcast. It has been 10 years. Well, it's brought to you by SeatGeek, as always, our presenting sponsor. Not for all 10 years, but I wish. I wish it had been 10 years. They're the best place to find tickets for hockey, basketball, baseball, Hamilton, the opera, whatever you want. I have SeatGeek on my phone.

The easiest way to shop for the best tickets thanks to the revolutionary grading system. You can do everything on your phone in just two taps. Everything fully guaranteed. Try it out. Download the SeatGeek app today. Go right to SeatGeek.com. We are also brought to you by another one of our buddies.

This is your buddy for Mother's Day, Boox.com. Sending flowers is the best way to show someone you care. It's not always easy or satisfying. Boox.com, changing that with fully transparent pricing, an easy shopping experience, great customer service, and an incredible selection starting at $40. Show every mom in your life that you care with flowers from the Boox company. Just visit Boox.com, B-O-U-Q-S.com.

Enter code Bill for 20% off your Mother's Day purchase. Flowers will sell out, so don't wait. And finally, we are brought to you by Against All Odds with Cousin Sal. That's our new gambling podcast. Some winners were doled out on Friday as we went into Cinco de Mayo weekend with a whole bunch of gambling possibilities and Sal and the crew delivered. Check that out. It is going to post, I think, on Wednesdays every week, Against All Odds with Cousin Sal.

And by the way, don't forget, we have another podcast that we're launching this week. I'm not going to tell you who it's with, but it's going to launch on Thursday. So carve out an hour on Thursday for something, for an audio experience that you'll be waiting for. But you find out all the details tomorrow on Tuesday. We'll announce it on The Ringer. And then that launches on Thursday. Coming up on the 10th anniversary pod,

The Ringer's Brian Curtis, The Wall Street Journal's Jason Gay. Let's do it alright as promised Jason Gadd it's your first time on the BS podcast right? on the ringer I was on a prior when you you worked at a different sports network,

I was on a prior podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brian Curtis has been on both. Yeah, a couple times. Double duty. So the sports reporters, let's start there. We have a lot on the agenda here. The sports reporters ended on Sunday,

and it was interesting, all these ESPN people bemoaning the sports reporters. But, I mean, the show did get canceled. It was the end of an era because they chose not to run the show anymore. But it did feel like the end of an era. What did it feel like for you, Brian? I mean, it was a great run, right? It felt like, I think Jeremy Schaapapp whose dad was the original host tweeted out a picture of the original set yeah and i'd forgotten that there was like you know it was like ali and

jimmy cannon i mean it was yeah it was kind of like this amazing museum piece you know but i remember as a kid it was the most exciting thing in the world the 80s 90s sports reporter was amazing because i was like oh my god there's this man in philadelphia who's got this huge beard he's this giant man he who's got this huge beard. He's this giant man. He's sitting at almost the Jack Drummond 180 degree angle. You know, he's like almost in the Barker lounger on the set. And he writes about sports and he's like, it's like, it was like meeting somebody from another planet.

Right. And you'd never see sports writers all together in the same place like that. Yeah. It was great. The three of us are sports media nerds and sports writing nerds, and this really was the first show where you could see everyone in the same place. You watched it too, right, Jason?

Of course. You know, I mean, and I love the sort of mannerisms of it. What's it called? Yeah, the parting shot, you know, when they would look straight into the camera and kind of laugh at each other's jokes. Yeah.

You know, I do wonder, you know, where will we go now to find middle-aged men talking about sports on television? There does not seem to be another avenue. I mean, you know, look, a lot of these guys who came in and out of the show were giants, starting with Dick Schaaf, of course. But it just, you know, it became very, very quickly outmoded in this day and age. And there was something almost like watching, I don't know, you know, chamber music to watching the sports reporters in 2017 compared to what sports talk has become. Yeah, it's tough to just parachute in on Sunday mornings and be like, we have takes that are more profound than the takes you've just been digesting

for 24 straight hours. Right, and the tone being completely the opposite of everything else, even on ESPN, right? Sports Reporters Junior is around the horn where they're in a box and it's like a game show. That's like the anti-sports reporters on the same network. I also remember from the 80s, 90s where it was like, when you got on there, you'd made it.

I mean, you had been chosen, right? I remember Skip Bayless growing up reading him in Dallas, and suddenly he was on the sports reporters. And he would talk about that on the radio and stuff, like, oh, I was on the sports reporters this week. That was a huge deal. Yeah.

Because it didn't mean you were just like big in a city. You were now national. You know, you were a guy. Now anyone could be national. Yeah. The other thing is locally there were local versions of the sports reporters in different cities like boston had sports final with bob lobel yeah and that was always like lobel dan chauncey um bob ryan and one other wild card

and it was basically the same format but then the sports reporters was the national version of it and i don't know part of me wonders some of the people that were on it that made it great were probably overqualified to be on it, like Kornheiser and Wilbon. They clearly just deserve their own show. And then once you have people who are properly qualified, that probably hurts it too. But Jason, where'd you grow up? I grew up in Massachusetts.

Who would have thought another person from Massachusetts talking sports? Talk about underrepresented in the media. Yeah, so you remember the sports final with Lobel then. The Lobel show, let's say, was a little looser. I believe it was live.

It came on after the Sunday 11 p.m. broadcast. Is that correct? Yes. And yeah, I just, you know, Bob was Bob. And this is sort of a relic of another era when these sports writers would become titans. And I look at, like, what sports reporters came to be. Is there anything equivalent that felt as clubby as what the sports reporters was? I mean, it was, you know, Brian's right.

It's like you had made it if you got into one of these chairs and got to look down the barrel of that camera. And it wasn't really a conflict driven show either. It was kind of like, we all have golf memberships. Yay he'd been on television in New York for such a long time before that, on ABC, right? Yeah. And also that Dick was, Dick's funny because he had, on the one hand, he had legitimate literary bona fides. Like he was a great writer.

He wrote for the Herald Tribune. Sport Magazine. Wrote Instant Replay, wrote all his books, edited Sport. But he was also somebody that everybody liked. You find any old sports writer,

they all like Dick Schaap. Because Dick was kind of, he gave him a seat on the sports reporters, or he gave him a nice assignment in sport, or gave him a nice little contract at sport. He was sort of this literary godfather figure. I mean, I don't know who that would be now, but it's sort of like he was, you know, they were all

kind of working for him in a way. I never felt like the show, when he wasn't on it anymore it just felt like a different show to me and he was always the appeal to me how first of all i'd grown up with him but the respect and reverence they had for him and if he liked their take it really felt like it meant something yeah you know reminded me of david brinkley you know when he had like sam donaldson and cokie roberts and george will and they were the squabbling children and he was kind of the elder statesman and kind of keep everybody in line.

Or Jim McKay is another one. We all grew up with Jim McKay, and he was like the Olympics Buddha, and it just felt more important when he was there. But I do think that's a relic from another time. I wonder, Jason, do you think there are guys either in our age range or a tiny bit older that have reached that status to younger people because it feels like that's slipping away oh i definitely do and i think that you know and and fairly uh anyone over 40 should be viewed with great suspicion in media um and uh i mean

another dynamic of the sports reporters too is like let's not forget that you know a generation of sports there's many generations of sports writers, grew up thinking they were way above television. And thinking that TV was a domain of knuckleheads and that they were going to bring this kind of erudite analysis to the airwaves. And that was pervasive for a lot of this kind of television for a long time. Now that dynamic is completely different. You see sports writers everywhere, except for the three of us, of course, aspiring to television fame and fortune. And that is the roadmap for a great many people.

