The Press Box - 25 for 25: Chris Ryan on the Birth, Death, and Rebirth of Blogging

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

Hello, media consumers! In our latest 25 for 25 installment, Bryan is joined by Ringer superstar Chris Ryan to discuss his come up in the mid-2000s blog world, how it set up the rest of his career and changed media forever, where the energy of blogging was dispersed, and whether there will be a revival of blogging. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Chris Ryan Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go! Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Bobby Wagner. I want to welcome you to the fourth installment of our 25 for 25 series. This one is called the Birth, Death, and Rebirth of Blogging. And it is with one of my favorite people here at the Ringer, Chris Ryan. Yeah, Chris Ryan was a blogger before he came to Grantland, before he came to the ringer, before he became one of the greatest podcasters on planet Earth.

And it has been so funny this week to go back and revisit his blogs because in a way, it helps explain why Chris is so good at what he does. I mean, I think even in an industry where we misuse adjectives all the time, Chris is brilliant, whether the subject is movies or television or sports or, or anything else, politics included. Yes, so that's part of what makes him great. But the other part of Chris, and I think this comes through in both podcasting and blogging, is this just spirit, this openness, this Chris Ryaness. It's almost hard to explain.

I remember when The Ringers started in 2016, and I started working in an office with Chris. We'd been at Grantland together, but we had never worked in the same space before. So I'm excited about that. And the ringer and Grantland before it had always had kind of no assholes as a guiding employment policy. I still remember those first days at the ringer. And Chris was so kind and he was so open and he was so genuinely enthusiastic without sizing you up in the way journalists do.

And I was like, oh my God, I'm the asshole. Anyway, here he is. We revisited old posts. We talked about old times. It's Chris Ryan on the birth, death, and rebirth of blogging. All right, am I here with the proprietor of Chauncey Billups. com? One and the same.

So we're going to talk about blogging, both your blogs and the general high blog era. Yeah. But first, I gave you a homework assignment to go read some of your old stuff. And I just want to know, what was that experience like? sobering and also a little bit depressing just because outside of the stuff that's on blogger that was on like you know that was on blog spots specifically a lot of the writing I did between 2003 and 2010 is gone I mean I have it on PDFs you can find it looking at internet archive but a lot of the corporate blogging jobs that I had those sites are gone and a lot of the people that I was

reading at that time, their sites are gone. And it is kind of bittersweet to be doing this podcast and memorializing this stuff. And I'm going to have to give people a six-step instructions to find any of them. And this is just because the corporate blog closed down and it vanished. Like I used to write for an MTV blog called Buzzworthy. And that was like probably the most quintessential blogging job I had in a lot of ways. Because every day I would define a blogging job being different than like writing a column or anything like Alice Speed in the sense that you would get into work 9, 10 a.m. or whatever was. And you literally would not have anything planned. Like you would sit down and you were someone on your computer writing for people on their

computers to entertain them. And then you would scroll through the internet and try and find any raw materials, a trailer, a highlight reel, a news announcement, a whatever. And that would be sort of the foundational pieces of your blogs for that day. But MTV that that blog I did was like every single day. It was just like, I have no idea we were right, but I have to write three to five times. And it would just be, oh, music video premiere, this announcement, this thing, this thing. And it's all gone. It's all, I have no idea. It's not even in the wayback machine. Wow. I got to say, it's always funny to read stuff people wrote in their 20s. The stuff I read that you wrote in your 20s sounds like you.

And not only does it sound like you, it sounds like a transcript of something you would say on a podcast now. Like the inflections, almost word for word. I think that that has something to do with the fact that I was just writing for myself. I had no editor. I was writing that way because

I was looking for a place to put my voice when I felt like everything else I was. was writing to impress an editor or to fit a house style. So when I was writing for magazines or if I was writing for any job that wasn't like literally writing for my my blog, I was like, okay, so like this is how they need this to be. Each place, blender, spin, they all had like kind of written or unwritten rules about how you had to write. And I didn't have that for for the blog. I guess that is the most pure distillation of my voice. It is kind of strange now to think about whether I've changed enough. I try to explain this to people all the time, but in old, old media, meaning 20, 25 years ago,

you did not come to a magazine or newspaper and say, I want to write like me. You said, I want to write like you and put just enough of me in there. And there was a lot of, to be completely honest, like anxiety, a fair amount of competition, envy when you would see someone who did seem to be idiosyncratic in those pages. And you're like, well, how come this person's allowed to express themselves. But I have to keep writing four puns in a row to like kind of get get the ball rolling. Yeah, my net graph has to be right up at the top. But then there's this, you know, the experimental genius over here who gets to like kind of riff for a page. All right. Let's set up early CR, the blogger. Okay. So this is the 2000s. Yeah. Where are you living and what are you doing?

I was living in New York City. I had moved there to work for Andy Greenwald, who was running Spins nascent website, Spin.com. So Spin Magazine was a music magazine that kind of had its heyday at least commercially during the alternative rock era of the 90s but was still a very powerful imprint at the time

and had a lot of the writers who I idolized wrote for Spin magazine, Charles Aaron, Chuck Closterman, John Dolan, Alex Papademus, all these people who were kind of circling around there. They were Siam Michael and all these people. And I just, all I wanted to do is be a music critic and write about music. So I moved to New York.

We were working on like 23rd Street or 30th, 3rd Street. I can't remember, but it was off Lex. There was like a small office. And I think I worked there on and off for about six months or something before the first.com crash. And then I started working at this record store downtown called Kim's. And in that time period, there was a kind of, thing that I this is it was basically what we do now with group chats but it was email list serves where you could start an email like a group email list and you would essentially write

pieces that would get blasted to like eight of your friends it wasn't it seems like an enormous definition of blast yeah but like you could um like i was i remember i was part of one that was for the band pavement but then like i started one because i can't I kept writing group emails that were basically early Chauncey Billups posts, and I would send them out, and people would respond, and there would be dialogue over the course of the day about, like, Kirk Heinrich or whatever. And then I think for some reason, I was like, rather than go through all these, like, sort of institutional steps of, like, putting it into this list serve and sending it out,

I'm just going to put it up on a blog. So, that's when I started Chauncey Billups in 03. So Chauncey Billups, for people who don't know, this is the guy Shaq thinks Coaches the Pistons. Yes. Yeah. He does not coach the mission. That's what Shaq thinks.

I found what I think is the first post October 2003. Uh-huh. You wrote a kind of NBA season preview. Yes. I'll quote from it here, tis is season for all of us to pray to the ghost of Dave de Busher that we get a Sixers Wolves finals. Right. Dreams are free, motherfucker.

Here are just one Irish-Jewish man's opinions on the upcoming campaign. Yeah. What kind of voice are you going for? I guess that's how I taught. It is how you talk. It was a character.

It was a degree of character. A character to a degree. Yeah. You could say that on a podcast now. Yes. Maybe not a Dave DeBusher reference. I'm not sure the ringer verse would totally grab that one if it wasn't a Bill's audience.

But you could say something like that and it sounds like you. It's also you can tell that I think I'm writing for a magazine, though. Like, why am I doing a season preview? You know what I mean? Like there's still like that part. of your brain that's like I'm I want to be part of like an institution you know but like I just felt like I no one was writing about basketball the way I felt about basketball except for Bill and Bill and I still have like enough of a generational divide that some of his references

weren't were not my references my references were mixtape hip hop gangster movies from that time period you know like like crime movies from that time period so I just felt like for is Bill doing teen wolf karate kid. Yeah, like his are a little bit more rooted in the 80s, probably a little bit more rooted in the 90s. I guess that's fair to say. I was going to ask you, Bill had been at ESPN for two years at that point. How much of an influence was Bill on you?

It was a religious experience. I mean, I defy anyone to tell me that they didn't just like basically sit around waiting for that column to post. And then some people would print it out to read it on the subway, you know? It was like, for me at least and for my friends, like especially the big columns of the year like draft diaries, anything that had like giving out awards based on movie quotes,

stuff like that. But even his just any NBA's thing that he would write, you would just be like locked in. We just didn't have that many that many people who had ever kind of broken the vase that way. And it was like, I'm going to speak to you in a normal voice,

but I'm going to do all this writerly stuff that feels really new. And it's an important point too. There was not that much NBA writing in the world. There just wasn't. I think hoops hype was sort of starting around then if it wasn't already. I can't remember when, I mean, a lot of the Chauncey Billups blog is essentially like, and honestly, if I was still blogging about the NBA, it would still be this way, was like looking at hoops hype, which is this aggregation site that looks the same as it did in like 2005, I think. And it was essentially just like