I don't think that in Dick Schaap's era they viewed it the exact same way. I think they kind of were like, we're going to show these people how it's done. We're going to show them what literary journalism is like on television. Yeah. You were a columnist who was appearing on television rather than a television personality who might once in a while write a column, right? Yeah. I, I had it both ways. Because sometimes if you're doing too much TV, it becomes hard to do the other stuff properly. But, and Jason, you also, you dabbled in the TV thing. I both, I think both of us were, I did a whole bunch of different TV things. Obviously the most fun I ever had was PTI.

And that's what everybody says. And it almost sounds like a cliche, but there is something really fun about it. And I don't really totally understand what it is the structure of it i guess make maybe take some pressure off it's loose you go back and forth you're you're really doing takes but it doesn't seem like you are but you really are all this stuff's the same like if you watch wobon on pti he's spouting just as many takes as anybody else but it doesn't feel takey right and uh and it's just a really smartly constructed show and it's the only show that's been able to live outside this whole

take world that we've entered now because it's um yeah because they don't take themselves seriously right right the whole thing has been from the beginning of pti but do you think steven a takes himself seriously uh yes okay because sometimes i wonder sometimes Sometimes he has a gleam in his eye. I think there's more tongue-in-cheek from the beginning of PTI, right? Look at us. We have this show. Oh, my God. This is crazy.

We have a list of topics on the screen. Yeah, we're bald. This is nuts. We're old and bald, and we have a show. Yeah. I did a podcast with Stephen A. like two and a half years ago, maybe, and I unsticked him. There was a lot there. I really had a good time and I've hung out with him at NBA

things and stuff and the non-TV Stephen A is definitely a different person the TV is like it's like a blown out personality of what he has but there's a lot of meat there I think he just he's playing what he needs to play to get seen.

What do you think, Jason? Do you think it's teachable? That's my question. I mean, can you make somebody great on television, or is there some quality that they're born with? Now, I was on America's favorite sports show, Crowd Goes Wild. Yeah. It had a beautiful nine-month run.

But at totally opposite ends of the spectrum, you had Regis Philbin, national treasure, and then new national treasure, Katie Nolan. And they could not be more opposites in so many ways, but they both possessed this just incredible talent for kind of connecting through that camera in ways that I don't think you can really articulate. And that was something that I clearly didn't possess on screen. And I don't know if that's a kind of teachable skill. Yeah, Beatle is another one who has that. Certain people just jump off the screen.

And when Stephen A is upset about something or ranting about something, it's hard not to watch. Oh, yeah. I remember I was in the car once and i think i told you this story he was yelling about it was right when the bulls were self combusting and he was just yelling at jeremy grant and i didn't intend to have the radio show him it was just on when i got in the car and he's just yelling at j he's like this isn't about you jeremy grant this isn't about you and he's just ber isn't about you. And he's just berating Jeremy Grant.

And I'm thinking like, what is going on? But I couldn't turn it off. It was great. Yeah, I wouldn't turn it off. How many people have you come across in your television experience who are the exact same person off camera as they are on? Wilbon.

Wilbon is exactly the same. Wilbon is exactly the same in all situations. Does not change what he would say. I was very enviable. Magic was the opposite. When we did the year of magic, magic would be great in the meetings. And then on TV, he would be very careful. Yeah.

But you don't want to be careful. I would say every play-by-play guy, too, or just about. That's pretty much them. Yeah, you're right. You can't do a character for three hours. Right. I mean, that's really, really you know you can't do a character for three hours right i mean that's really really hard right no and a lot of them when you're talking to them it's almost like you you started interviewing them but you don't remember that it was you know like hey how's

it going today well let me tell you bill yeah you know when you wake up and you have breakfast every day you get to do this for a living it It's great. It's like, are we doing a talk show right now? Right. Yeah, a lot of them are like that. I've heard you say before, Bill, that you don't know how the single voice does it, like a coward type. And I've always wanted the same thing. How do you not talk yourself completely into knots logistically um and and beyond i just that's a skill set that i just i i don't even i can't even put my finger on it

yeah i was watching rossillo he had his first show after they got rid of danny canal and he just gave this like 10 minute monologue about you know how this guy was it was really good and i was like that, to be able to basically give a verbal essay off the cuff is really hard. I have trouble doing it. I always need to, on the podcast, I always need to have somebody to play off of. I've had a couple times.

I remember near, like in March of 2015, I remember doing, it was the ESPN.com's like 15th anniversary or 20th anniversary or something. I remember doing a pod where I just, it was just me for 40 minutes. That was the only time I've ever done that. And I thought I did a really good job of that. And then I listened to it and I kept saying like, and um, and like, you really have to be comfortable with silence.

I always felt like that was Jim Rome's greatest trait. Jim Rome would have this point. And it would pause. And then he would make the point. But you'd be hanging on the silence. And it was like the silences are the key to that. I'm not good at that. Yeah.

By the way. Could you watch yourself on television? Or would you go back and view tape? I did in basketball. Yeah, I did. You know, you learn stuff. The stuff you learn is if you're fidgety, if you have some tick you didn't know you were doing. I remember in basketball,

the first five or six times I did the show, I was tapping my pen on the table like a serial killer. I didn't know I was doing it. It wasn't like I was nervous. You just have a lot of energy. You must have noticed that too, right, Jason? have a little stupid and what you realize is you have to be frozen you know i'd be making these points to that when we were doing with uh the first like few months of the mba show and i'd be making points and magic woolbon would just be calmly

frozenly staring at me as i made the points and i'll be talking going are they listening to me but i realized when they were doing it because it looks terrible when people nod. It looks terrible when people are like smiling and not smiling and they're, they're just basically, they're rolling over to help you make your, your point. But yeah. Yeah. The podcast equivalent is when you say right every 10 seconds. Right.

Or you're like on here when you listen to an interview tape and you're the person's talking, you're going right, right, right, right. And you'll do that if somebody's on the phone because you're trying to prompt them. You know, like, these three men, I just want America to know that a three-man podcast with two in person

and one on the phone is hard because the person on the phone never knows when to jump in. Fortunately, Jason's an experienced professional. Yeah, of course. Hey, you wrote about LeVar Ball, who is 2017's most polarizing sports figure i enjoy is there another side of it though that's what i want to know like i thought it's just one side everyone just can't stand lavar ball i enjoy it i'm on the other side

okay all right i enjoy it i listened to him on undisputed this morning, and I thought it was fabulous. I mean, every moment. I'm sorry. I mean, it was just great. It was everyone knew it was a con. Yeah. But it was just great. It was 15 minutes of wonderful radio, TV through the radio for me. Give the listeners the synopsis of what you wrote yesterday, Jason.

I mean, listen, he's just another example of how the media culture now works, that the loudest voice in the room wins. And we've seen it all across the spectrum. And LeVar Ball is basically calling out every predisposition we have now. He knows that being ridiculous, being loud, the craziest price for a pair of basketball sneakers and, you know, manufacturing history, that's attention-getting.

And though, you know, the media likes to play it both sides of their mouths, people can't get enough of it. They're going to keep, keep, keep putting them on the air. And, you know, I thought it was funny when he did first take, when he did Undisputed. It fits in perfectly. Absolutely perfectly. Like, he's been coming on for years. He's like the Tony Randall of that kind of format. Yeah, I liked him with Stephen A.

I thought it was hilarious. Yeah. It's like at least they're owning what this show is. It's two people ridiculously yelling at each other. Right. That's the destiny of the show. Right. And this is good guy and this is bad guy.

Yeah. Do you buy any of the overarching worry here, though, that somehow he is talking his son out of tens of millions of dollars, potentially, that he could be maybe even damaging a relationship with a GM and a team and some team might have – I find that preposterous, the idea that a basketball team wouldn't draft a once-in-a-generation talent because of the dad's television appearances. But the money part, there might be some truth to that.