the Atlanta Journal Constitution beat writer. And here's the one paragraph you need to know about the Hawks that day. And then it would be something from the Denver Post. and something from the Washington Post, and you would just sort of like troll this, and I would just look for something stupid that George Carl had said. You know, I would just look for something funny in these gamers, injury reports,

a little bit of gossip. You know, the trade rumors thing hadn't really popped yet because I think trades were really hard to pull off at that time period. Guys were on like eight-year deals. You know, so it's a little more difficult. You mentioned people not writing about the NBA

in the way you wanted to read about the NBA. Were you reacting to some extent against mainstream NBA writing? Did you feel something was wrong with sports writing as you read it? I think that it was a time before Twitter so it was a period when

I think there was a secret language among NBA fans about what the culture of the NBA was and who these guys were and I was very much a person who was a huge fan of some of the historically like looked down upon eras of the NBA. So like

the Gilbert Arena's Washington Wizards, Alan Iverson on the Sixers. Like I, those were my formative teams. Like, I have a post in Chauncey Billups where I was reminded that I think like some of those Carmelo Nuggets teams with Kenyon Martin were some of my favorite teams. But these were teams that were not being celebrated

in mainstream media. And honestly, not even really talked about. It was also this weird thing where it was kind of hard to see games still. I mean, I don't remember when LeaguePass comes online, but I certainly didn't have it. So it was a lot of like going, to bars and seeing if the nuggets were playing and asking a bartender if they could put this on

at like 10.30 p.m., which was a very fun way to live in New York City. Your name's not on the blog anywhere. No, it never even occurred to me. I thought part of the joy of it was the anonymity and also, like, creating a character with the voice. So who is this person? It wasn't supposed to be mysterious or, like, I was trying to, like, throw anybody off the scent. But I imagine this writer as someone that was not just living.

in Brooklyn and going to Kim's every day to price arcade fire CDs. Are you sending this out, blasting it out to Andy and other people? I would probably tell, like, Andy, for instance, on G-Chat that I'd written something. But I think you could subscribe to, like, an RSS or something or get some sort of updates. I mean, let's be honest, like these are pretty sporadically updated. It's not like I was adhering to, like, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Time for a blog post. Yeah, no.

It was like when the meds kind of leveled out and I was like feeling really good. Like we got after it. Yeah. I have a vision of you sitting at Kim's just composing one of these things in your head. They would be pretty close to what was in my head. So like one of the problems I think I had early on in my writing life was that I believed like nothing should come without like a moment of epiphany or inspiration or like I can see it all. I just have to get it down on the page. And then I think the process of actually becoming a writer is when you professionalize that and make it into a little bit more of a like writing is actually what happens when you have nothing to say, but you're being paid to figure something out.

Uh-huh. It's 10 a.m. Time for an epiphany. Yeah, exactly. We've got to have another one tomorrow. Right. 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. and noon. Were you reading any of this stuff back then? I really wasn't.

Yeah. I was such a normie. Were you in Austin early 2000s or were you in New York? That was in New York. Okay. Shoemaker would actually tell me verbally what happened on Hoops Hype. Okay. I remember that happening in our apartment.

We also went to Kim. So if we ever invented a time machine, I want to find the time when all three of us were in there at the same time. Yeah. And didn't know each other. Yes. I'm like filing away La Tigra records probably like on a sleeping pill, but also thinking about Kenyon Martin and you two were next to me. It would be totally amazing. Another part of the fun of revisiting this.

There's text and then there's pictures. that Chris ripped from the internet to help tell the story. Yeah. And that was part of the fun of this year of blogging. Yeah, that was probably even more fun for me than the writing, because the writing would be whatever, but

the imagery would allow me to kind of make references outside of basketball or outside of hip-hop that I was making the connection between the sting and, you know, Jay-Z, but I didn't know how to say it, nor did it really warrant a paragraph.

But it was like, I'm just going to throw this picture here because that's how I'm feeling between these two paragraphs. Or this is a funny joke to offset how dark this has gotten or how, you know, whatever. And that was always like, I did that at Grantland, too. I would try to, I'd try to, like, throw random pictures in there. I'd get in trouble sometimes for, like, changing the color of, like, text and stuff. Like, I always thought, like, part of the fun about publishing on the internet was, like, nobody, especially when you weren't getting paid for it, it was like, who cares? Like, if you want to make it all caps, like make it all caps. Cultural references in here.

Here's some of that I just counted. This is a necessarily partial list. Sam Shepard, that was uttered in an imagined monologue by Rashid Wallace, by the way. Donnie Darko, the last Boy Scout, The Hunt for Red October. Yeah. This is you. That's my Mount Rushmore. Right.

That's your pantheon. So this is you. NBA. I'm spinning out movies I've seen that I'm watching now. That's Bill. That's like probably Bill. It's like that that sort of not, I don't think I had ever considered the possibility of using pop culture to explain sports or how I felt about sports or that my love for those things were the same. You know, it's like the same heart, same brain. Why would they be completely separated in the way you talk about them? Now it's obviously become like the way that we talk about them. We've really like kind of codified that. in a lot of ways. But I felt like I wanted just to have a notebook where all the shit I liked went.

And that was, it didn't matter that if it was about Rashid Wallace, I could still have the fact that I'd just watch the right stuff in there or whatever the Sam Shepard movie is I'm referencing. It's really interesting because, like, we will never be able to explain how Bill making that notebook and putting it at every office max for every future sports writer to pick up how revelatory that was at the time. It's very, very hard to describe.

Yeah. we were like, of course, you'd make a movie reference right after you do a basketball thing. It's like, no, you didn't. Yeah. That kind of wasn't allowed or was allowed only very, very sporadically. Well, I think it's like, it's worth mentioning because I think probably now this is where podcasting is, but it wasn't journalism. So it was, it wasn't, journalism wasn't really anything I actually aspired to.

I always felt super uncomfortable when I was doing reporting, you know. I never really felt like I was in my own skin when I'd have to go to a locker room or write a gamer. Like, I could do it and there was fun parts about it. And I certainly loved some of the experiences I had when I was doing more sports journalism stuff, especially at Grantlin. But it was different than that. It was somewhere in between fiction and sports writing, you know, or journal keeping or diary writing or memoir writing and sports writing. And it was also, because you, I can't emphasize this enough, because nobody was to telling you what to do and you weren't being paid for it,

it was almost the point was to be really expressive and not to worry about whether or not it was hitting or not. I mean, the idea of like, it never occurred to me to like, I never even wondered how many people would be reading it. As far as I knew, it was just six people. Let's talk about another CR blog here. Gabe said we're into movements. Runs from about 2006 to 2007.

Fader would call this legendary in the extreme, nerdish world of New York editorial esoterica. Did they? Put that on your business card someday. What were you trying to do here? This was a relatively rough period in my life, but it was a point where I was probably coming to terms of the fact that due to my own behavior and also just the limitations of my abilities in a certain realm of music writing that I had kind of ceilinged out.

So I knew that I pretty much knew that I was only ever going to be able to write music reviews. Like I just didn't really have a affinity for writing profiles. I don't mind editing them, but like I really find them difficult to write. And I, you know, features and pieces, like larger pieces were just really difficult for me to wrap my head around. And as, you know, writing music reviews was a way to make side money. And if you did it in a really, really mechanized way, you could probably make your rent writing. you know, one review for spin and a couple of reviews for some alt-weeklies, and you could get some blender stuff going and be in a, you know, have a bunch of blurbs on a list.

And between that, you might make $1,200 bucks in a month, you know, or $1,500 in a month. But it was starting to kind of get to a point where I was wondering whether or not I was going to be able to keep doing this. But I still had all this feeling about rap. And this was right about when Jay-Z did the Black album, which was announcing his retirement. and I think I, in my state of mind then kind of saw that as my retirement too, or not even my retirement, but just sort of the end of something in my life, but also in my relationship to like writing about rap and where I was living in New York and stuff. And I just started writing these emails to Jay-Z about the nature of his like retirement

and about the black album, which I still think is one of the greatest rap albums ever made. And it kind of just went in all these different. directions. And sometimes it would be pretty close song analysis, but all in caps, all with a lot of references, all with a lot of, like, you know, digressions. And then sometimes it would just be something about myself or, you know, there was a rapper that I was really, really fond of that I had gotten a chance to meet who was killed. I wrote about him. So it was just a place for me to write about rap again, the same way about basketball, like with no notes and no expectations. What was the response like?