I don't know. I wasn't in the room for what the Nike-Adidas kind of negotiations were and how absurd that was. And also there's another part of this, which is rookies don't get big, giant shoe deals anymore. That's not really a thing that happens. And so I find it very hard to believe that if he comes back, or he comes out and has a great rookie season or two

that these shoe companies won't come running at him hard but do you buy any of this or danger for Lonzo because of that? There's got to be a point where if you draft him and he's just trashing your coach or GM on the radio if he's on Undisputed all the time

which by the way to Jason's list of things he has going for him loud and stuff is available just trashing your coach or GM on the radio, if he's on Undisputed all the time, which, by the way, to Jason's list of things he has going for him, loud and stuff, is available. He can call and he answers the telephone. There is a point where that becomes annoying. And I don't know, maybe that point is way off. We reached that point three months ago. Listen, I'm telling you, there are teams out there that are afraid

to take him because of this for two yeah here for two reasons one because

if you're in a situation where that son's not going to play all the time right away and you have the crazy dad

on the side going I don't know why my son's not playing he's better in the backup like that's just bad

and that's in play that might actually happen here. And then the second one is he's been so open about wanting his son to go to the Lakers. Yeah. Let's say you're the Celtics, right? You have this good ship lollipop routine going right now. Everybody's on the same page.

Things are going well. You made the second round of the playoffs. You're unfortunately going to flame out in about two games. But you bring this kid in who's going to have to take a big ego hit. He's not going to play a lot the first year. And now you have LeVar Ball bitching about it. And then in four years, he might go to the Lakers. You know, if your draft, especially in this draft, where it's like probably the best draft in 14 years,

I want somebody that's going to be on the Celtics for 12 years. I don't want somebody that I'm worried in three years he might be jumping on the Lakers with his brother. I don't know if it's enough to drop him four spots, but I think if the right team is in the second spot, and they look at it, and they weigh all the, like, are we just better off taking Josh Jackson? It's conceivable. And that's why i think what he's doing is smart he's because he wants the kid to go to the lakers if the lakers have the third pick he might be able to nudge him to that third pick or get the lakers to trade up or whatever that makes sense he also just got he reportedly just got the chino hills coach fired right the high school coach yeah so why isn't he going to do that to Luke Walton?

You know, half... Maybe he'll be the coach. Yeah. But he thinks he probably could, right? I do think the Lakers would be the best team for him because of Magic. And I just love the Magic Johnson slash Lonzo Ball showtime 2.0 and Magic doing the whole thing.

It would be the most fun fun of all the storylines we can all agree absolutely lavar ball right down the street from ucla how's he gonna get his next son there ucla play like it's it would be the most fun but it would also be super fun if the lakers didn't get a pick at all for you yeah for me and everybody else's haters over there so jason did you get feedback that you think this is going to hurt his draft stock? No. In fact, a number of people have sniffed around on the topic, and they have not gotten a GM to confirm privately even that they have a hesitation about him.

But I do buy what you're saying in terms of situationally, if you're going to have him sitting behind somebody in Boston, certainly would be that kind of scenario. Yeah. You know, has the father shown restraint in the past? No. Could it be potentially a problem? But again, you know, talent's talent. And we've seen, you know, crazier sports parents. Well, maybe not. But there's a pretty rich history of sports parents being somewhat insane pre-draft. Yeah, I don't. Richard Williams, to me, I've seen ball get compared to Richard Williams. Richard Williams, I don't know, this feels more fun to me

and more entrepreneurial. It's like he's taking his swing. Richard Williams, there was always a creepy element to it, and you could always kind of see where that one was heading it was heading yeah this is a lot sillier than that this is much sillier and and i also think lonzo's gonna be really good and that's gonna solve a lot of problems too it's not like he's gonna come in and shoot 32 the first year or anything like that i like having wacky sports parents in my life is that wrong i mean I mean, we grew up with this. Why is Archie Manning and why does Jack Elway,

you know, we've seen some big parent maneuvering pre-draft before getting guys out of Baltimore. Hell yeah. Yeah. I forgot about that. Archie Manning was like

a quieter LeVar Ball. Dignified Southern LeVar Ball. Like, we never really got an answer for why he was so afraid to have his kid play for the chargers it's not like the chargers were the cleveland browns no and everybody likes everybody loves living in san diego um quick break to talk about texture how do we keep this podcast fresh i read a ton of stuff every day including a bunch of magazines on the texture app oh brian

got excited texture gives me access to hundreds of magazines like the atlantic new york magazine the new yorker and si all in one place on my tablet or phone daily recommendations exclusive interactive features videos and more texture makes it easy to find and enjoy the articles i want to read it's even searchable you can mark what you like check out back issues view bonus content it was selected as one of Apple's top 2016 iPad apps. And I read everything on my iPad, just about. Where do you read everything on? Yeah.

iPad? Same. What do you read on, Jason? Yeah, I'm going back to print. Good, good. I'm old enough. Yeah. Well, Texture is $9.99 a month for access to over 200 magazines.

But if you sign up right now at texture.com slash BS, you get a 14 day free trial. What is better than that? Why subscribe to a couple of magazines when you could subscribe to all of them? Start your free trial. Now download the texture app today. Go to texture.com slash BS for your 14 day free trial. Uh, texture's good. Great. I like that. It's I get magazines in the mail now and I just feel stupid. 14-day free trial. Texture's good.

I like that it's... I get magazines in the mail now and I just feel stupid. I just can't open them. Where's the time? And somehow I keep getting Sports Illustrated even though I feel like I've canceled it nine times. I tried to turn it off for like two years and it kept coming.

It's like the Jason Voorhees of magazines. My big move nowadays is to go, when I'm flying, to go toudson newsstand before the flight buy a stack of magazines and then put them on the seat next to me and never read them but you felt like you yeah you felt like you at least put in the effort i made the statement yeah that was that was enough so we're talking about the take culture which ties into uh espn layoffs and um which you know espn for i don't think i've really talked about the espn layoffs on the pod i have a bunch of thoughts that i'm probably for the most part gonna keep to myself because i'm a little too close to it but i do

think you know reading that espn is done and reading that this is it and this is some turning point like clearly it's not I think they it was an incredibly unbelievably successful company probably the most successful media company or media network ever um and now it's not quite as successful but you know they hired a lot of people and they had a lot of excess and they had every possible thing covered and now it seems like they're making specific choices to try to decide what to focus on which is what most successful businesses would do on the other hand there was a coldness to how this played out and especially with the with the NBA coverage that was very atypical for ESPN what did you what did you think

Brian watching it from afar? Well, I think the first thing is we were sold that it was going to be a big TV thing. And then as it manifested itself, it became a print thing, you know, a reporter-driven thing. And I think for all of us who are mostly print-ish people, right, that was pretty jarring. I have a feeling, and John Aron wrote this, that some or maybe a lot of TV guys got the thing where it said, look, we're going to cut your pay by 60 percent or whatever it is. And you get to keep your job. Right.

And they said yes to that. So we never actually found out about some of the TV cuts that were made. You know, like that's all kind of behind the scenes. But the ones we found out about these brutal sort of guys like, hey, you write a soccer column. Goodbye. You know, you write about hockey. Goodbye. You do a, you write a soccer column, goodbye. You write about hockey, goodbye. You do a good job, right? You don't do a bad job, but you're out of here.

So that, to me, was initially the most jarring thing. What about you, Jason? Well, sort of the way it went down, too, the nature of it, just these heads would pop up on social media saying, listen, they called my number today, and that drumbeat continuing for a couple of days was really odd and unsettling. Listen, it's really impossible to find a media organization today that has not gone through some version of this.