I think people really liked it. I mean, the people who saw it, I think that, you know, it was... Who did you hear from? I mean, you could see the blog role on the side of it. It's basically like fantasy and John Caramonica and Sasha Verde Jones. This is around the time you meet fantasy. Yeah, I met Sean 03, I think, something like that. Like right when I was writing Chauncey and he was writing a blog but was working at stuff and then vibe.

And so... Both music, people with music critic aspirations around that time. Yeah. We had very similar. backgrounds. We both kind of come up being giant nerds, loving rap, loving movies, wanting to write about them. We idolized a lot of the same writers. We were in thrall to like the idea of living in New York and being like culture writers and going to the Bowery and seeing bands and coming home and writing about it and being up all night and yeah. Gia Tolentino, herself a blog veteran. Yeah. Wrote this in the New Yorker about blogs. She wrote that blogs can only be run by workhorses

who are creative enough to amuse themselves and distinct enough to hook an audience. And I do feel the self-amusement. I didn't have to worry about the latter for a while, but yeah, the self-amusement was just the only thing that mattered. I just feel you smiling through all these clothes. You're happy. Yeah.

And not like I made a funny smiling, but just like this made me happy to write this. Or the process of writing this was somehow. There was also like, I think there was always these like stages of these pieces too. It feels really strange to like talk about them like it's like the white album, but like I would publish something and then I would tweak it after I published it because I was like, oh, wait, there's like five typos here. Or that's not exactly

the way I want to say something. So they were living documents to some extent. Like I would leave them alone in their core, but I would tweak, you know, you can go back and revise a little bit. And it wasn't like I have to issue a correction because I changed around the word or I moved a paragraph or I screwed up the coding. Yeah. For the Youngs, before social media comes along, or at least social media as we would later know it. How did other blogs find you and how did you find other blogs? Oh, so there was this, like on the sidebar of your blog, there would be something called your blog role,

which would usually be either your friends or other blogs that were in the kind of same space that you were in. So for me, largely it was Freed Arco, was the blog that wrote about basketball at that time. But then also I had like when I was writing Gabe said it was mostly my friends. And you would, if I had written, writing a typical, like more normy blog, I would probably talk about a record or a movie or a game that I had watched. But then there would also be like a link dump where I would be like,

check out Caramanica writing about this and check out fantasy writing about that. This was a little bit more of a like, I don't know. Experience. Yeah, swan dive into the abyss. But like, but I did have a blog role and I was obviously a huge fan of other people writing at the time. And you're writing mostly music reviews and doing other things like that on the side. Professionally, yeah. I was writing for the voice fader. I worked there for a while. I would write for spin the review section, blender, vibe, stuff like that. I found this in an Atlantic piece. This was part of the part of your author bio. He currently lives in works in New York City and is working on a book about lethal weapon

due out early next year. Did that book get published? Did not get finished? It didn't get finished. Sadly, yeah. Oh my God. Can we bring that out under rene of books? I think there's an audience. You may have already said it on the lethal weapon. I think honestly, that was a really interesting experiment of trying to write about lethal weapon with the same kind of intensity that I was writing these little blog posts and writing a book length

appreciation of one film. I also didn't know... I mean, if you just did it straight, that'd be incredibly hard. But I was trying to make every chapter feel something. The Godfather, yes, but if you're writing like that. Yeah. Yeah, it's tough, man. It was tough. I mean, you know, a thousand words, I would be like,

this is also also like, you know, get a book, you could maybe get a book deal. I mean, not everybody got a book deal, but you could go out and try and get a book deal, but like, that didn't mean you knew how to write a book, which I quickly found out I did not. Turns out for a lot of people with book deals. You did other blog experiments after this? Yeah. So if you look, you can't, but my blogger account has something like a dozen blogs. Several of them are just, for instance, there's a blog that I think Greenwald and I had called 4,000 cuts, which is just four posts

and it stills from different born movies and lines of dialogue. There's a blog called Conclave So Real which is about when Ratzinger became Pope and I was going to write a white smoke kind of

Pope watch blog but he won like in the first day so it was like The Wojbaum happened pretty good. I was like oh well I've robbed the world of my conclave. Wow. Yeah.

And then, you know, there was a Steely Dan-themed blog. There was just a lot of working through some stuff. And then I got to write for other people's stuff. So I wrote a few posts for Fridarko. I wrote one piece that I was, like, really proud of for my buddy Pete's soccer blog called Don Rodriguez, where I wrote about Juan Roman Raquel May, which is probably still one of my favorite. things I've ever written. He was an Argentinian soccer player. And yeah, so I would, you would jump

around. Like, it was kind of fun. You would guess on other people's stuff. You could just start something and stop it. You could start something just to send it to fantasy and he'd be like, holy shit. And then you'd never do anything with it again. It was, yeah. We should know Free Darko. Yeah. Basketball of this period that has a similar aesthetic and similar intensity. Yeah. At least some of the time. I think a little bit more intellectually rigorous than I was. Got its name from one of of your posts on Chauncey Billups. Apparently, yeah. You had Darko Milichich, again, an imagined monologue that Darko was giving and it contained

the words Free Darko. Yes. So they said that's where we got the name for R. Yeah. It's unbelievable. That's really unbelievable. All right. Some of your favorite posts, I said maybe give me a couple that you were really proud of or

significant to you from this period. I guess there's two from the sort of second and last one I wrote on Gabe said, which was just kind of like a real cleaning of the mechanism for me, where it was just like my last real long post about Jay-Z. It's called Let Us Do What You Fear Most. And that's on Gabe said. It's like the second and the last post. I also wrote a eulogy for this rapper Stack Bundles when he died.

And that's called Go Now Brother, which is a deadwood reference. And yeah, so those were the two that I think I was probably most proud of on Gabe said. This is very strange to do this. The post I wrote about Raquel Mae for Blue and Cream slash Don Rodriguez, the soccer blog that my friends did. I always really liked the way that came out. I was reading Libra by Don DeLillo at the time. So I basically was ripping off Del Lillo or trying to while writing about a central midfielder.

This is an all about Lee Harvey Oswald, if people know now. Yes, that was his Oswald novel. And then the Chauncey stuff is more, it's just kind of fun to go back and look at it as like the days that I would just clearly be looking at Hoopsipe. And I think I did one where it's like the arc of every George Carl coaching stop and how it starts out. It's great. And then he starts whining and then it just explodes on impact, you know? So there's a bunch of stuff.

I did a draft blog breaking down people's outfits, which is very much a bill conceit. But, like, that was, you know, I've got one here where it's Redick and Adam Morrison and, gosh, who is that? Rudy Gay, their draft class really dates me that I'm looking at Rudy Gay's draft outfit here. Those are some pretty good draft outfits, if I remember correctly. Yeah. And then, you know, I tried to take a lot of that spirit of stuff into the Greatland into era and doing that on the Triangle, which is the Grantland Sports blog. Yeah. I mean, I don't think we can talk about Chris Ryan's bloggy without the Sea is dope.

one of my favorites. I'll do a dramatic reading here. This post was, I believe, from 2014-ish, probably around there. Every movie set on the sea is dope. White Squall is dope. The perfect storm is dope. Master and Commander is super dope. Plus your man, Paul Bettney goes out in catalogs turtles.

Again, could be said on a podcast today in your voice. I'll continue here. The hunt for Red October is flames. You wonder why they can't make a good Jack Ryan movie? Not enough submarines. I like every movie set on a submarine. I will ride a Lipazander's stallion for Crimson Tide. Yeah.

I also like U-571, K-19, The Widowmaker, and Das Boat. All that stuff is still true. I hadn't thought about in the heart of the sea in a very long time until I reread that post. That is a quintessential blog. That is, there are two trailers that came out. Those are my raw materials. Yes, I have nothing to write about today, but I really like submarines. And I think I just, I may have even.