What I find a little bit tough to swallow is just people kind of wrapping it up into some kind of self-serving agenda or cultural statement about where ESPN is or isn't heading. These are people's individual lives and livelihoods, and that's tough. I do think the thing that I don't have a sense for is the why and the wives this way uh... i haven't yet uh... you know get a get a real federal or you know if you're going to make a cut why i think the cut the version there's no sort of clear line it seems to be here at the why they did they cut the people that they cut

uh... there was a one-third specific thing i mean i know they make big trims baseball it terms of basketball and i know's the element of whether or not Wojnarowski comes over from Yahoo. But in the absence of ESPN sort of coming forward and saying, like, these are our priorities, the rest of us are kind of guessing. Yeah. It does seem like part of the issue is their website changed, their ability to display content changed.

They can really only push a couple of columns and features, whatever, their website changed, their ability to display content changed. They can really only push a couple of columns and features, whatever, per day in a big way. And other than that, it's just really hard to find stuff. Can I ask a dumb question, though? When you say website, I'm thinking, okay, the homepage. And all we hear here at the Wall Street Journal is that the homepage,

that becomes less and less and less important every second. I mean, people are experiencing our content through, you know, social media primarily are referencing it from other friends. And so on the homepage, you know, while still a factor, isn't the big driver of traffic. And I look at ESPN's homepage now, and, you know, you're right, it's 100% video-centric, and it's awfully hard to find written articles until you go deep, deep, deep down. But is that the main purveyor of their content right now? It would seem like the written stuff has become less important. I know from our experience at Grantland and the experience we're having now at The Ringer, the homepage page still matters to us but i think i don't think that's typical i i think what we found is if you have if you build something that you're very carefully picking how much content you're putting up and the content all complements each other and

it's not overwhelming people will still go to a home page my issue with espn and the reason i i hadn't gone there as much um the last year is that it was just really hard to find stuff yeah and it was just all over the place and they've never really been able to solve that I hate being the old school guy I was like I liked it better the old way but it was just easier to look at the site the old way especially on a desktop and you could see 10 11 pieces at the same time I think there's clean homepages out there. But they clearly, they had too much NBA content. I think it was really hard to keep track of everything.

And at some point, they probably looked at it and said, all right, let's pick and choose what we're putting our chips behind. Getting rid of hockey and soccer, basically, and a lot of baseball, is really shocking to me. Because ESPN, the whole time I was there, ESPN was always like, we have to be everywhere. We have to be, we have to have something for everybody.

We have to be global. Yeah. And now they're saying, we don't have to be everywhere. We're going to double down behind baseball, basketball, and football, and college. College, yeah. And we're going're gonna double down behind baseball basketball and football and college college yeah and and uh and we're gonna have investigative reporting and we're gonna have big features and we're gonna have some columnists that you know um we're gonna have some podcasts

but not as many we're kind of stripping it down and we don't have something for everybody anymore yeah and i think that's the through line if you had to do anything it's just scaling back ambitions right 15 years ago espn was going to go into every city and basically compete with or knock out the local sports page right yeah that was espn dallas and boston and all that stuff and then we see like oh wait they just don't have it was 10 years ago 10 years ago they don't have a rockets beat writer anymore because they're just probably out of that business right uh i think the beat writers are the next thing that's probably going to be chipped away at you know just saying like do we need gamers on all this stuff we're going to send people on the road right that's what they were doing you know they were literally going

in and just matching we're going to match the mets writer we're going to match the yankees right we're going to match the columnist in new york we're going to do all those things and then have the radio bit and all that stuff and i think they're just going to come i think that's now they look at that and go wow that was ambitious well that was for a time when we were making money at a totally different rate and that was also a bad bet because their intention was to have these local radio stations that competed with the local stations in boston new york philly all those shows get destroyed yeah i mean you're talking like like in boston they have two stations by the way two all sports stations and i think both of them get like 40 40 times as much for 40 times as many

listeners as espn radio does so i think they realized over time that they just couldn't compete with a national radio show in cities where they just want to hear if you're in boston now you just want to hear hey what's what's Boston now, you just want to hear, hey, what's wrong with Xander Bogarts? Why doesn't he have a home run yet? You know? Yeah. When does Brock Holt come back?

They don't care about the Warriors series. They just don't. They want to hear about the Red Sox. And with entirely due respect to any individual who lost a job, I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's great that there's some sort of, you know, victory for regionals here in the respect that, you know, local coverage has won out, whether it's radio or newsprint.

Newsprint, God. But, you know, that sort of dynamic and those guys prevailing, I think that's okay. Yeah. I also think there was a feeling in the mid-2000s that newspapers were going to die. Yes. In a moment now. Yeah, that ESPN was

basically going to become Starbucks. And it'd be like, alright, in Boston, you have ESPN Boston, that's going to replace the Boston Globe. Absolutely. And what you've seen is the newspapers have found a way to kind of reinvigorate the washington post new york times boston globe all of them have these subscription models now that are going to

enable them to stick around newspapers also and sports is a driver for you know especially something like the globe i mean you'll just look at what you know the patriots coverage and so on is it's just you know that that they're they're they're much more important than city hall yeah and i was just like news remember how shitty newspaper websites were when those ESPN microsites started up? They would say, like, we're going to have our football writer write one article at the end of the day that has all the news of the day in it. And then the ESPN guy comes along and we're going to write 10. And every little micro nugget is going to be a thing. ESPN taught newspapers, I would say, how to do that.

Our newspapers sort of figured it out eventually. And now if you look, there's really no difference between the way they cover the beats. Remember in the 70s, the newspapers would have like the three editions? Oh yeah. Like the Globe would have like the nighttime edition that would have some column that wouldn't even be in the next paper. That goes to Maine.

Yeah, and it would just disappear. You'd go to Cape Cod and you'd read like Bob Ryan's like, Bob Ryan's pre-game Celtics column that he just cracked out 45 minutes before the game. And at the end of the first quarter, the Celtics led by two points. Right. Or he would do

scattered thoughts before the playoff game. And you'd be reading that in Portland, Maine, because they wouldn't have time to get the other newspaper. And the West Coast trips, forget it. You got nothing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so I do think in Portland, Maine, because they wouldn't have time to get the other newspaper. Oh, and the West Coast trips, forget it. You got nothing.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, so I do think that was part of it. They made a huge, huge expensive bet on taking over all these local sites and gradually realized that that wasn't going to work. But the part that's fascinating to me is that they now have to pick and choose what sports they're going to really care about. And like soccer, especially like John Skipper, who obviously I know pretty well, loves soccer.

This is his favorite sport and was really, really intent on, they made a great bid on the World Cup. They were kind of blowing up soccer domestically. Then Fox came flying in. Then Fox came flying in. Then Turner came flying in and got the Champions League. And to me, it seemed like ESPN just kind of threw their chips in and said, all right, take them. We're out.

We can't win this. And I don't know, man. You don't have soccer. You don't have hockey. They're kind of stuck with baseball. And it's been really interesting to read all these people blaming the football deal and the bet and the basketball deal all these like oh the rights deal the quarter they like that's partially true they would do the nfl and the nba deals again you think they wouldn't want to have the nba right now like give me a break that was so funny to me

because five years ago what did we hear what was the one thing everyone knew about cable the only thing people watch is live sports yeah the only thing that's dvr proof right and maybe still the case maybe they overpaid quote unquote in some way for these deals but i'm like what are you gonna do you're gonna be out of business with the nfl you'll be out of business with the nba what's gonna be on well they're gonna watch we're gonna watch branded branded argument shows and sports centers like i'm just over and over again and also if, if Fox gets the NBA, now you're creating

a real competitor because if you look at the FS1 ratings like they're in October during baseball, they're way up there. And then it comes down once football ends.

If you give them basketball, now you're legitimately creating a second competitor. I think that the baseball deal is the one that really hurt them. I don't even understand exactly how it's supposed to work, though. Isn't there some sort of property sharing that's

going to happen with MLB now? What's that? The four o'clock intentional talk? Yeah. That was kind of the underrated shocking moment. We're going to put an MLB network show on our air. Yeah.