said out loud to see is dope. I don't know, but I, that was probably a 40-minute all-in job. There we go. Yeah. And it works. And then I went to subway. Yeah, exactly. Do we want to talk about some blogs from the early odds? Yeah, sure. I mean, I would just say that the blogger that I loved the most during this time period was a guy named Gabe Delahey who wrote for the blog Video Gum, which was the pop culture, you know, TV and movie extension of the music blog stereo gum. And Gabe had one, Gabe was the same way in the sense that he would have to write three to five times a day. He did not have

a ton of original journalism that he was working off of like he's turning on his laptop, turning on his computer at the beginning of the day and writing for eight hours and just seeing where it got him. But had all these different recurring bits. He had a very like pugnacious but hilarious style of was, was part of the caps lock army would often go into that that zone and it's very sadly like that's one of those websites that are very difficult like you'd have to know the name of one of the posts I think to go back and find it on Google you can use the way back machine but it's it's very

difficult but that was a perfect example of what I'm talking about where there was honestly like a small army of people every day in New York who would take a train from Brooklyn into Manhattan and sit at a desk and they were. responsible for four hours of work that day and the rest of the day they would spend looking at the internet. And these blogs basically lived off of that traffic because this is before I think Facebook and SEO completely changes the relationship people have to like publishers and to writers where that then becomes, well, I'm coming to you because either it was in a feed or because I've Googled in the heart of the sea and this came up. You know, but.

kind of a surprise. You see right around that time period in probably after Grantland is when it changes a lot for me, but I think generally speaking when Facebook and SEO becomes a huge part of traffic, a lot of the

style on those sites gets flattened out a little bit, at least in the, from the display copy out. So a lot of the headlines become a little bit either intentionally provocative or comprehensive. Like there's not, I think Rem and I did a post at Grantlin once that was, the headline was just Belichick. And I don't even remember what the video was, but it was like literally a headline that said Belichick.

And then there was a video that might have been like a Hartnach's thing. And there was no text. And even that, I think somebody was like, what are you doing? You're too weird for Gratlin. Yeah. Yeah. But it all gets kind of ironed out there. This is an era when I think people were just going to Gawker and they were going to video gum and stereo gum and

pitchfork and blogs that they had on a blog role. A lot of that stuff, I think I learned a lot about just like basic blogging from a lot of the tech blogs that were around back then because those were

operating in a world where there wasn't even like a pros to graduate to. So some of those tech blogs become institutions into themselves. And they were kind of, obviously they had a facility with sort of coding properly,

like, you know, making things look nicer than they normally would. So I was, like, aware of a bunch of those. I guess Gizmodo is sort of the one that jumps out. You know, defamer was a big one reading Mark LaSanti on defamer. I'm here in L.A. Yeah. Yeah. So there was like always, there always felt like there was something to read.

And because it was reading and not just scrolling, you know, the Internet took a little bit more time to get through. So your experience of it was like a little bit more based on whether or not you like the voice of the person. And you know, I'm sure you remember. Like, do you remember like when different editors would take over different blogs and be like, oh, I like this person more or less than the last person or whatever? It was jarring. Yeah. It was just like somebody else was hosting a podcast. Yes. Just completely changed. You're like, ooh, the vibe's a little bit different in here. Yeah. Yeah. We talked to you about a few other things that were cool about this period. You talked about the voice and being able to write in your voice rather than an institutional voice.

also like blogged him accommodated volume shooters. Yes. It's really interesting because if you go back to old media of the early odds, like you would write a piece. If you're like, oh, I want to write another piece for you. I'm not talking about being at Gawker or something. If you're just like, I want to write another piece for you tomorrow, they'd be like, oh, well, you've had your say.

Thank you very much. Please come back in a couple of days or maybe even next one. Well, hell, I mean, for the monthlies, you were basically, you were six weeks out from even talking about that. you know, once you filed something and it would go through its closed process or whatever, I mean, to be completely honest, like magazines back then, when they would

close, then it would be like 10 to 12 days of hanging out before they got going on the next one. So I'm sure that wasn't the case for everybody, but it did feel that way where it was like, okay, man, what's my next assignment? And you were also playing the like, how do I do this by seeming cool?

You know, I don't want to be too thirsty here, but I also need money. send that email when it's the best time. Yeah. It's interesting. The other thing I was thinking about, too, is I was reading a lot of political blogs during this time because there's a whole political blogosphere coming up. Andrew Sullivan, everybody.

Andrew Sullivan. I was at the New Republic when he started that blog in 2000. Yeah. And I was kind of his like chosen fact checker and researcher, chosen by him because I was just sitting there one day when he walked by. Not anointed, but just more like. Yeah. And he was the opposite of almost every blogger in the world because he at that point was

getting paid tons of money to write anything. Right. he could write the word the and probably make five bucks. Right. I mean, anything, New York Times Magazine, I just remember like, why are you doing this?