An outsourced show. You say, we're used to the old ESPN where we're going to put an MLB Network show on our air. Yeah. I mean, that to me was- An outsourced show. Because you say, like, we're used to the old ESPN, where we're going to cover the world. We're going to cover every sport. We're going to cover everything. But also, we're going to have our own version of everything, right? Right.

And now we're going to outsource something to MLB Network, our baseball talk. Prime real estate, too. I mean, that's just amazing to me. I remember the last two years at grantland when they were trying to get us to do tv more tv we need you on tv ad sales more tv more tv do tv um we were looking at the espn2 slot like could we do i don't know grantland hour what would a grantland show look like and espn2 was like that real estate was just crowded and it was like there was no way you

could get in right and now now three years later Kevin Millar and Chris Rose they're just gonna like simulcast a bit on MLB Network show that is insane to me they have nine state-of-the-art buildings in Bristol where all they're supposed to do is make television and they have to outsource the show what was your reaction that Jason I mean that just seems crazy but it also sort of says to you know underline the point that the business they're in is the entertainment business right and the relationship that they're going to have to coverage is going to be they're going to cover principally the things that they're invested in and you know football and basketball are their top two investments and that's where they did the least amount of cutting, it appears.

And, you know, they're going to reinvest in Adrian and so on and do all this other stuff. I mean, that's a pretty clear statement about where you are going. And, you know, maybe it's sort of if there is an era's end. And, again, I sort of hesitate to jump on that bandwagon because virtually every media organization has gone through some version of this. But if there is an Arizona for ESPN, it's the kind of just intergalactic dominance that we are going to be the thought leader in every imaginable corner of sports in both the United States and the globe. And that just is not going to be the case.

Yeah. The real narrative here is there have been smaller pieces that they gave away. Baseball Tonight 20 years ago is an institution. It's one of the three or four most valuable properties they have. They've not thrown it out the window. They have said, Baseball Tonight's dead. We're just going to do it on Sunday nights, basically. was this channel that they had really boosted up to the point that not only were they showing playoff games, all these different things on it, but first take becomes more popular, becomes more highly rated going against ESPN one sports center. Right now they're throwing away ESPN two. It feels to me, it's, it's a channel now. And they did this before, right? They threw away ESPN news. they threw away ispin classic when when i was there like 2010 2011 range we wanted to save ispin classic connor and i were writing all these memos about hey we think this could be a sports movie channel um here's what

we would do you have all these libraries of games we could basically make it like uh like the stars for sports movies i used to jokingly call it balls with a z bllz it'd be like sports movies uh 30 for 30 library old games we'll blow it out and they were basically like we don't care like people pay the distributors pay for his pin classic anyway. We're already getting paid on that. We don't need to spend money on something that we're getting a check for. So my whole argument was always, all right, there's four ESPN channels right now. I guess five because ESPN Deportes is a channel. And you're just throwing away ESPN News and ESPN Classic.

Like those have ESPN in their name. Why would we want to throw away channels? They just didn't care. Now they're throwing away ESPN 2, it seems like to me me am i wrong to think they're throwing it away it feels like they are it feels like the second tier stuff yeah does it feel like and some games in college it's basically a live rights channel now which is that's what's important right yeah we need another place to stick that big 10 game yeah saturday afternoon yeah i mean that's what it is i think also there's some analog to what newspapers went through a generation ago in this respect that they're trying to do two things at once.

You have to hold the line as much as you possibly can on the classic cable model, which, listen, still throws off a tremendous amount of money. But at the same time, all of us have seen how a 13-year-old to a 25-year-old now processes media. They're just not traditional viewers anymore. And so you have to react strongly to that. And so they're simultaneously trying to migrate all their program across all platforms. And that's a tricky thing to do. It's hard to beat two things. And I think that's the real question for them, if they can do that.

Do your thing about how basketball Twitter has ruined highlight shows. I mean, just that the basketball Twitterverse is so much better at finding the detail of games, the crazy things that happen that, you know, I didn't watch the Warriors game the other night, so I don't know if they called attention to the Durant stuff. But basketball Twitter certainly caught it. And I'm talking about, like, cussing out the mascot and so on. And these just beautiful nuggets that tell you a lot about what's happening in the game and about individual player personalities that you almost never see

when you're, quote-unquote, behind the scenes of the game. I always laugh when they show you the in the huddle. I mean, has any interesting piece of information ever been revealed in the history in the huddle? It's always like, we're going to go inside the huddle. They're like, all right, guys, let's go. You know, it's nothing, nothing, you know, material to the game. They're not allowed to, they actually have a screener for those. Do you know that?

I'm sure. For inside the huddle. I forget if it's an NBA representative or somebody from each team. And if Brad Stevens says like, look, we got to attack Kelly Oubre, that guy can't shoot. Like the Celtics representative would be like, you're not keeping that.

So that's why it's always, all right guys, come on, intensity, intensity. Let's do this, 48 minutes, let's go. Yeah. Can you in this day and age, could you possibly have a feed of a game that was just the hot mic on the court, catching all the player chatter? I mean, obviously players would have a problem with it and it probably would result in

like people toning down the trash talk, but it would be absolutely fascinating and incredibly popular from the jump. I think. Yeah, I think so. We'll never get it. There's no way. Yeah. Sidelines are the most regulated journalistic zone in sports.

You know, we see it with football. If you could actually be down there, a sideline reporter, and quoting and writing down and giving to the audience what you heard on the football sidelines, it'd be fabulous. You can't.

Can't do it. Can't do it. And most sideline reporters, they just don't know, they just don't know what to do with that job because it's a job that has been so marginalized and diluted that it's not like you can ask anyone anything. That's why I was like David Aldridge. David Aldridge has great sideline questions. He's always like, John Wall, you started yesterday.

John Wall, you started at 0 for 9. How did you keep your confidence? What happened? You know, like John Wall has to answer that. So then he's like, well, I missed some early layups. I wanted to keep shooting. But most people, they go and like, John Wall, talk about

that win. That's Brian's big thing on Twitter. What does this win mean to you? What does this win mean to you? Talk about coming back. How big was that? What was going through your head when you won? It's so stupid and then the and then to on top of it to have the coach interviews so yeah it's like the nba's on the one hand the tv networks in the nba are they're trying to get this inside here's what but it's not

and then twitter actually has it and it's like look at this durant just dropped an f-bomb on the utah mascot it's like i'm not gonna find thatant just dropped an F-bomb on the Utah mascot. It's like, I'm not going to find that out during the game. But I think there's this overarching thing here that I think we're in sort of a high point for interesting athletes. I mean, I think a lot of guys are letting fans behind the curtain through social media or something else. And they're finding that there's a real upside to it. They connect with people. People think, OK, they're not robots. They're not just sponsors.

And in many ways, regular television hasn't caught up to this. Why not let people know what Kevin Durant really is like on the court? All the stories over the years, I mean, everything I ever heard about Larry Bird on the court was like fifth hand because I was never close enough to hear anything he had to say. But he'd be appreciated in a completely different way nowadays. I'm just like throwing fish to you here, Bill.

Oh, geez. I almost passed out. Bill's smiling so broadly, I have to answer this question. What a 10th anniversary present! But I think you answered your own question, which is they led people behind the curtain very much on their own terms. On these very highly scripted

kinds of things. Even if it's called unscripted, it's actually scripted, right? And the court is unscripted. And they don't want that. You know, that's scary. Oh, you heard what I said to some guy on the court? I didn't mean that. Oh, we just say that on the court. That doesn't have any meaning.

That's like every Kevin Durant post-game press conference, right? But when you get Kevin Durant in the right place, then he'll actually talk about it. But you can't. I think that would terrify them if everybody knew what they were saying. But do you, I mean, I believe 100% in what you're saying, that, you know, these are very sort of scripted,

let you behind the scenes moments. But sometimes real personality wins out. I mean, like, look at the Dion Waiters Players' Tribune essay, the high point in the history of the Players' Tribune, in my opinion. Yeah, if not sports journalism as a whole. Spectacular! You know, this is a classic example

of sort of access journalism, and yet, worked. And I feel like I know the guy, and like the guy even more. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, as a journalist, I'd love it. I'd love to hear it all. Well, we should, the players should call us up and tell us what they dreamed the night before the game, but I think they're not going to do it. Well, but like, the players should call us up and tell us what they dream that i you know before the game but i was not gonna do it well but that like the durant

podcast i did the two so that's as candid as anybody's been who's a top five athlete in any sport in the last couple years and you would think when he's doing it he's like i'm worried what'll be the repercussions to this that he just didn't care. And guess what? Nobody cared. I mean, people cared. They loved the interview and that kind of stuff. But it wasn't like people spent the next four days picking, oh, can you believe he said this? They just appreciated that he was candid. And that's what I don't understand about some of these guys.

Like, why are they so afraid to just be themselves? What are they terrified of? I mean, nothing's funnier than the, the, the, you know, career transition of Alex Rodriguez, you know, the most robotic athlete interview in baseball history, all of a sudden reborn as a truth telling television analyst. I mean, it is one of the funniest, I never would have thought in a million years that he would have worked perfectly on television and, and been a candid voice, and yet here we are.

We'll take a quick break, and then I want to talk about the Players' Tribune because that is a very important conversation. The following is not an offering of securities. Private investments are highly illiquid and risky and are not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Security offered to accredited investors through North Capital Private Securities member FINRA slash SIPC. All right.

How do you get involved in real estate group investing? Do you know, Brian? I have no clue. I bet you don't know. I don't know. I didn't read that article in the Players Tribune. I bet you don't know either. Yeah, this was in the Players Tribune.

Thanks to realtys.com you no longer need billions to invest in vetted real estate assets realty shares lets you invest fractionally and reduce the cost of an initial investment i wish sports teams operated this way i guess the packers did yeah they do the packers are the other one close to 100 000 investors nationwide are already using realtyShares with over $60 million in principal. Return to investors. Manage and invest on your phone or computer. You only need $5,000 to make an investment. If you make $200,000 a year, you may qualify.

Find out at RealtyShares.com. Right now, they have a special offer just for our listeners. Go to RealtyShares.com for $100 toward your first investment today. Once again, that is RealtyShares.com slash BS for $100 toward your first investment today. Once again, that is RealtyShares.com slash BS. All right. Players Tribune. We covered the ESPN stuff for the most part. We didn't talk about the Wojnarowski thing.

You want to save that for your Channel 33 podcast? We can save it for whatever you want to do. Do you think it de-woj's woj? That's what you want to do. Do you think it de-woge is woge? That's what I want to know. Because part of what made Woge woge was that he's a tremendous reporter and source material. But part of what made him such a sensation over the last bunch of years has been his kind of like, you know, sabotage of draft day and just sort of beating ESPN to the punch always and kind of like sticking it to the man. And once he joins a partner network, does it take a little bit away from him?

Yeah, and he said this explicitly. The draft is a TV event, and I have no stake in, you know, keeping the suspense on this made-for-TV event. Right, and you just imagined him like smoking a cigarette as he said it too i mean just like there was just a great about it yeah maybe even wearing a cape you know there's something very diabolical about it i don't work for espn yeah and and it's funny right someone whose career except for a small portion has been basically in opposition to espn. Yeah. Designed and vocally so.

All of a sudden, reportedly, goes over to ESPN and joins this parade. I think they bought his site. Well, yeah, but I'm saying like, you know, now he's part of it. As everyone pretended they didn't know that two weeks ago. Where are all the sports media, quote unquote, reporters? But I think he's sort of like, you know that's going to be really funny right now i'm participating in the made for tv event that is the draft i think that for them getting they information is still matters and still is collateral to them and having something go

across the ticker that says espn's adam schefter reports blank is still really valuable to them i don't know if you could put a price on it for them to get their butts kicked by him for the last five years the way they did i think they were just like all right what's the price it really bothered to fix it really bothered you talk to people in there and that was an absolute i mean the fact they had look they had a lot of reporters right yeah stein ramona all these people you know people broke a lot of stories yeah they hated the fact that there was this entity called Woj that was taking all the Schefter-style scoops away from them, or let's say most of them.

But Brian, I mean, some of the scoops were huge, sort of league-changing scoops, but a lot of them is just the day-to-day information, transactional information that happens in basketball or any other sport where you have a kind of Woj type reporter. And it's kind of like a new job. I feel like it's really, really come into its own over the last, like, I don't know, three to four years where these guys are like less like sort of your classic journalists

and they are kind of high frequency traders. They are people who are just pumping information instantaneously and seconds matter. And it's such a funny kind of job. And I think it has, you know, obviously 100% to do with social media and so on. But there wasn't any equivalent to that, you know, 20 years ago. I mean, the Will McDonough's and, you know, Pete Vesey's and things like that, you know, they certainly broke news, and they were incredibly well sourced, but they had the luxury of waiting time to release it. Yeah, no, I think it would have been, I think think Vesey and McDonough would have done this job if they'd had Twitter.

Yeah. I mean, I think that for them, I think the nugget was important. And people on radio, and they might have broken some of that. Remember, they were breaking some of that stuff on the, McDonough was on the Sunday morning show. Yeah. Right on the NFL, you know, on the NFL Today. He was the first one to do it. Right.

And he was using that as an advantage over his print guys who had to wait for the rest of the day. Is that a bad thing? I mean, you know, Will McDonough, if he had become sort of a creature of Twitter, that would have robbed, you know, some very interesting and amusing Will McDonough columns over the years. That's pretty horrible, Will McDonough columns. But like, you know,

think of the way the role of a White House correspondent has changed. I mean, gone, gone, gone are the days of the White House correspondent who had taken information and processed it right about the next day or the next week even. Now everything has to be instantaneous. That job is just a monster. And sports jobs have changed in very much the same way. And I don't think that necessarily the net product is better. I agree with that.

I think we've created this kind of scoop or created more of this kind of scoop where it's like, I'm going to tell you something that's going to happen in two minutes. And because I have Twitter, I can do that. It's going to be announced in two minutes anyway. And I'm going to, quote unquote, break the story. I'm so glad you brought this up. This is the part I don't get. And this is the part I have friends who cover these things, you know, that I would talk to about this and be like, why does it matter? Who's keeping score. Is there some scoreboard?

I don't know about that. It's like, Oh, Mozgov's going to the Lakers 64 book by Woj. And it's like, so does he get, so that goes to his scorecard because I'm going to find out anyway that Mozgov's going to the Lakers. Like when there's real stuff, like Woj breaking that boogie was in advanced talks to go to new orleans over all-star sunday at all-star weekend that would that was like wow this is real news this is now starting a three-day discussion um but a lot of times it's

just stuff that was gonna be found out anyway and that's the part that i don't get with this like for for what espn what they're valuing this they're valuing the basically the ticker but woj is tweeting all these scoops so you're not they don't get his twitter account it's his twitter account so how do you reconcile that i i'm speaking to you from the newsroom of the wall street journal where you know information like this has absolute value, you know, monetary value on the street. You know, you find out that a CEO is getting canned and you're able to get that scoop out there.

I mean, that is, you know, a ledger altering kind of information, whereas, you know, I don't know, is it fantasy? Like, what is the sort of upside to getting this, you know, seconds, if not half seconds ahead of the competition? I tell you what the upside is. It creates, it makes the journalist into this huge, swaggering figure, right? I mean, to me, the analog is Nikki Fink with Hollywood, because she would write about this stuff and be like, I don't know who this executive is. I've never heard of this thing. But because she's breaking something, and it's dangerous information,

right? It gives her this majesty. And I think when I Schefter and Woj and those guys and it's dangerous information right it gives her this majesty and i think when a schefter and woge and those guys it's the same thing you've created you haven't you haven't really the information you could argue is small time a lot of it would have been an agate type in newspapers like the 28th pick in the nba draft well it's virus right but it creates this great character oh woge you know he's undermined you know he's woge has got all the scoops he got the woge bombs you know yeah and it's itj has got all the scoops. He got the Woj bombs, you know? Yeah. And it's sort of built the character of the newsbreaker from Peter Vesey, who was big, but nothing like this, into this guy who's like the biggest guy in sports media,

or one of the biggest guys in sports media. I mean, that's crazy to me. I do feel like Vesey was as big as this. I mean, he was on NBC. Because he didn't really have, but he also, the New York Post, like that column will come out on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Fridays. I lived in Boston and I knew what was in it. Let's do salaries.

Let's do salaries even with adjusting for inflation. Peter Fessy would have loved. Peter Fessy would have loved this era. He definitely would have taken more pot shots than Woj. I think Woj does a terrific job of working the circuit. I really respect how hard that dude works and how hard he's worked to cultivate the sources and all that.

But to me, it's like I look at this and I think this is mostly about ESPN trying to save face with the fact that he was kicking their ass. And that on their ticker, on their channel, they had to constantly write the verticals Adrian Wojnarowski first reported blank. And you're going to stop that. You're going to stop the hemorrhaging of that. The part I don't get is this is an information play. You care about being the one-stop shop for all NBA information, so you go get Woj and his crew. So then why do you get rid of Mark Stein?

Mark Stein also had information. He breaks stories all the time. If you're making an information play, why not have both? They don't like each other, apparently. And this is all the, I mean, it's... And it's redundant. And if you're ESPN, I think you look and you say,

well, we're hiring the guy with this many scoops, so why do we want the other guy with that many scoops? I mean, I think that's what it is, right? So it's almost like an NBA team with a salary cap, like we're going to get Paul George, I don't need Jay Crowder anymore. And look, it is a salary cap, right? As we just found out at ESPN.

Maybe it's not fair, maybe it's stupid, maybe it's about impressing Disney, but it is a salary cap. Yeah. You know? Stein, I just, I'm shocked by it. I mean, obviously he's my friend, so I'm biased, but I thought he did

great work for them and broke a lot of stories and was a staple of that website this is the irony and I'm sure Jason would agree with this which is ESPN was lauded for all its basketball journalism right yeah they had creative magazine stories they had true hoop they had funny

strange writers a lot of their local beat writers were beloved characters including Strauss who just got laid off in this thing right there are people who have huge things and now they are changing the very character of that NBA unit Mark Stein a great guy and I agree it was every interaction I've had with him has been wonderful not to mention to I mean the Grantland by year four Grantland the NBA staff was outrageous but now they had the most talent under one roof that anyone's ever had they looked the NBA staff, we had to assemble this, was outrageous. I mean, we had the most talent under one roof that anyone's ever had. They looked at that and said,

we want to change completely the character of this NBA staff. And we're going information. Yeah. And we still have Zach as a columnist. We have Ramona. And who's, I'm blanking on Ramona and somebody else on features. Reportive, Windhorse.

Yeah. And then a couple of smaller like quicker hit columns and that's our coverage and maybe some beat writers and a couple couple of the big cities yeah maybe that's all you need i don't know to ask a really nerdy question what do you do if you're you know a 20 year old student who wants to be a sports writer in 2017? When you watch this, what is the takeaway? Bill, I mean, all of us, we grew up probably in an era where we had editors say to us, you've got to find a beat. You've got to find a home. You've got to find something that you know inside and out. You can't be a generalist.

And now I think there's been a dramatic pivot where range is everything and not just range across several subject matters but also ability to do audio video in addition to print you can't just be one thing and if you get locked in too hard that's a tough place to be sometimes i agree with that i so here here'd be my counter that because i've heard that like like people in college like what do i do well first of all writing is always going to matter whether you're writing for a website a magazine a newspaper or you're writing tv copy like being a good writer is still an advantage so you know read and write as much as you possibly can. I don't think that's changed. I do think being able to know how to do a couple different things is a good thing, you know? But couldn't you have said that 15 years ago? I mean, maybe it just occurs more

to people now that it's good to be good to have a diversity of skills. I would argue that it was always good to have a diversity of skills. It argue that it was always good to have a diversity of skills it always was but they didn't give you a radio show when you were 22 years old and they'll give you a podcast when you're 22 years old now right so i think it's just the access is different yeah yeah i mean it's it's a tough question i think with journalism funerals as we're having because we've had for the last couple of weeks we all kind of it we're all very sincere and then we all kind of lose our minds in the second half. And I was looking at the one, and I don't want this to be the quoted part of this, but Ed Werger was held up in a Peter King column, and he was showing Ed Werger's story. And it's sucky for Ed Werger, and I always liked Ed Werger, and I read him as a kid in the Dallas Morning News.

But these college students who were saying, well, if Ed Werger gets fired, gosh, or laid off, what do I do? My Edward just spent 17 years on television. Yeah. I mean, to me, that's, and I hate the way it ended for him. I didn't want it to end for him, but that's a great success story in this business that we live in. Right, man. If you college kid, if you get 17 years on a giant television, you did great. You did great. That's a success. The young soccer columnist, the young big 12 guy that got laid off that's tough you know that is a really tough one and that's the one where you go oh you know what am i what do my prospects look like and look as you know at the ringer here we're i think we have like 70 people that are working for us right now and it's that number is going to keep

going up we're always looking for talent and i don't think we're alone i i think there's a bunch of different places um ranging from gigantic to medium to small that are always looking for people that are going to stand out and stand out in some way maybe maybe their podcast stands out. Maybe the way they wrote a certain piece. Maybe they did a cameo somewhere. Everyone's looking. The whole thing of the sky is falling. There's not going to be jobs anymore. There's more content stuff out there than ever before.

20 years ago. There are more people writing about sports than ever, ever, ever. There are just going to be fewer of the sort of, you know, God-King type jobs that we've become accustomed to. Right. I mean, when I was talking like, I don't know, when I graduated grad school, 93, and I wanted to get a job in Boston,

it was like the Herald, the Globe, Boston Phoenix, Boston Magazine. That was it. You had four choices. I do think people can stand out Boston Phoenix, Boston Magazine. That was it. I had four choices. I do think people can stand out if they write something really good. It's going to be found. How many times have you seen on Twitter some piece from some website you've never heard of

or blog you've never heard of and you're like, wow, that's pretty good. Every day. So that's a bonus. On the other hand, there's so many people trying to stand out that it becomes hard to stand out. Totally. And that's the flip side of it.

And it doesn't make it easy for anybody who just lost a job, right? No. And if you're the one who just lost your job, being told about how great the new world is, and all the great opportunities you're going to have while your severance ticks out of your bank account, that sucks. And if I understand the scenario correctly, it's a tricky setup for a lot of these folks who have extended contracts and that they have to make a choice at some point between either going to work for a new place and presumably almost surely taking less money or not working, being put on the bench and,

and just collecting your, your salary. And that's a, that's a tough one. And we don't, I mean, we all think that this won't be the last round of laughs for ESPN, right?

Cause they're also hiring people too. It's not like, yeah, it's not like they're stripping across the board. Like they may, you know, they did stripping across the board like they've made you know they did all these laughs but then they also just bought the vertical sure if business if if the two things that are hurting them keep going the way which there's no reason they're not right people they're gonna have fewer subscribers yeah uh sports rights fees

uh let wake me when they go down maybe they will but wake tap me on the shoulder when that happens it's not happening. They're still going to be proud. They're going to have an economic problem. I mean, this is just the problem. It's going to be newspapers, right? You can staunch the bleeding, and then you still have a problem. Well, especially because you're going to have more and more competition

for those rights. I mean, you're going to have Amazon all of a sudden just jumping in and throwing money around, and then it's just a whole different dynamic. Amazon and what they've done with the Washington Post over these last couple years has been the most fascinating media story for me. Because three, four years ago, newspapers were dead.

It was over. That was it. Let's have the funeral. The only one left is going to be the New York Times. That was all stuff people were saying. And now we're in this different era where you could argue that Amazon's the future of everything

but especially what they've done with newspapers is now a model that people are following and the Wall Street Journal which I always make fun of Jason and Ben Cohen about that I can't read some of their pieces sometimes without a subscription but when did they go to the subscription model?

Like, what, four or five years ago? Well, there's always been a paywall to the Wall Street Journal since day one. Yeah, but I mean, whatever the model is where you get some, you get some stuff. Yeah, I mean, the sort of, quote, unquote, leaky paywall, I think it's been tightened up a few ratchets over the past couple years. I mean, the idea of the way it works here is that if I put a link on Twitter or Facebook, anybody can read that, and you can make a referral of it, too, which I think is actually a pretty good way of doing it,

because you're not cutting yourself off from the world. No writer wants to be read by fewer people. I mean, it's just absurd. You know, it's an ego-driven business, let's face it. And so you want as many people reading it as possible. But yeah, something has to give in terms of the subscription model. And I agree with the Washington Post. I mean, it's a great story, but let's not forget there's sort of something at the core of it, which is their spending. Their spending. Same thing happened here at the Journal

a handful of years ago in terms of just really making a reinvestment in journalism, putting butts in chairs. I mean, that's a really, really key thing. It's awfully hard when you see a news organization lay off a bunch of people and sort of say, you know, we remain committed to journalism as ever. I mean, how could that possibly be 100% true? We never – I trailed off with the Players' Tribune thing. That's a lot. We can end on that. You were talking about the Dion Waiters being the highlight with the Players Tribune thing. We can end on that. You were talking about the

Dion Waiters being the highlight of the Players Tribune. We all grew up with tell-all books that the guy didn't even write or look at and the author just wrote it. Now this is a website. What's interesting is, I don't know anybody who's been to the Players Tribune homepage. When we were talking about whether

a homepage matters anymore, I think Players' Tribune is an example of it strictly gets sent to you, forwarded. You find it on some blogs, NBA Reddit or something, and that's how you know about the Dion Waiters thing. Is this a business? Because it seems like now we have... I personally think this is one of the destinies for the undefeated. I think it eventually becomes ESPN's kind of version of the Players' Tribune.

Some as told to kinds of things. Yeah. I'm going to make a May 8, 2017 prediction. I think ESPN buys the Players' Tribune and combines it with the undefeated in the next 18 months. Wow. Yeah. Wow. And I think they try to own that corner, which is a pretty smart corner to try to own if you're ESPN, right?

You get the athlete relationships. You're controlling the narrative in a lot of ways. But I do think this is something. I don't know if it's a business for the Players' Tribune, because from what I've heard, so many players own stakes in the Players' Tribune that it's literally there's nothing left. Let's not forget the editor-in-chief, Derek Jeter.

He's probably going to be out of the newsroom quite a bit because he's got the Marlins deal. Matt Harvey, the city editor, he's suspended right now. He might be around the newsroom a little bit more. Kevin Durant's in the playoffs. Can you go under the fold of ESPN and still be what the players should be? A lot of athletes have beef with ESPN, let's not forget, you know, I mean, I think part of what has made them them is that they've been able to go out and create these relationships with these guys because they have no institutional

history. They don't have people feeling that they're burned, you know, potentially going to get burned or have been burned in the past by them. And that's how it's worked. So I don't know. Is there any publication where the quality varies so wildly between articles other than the players i mean all publications maybe i don't know we talked about some of the great ones but like tiger woods being mad at dan jenkins because dan jenkins wrote a fake interview with tiger woods as a column yeah and he wrote that in the players tribune i mean that was terrible that was awful yeah Tribune said a lot of misses. Yeah.

Yeah. There's stuff like, you know, David Ortiz writing about Dan Shaughnessy that's just kind of weirdly interesting, but it's like one sentence. And it wasn't like totally fact-checked, right? No, it wasn't. I just like the titles. What is Durant? What is Durant?

The executive editor? He's the, he's the herald. He's the, I think they promoted him. Mr. Sean, I think. No, he was managing editor for a while. I think they promoted him. The managing editor,

I feel, should be more kind of like a workman-like player, like a utility infielder or something like that. Because that's a, that's an incredibly valuable newsroom job

and it's not really a star job, though. He's kind of a glue guy, right? Magazine's glue guy. Yeah, exactly. He's a managing editor. So you don't think there's any growth

in this that it is what it is well i think the growth is weird because it all depends on getting really good stuff and do players if you go to players they say well i got a book deal so i don't want to really do that or i got my own podcast thing right yeah i think the other thing we're going to see is the weirdness the players to me was always that you could get all this under one roof as opposed to everybody's just like Steph Curry. I'm just going to go start my own thing. Right. Or I'm going to do this, all this through my Twitter account. I already got my own, I already got my own players to be. My question is why do you even need the players to be in? If you're anybody, it's so easy to just get, get whatever, you know,

I guess they have writers and editors that can craft the words a certain way, but it seems like we're heading to a point where any athlete can just get their own message out however they want it, whether it's on YouTube, Facebook, I don't know, Instagram, anything. And to be fair, the counter to all this is, oh, well, we're just complaining about the Players' Tribune because it's rendering us irrelevant. Like why send reporters into locker rooms to talk to anybody you know if these guys have their own channel now yeah but i'd say the upside if you're a player is lebron and lee jenkins right why does lebron go to lee jenkins to announce his thing because it's a better provoke me well

but it's a better the upside is a better written thing than maybe lebron's camp comes up with right or there's a it's rendered in such a way that makes people like LeBron instead of hate LeBron, right? That's part of it. It's old-fashioned, too. Print. I mean, it's print. I mean, that's the funny part of that relationship. And of course, LeBron's history with live television is a little bit fraught.

So print appears to be probably a better platform for him. LeBron, as long as he's had a couple swigs of champagne after a game seven, is a great interview. That's the key for LeBron. Well, I had a whole bunch of other stuff I wanted to talk about too, but we're out of time. That's it. We can talk about it another time.

What's your next piece, Brian? On the next episode of the Sports Reporter. We should have had parting shots oh my god i would have completely written one next time we call this sports reporters 2.0 maybe we make this like a monthly thing parting shots would have been hilarious but they would have had to been delivered in the same kind of the way they do it in minneapolis in minneapolis this week right and then the chuckling before the joke I always loved. Yeah.

Also the courtesy laugh from the other three panelists. That was always nice. I also was going to surprise Jason with some PED stuff because I know he's a huge cycling guy and has probably had more PED cycling thoughts than anybody. But we'll save that for another time. To be continued. Jason, thanks so much.

I'm glad you're on this podcast finally. Yeah, thanks, man. All right, Brian Curtis, thank you. See you soon. I'll see you in the office. You got it. Thanks to everybody out there. 10 years of podcasting for me.

Hard to believe. I'll have to tell this story maybe on a different podcast about how this whole thing started and how it kind of evolved into what it evolved into but thanks for listening thanks for spreading the word we're back on wednesday finally adam carolla breaking down fast seven and fast eight it's been two years in the making and uh and we taped it tate was it good it was great tate loved it yeah cobra that's coming yeah it's coming we there's probably a little too much

cobra in this podcast but that's fine but yeah we're gonna put that up tuesday night late so be ready for that one uh 901 p.m tuesday night take care thanks for listening to the bs podcast I'm going to see them on the way. So I don't have.