Why would you want to have this outlet to write about not only politics but Madonna? I remember writing an early post about that. It just like it just made no sense to me at all. And then, of course, it became the Andrew Sullivan business. Yes. Which we'll get to here in just a minute. I also thought of early blog here I'm reading Ezra Klein in the blog,

I think he was at the American Prospect. And I just remember it was John Edwards, you know, politics blog. And then it was like, here's my recipe for shrimp that I'm checking out this weekend. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember that again, being such a normie, that being so jarring to me. Being like, wait a second.

Yeah, Tana Hossi's blog on The Atlantic was like that. It was a little bit later. But that also would be like, here's the Friday hangout post. Jump in the comments and just say what you're doing this weekend. And what are we reading this weekend or I'm going to listen to this record. But then also like 11 posts about, you know, politics and race and culture. Absolutely. Yeah.

There was also an answering post thing. Maybe this was largely in the politics blogs here. They're probably in culture too. Somebody would write something. It'd be like, here is my response. Oh, yeah. On another blog. And then here's my response to the response.

And it would just go on and on like people were founding fathers, printing up leaflets and sending them to each other. Yeah. That would just be a thread now. It would. Yeah, that would just be a thread in Twitter. Yeah, just be a tweet and then another tweet and another tweet. That was a big thing. We're going to go back and forth in those days, which I thought was really, really fun.

Yeah, I mean, there was a strange formality to all of it. You know, there was like, I saw what you wrote, sir, and let me allow me to respond. Yes, the book you described does not resemble the one that I actually published. Yeah. All right, so whenever journalists declare the death of something, we often do that before the thing is really dead. It's in that kind of lock-in white lotus state where it's floating in the water, right? Yeah. But if we can overstep our bounds here and declare a death of blogging, that or first,

death. That would be 2010's when social media really gets roaring and sucks up a lot of the energy. Yes. I still have a very clear memory at Grantland when James Winston the crab legs thing happened,

I think, or whatever, something happened with James Winston. Basically, what I'm trying to get at is like the idea that I remember the time when it was like, no, we have to write about this at 10.30 p.m. Because Twitter was exploding over it. And it was like we can feel the story like leave the station without us on it.

So even for blogs, the world, which we're moving faster than old media. Now the world's moving too fast for the blog. I mean, when you're writing a personal blog with no financial interest in it whatsoever, you can just do whatever you want. When you're writing for a company, you're supposed to have hours that you work. I remember those Gawker blogs did have night bloggers, but even within reason, like they wouldn't, you know, they would stop writing it. 10 p.m. or whatever. This is stuff where like, you know, NBA trades happening in opportune times or newsbreaking at in opportune times and the feeling that you would have as you were looking at Twitter and being like, well, we're just leaving money, quote, unquote,

on the table. And so I really think that that had a profound impact on the feasibility of writing blogs. Because if you can just do a tweet, that's basically like, I'm planting my flag in this and here's a follow up. And now you see, you know, it gets into the 2000. mid-2010s up into the 2020s with Woge where it's like Wojj and Schefter are essentially blogging on Twitter all day long. Now they're not necessarily writing personal expressions of their own inner soul

and making pop culture references, but there is no need for that to be published anywhere else. And clearly ESPN was like, it's better here faster than it is on our turf. On Twitter's blog, as it were. Yeah. That's so fascinating. I also think you just have a ton of the blog talent sucked into the mainstream media machine by the 2010.

We're just doing basketball. Ethan Strauss, Tim Kato, Kevin Arnowitz, like all these people start to get jobs in mainstream media organizations. All the Gawker Media alumni, you know, or go off to other places. I mean, Zach Lowe and Rob Mahoney both wrote the same, I think they wrote the blog on the NBA blog on S.I. They were the guys who were writing like two, three times a day. Another feature this year, by the way, the big publication says, oh, we have a blog. Yeah. Right?

Oh, we have our own blog. You know, it's where we loosen our ties a little bit. We've got to publish some stuff that might not make the pages of the glossy magazine. Yeah, there was always a little bit of front of the book, back of the book tension with that. I think even going back to when we were at Spin and then, I mean, even at Grantland, it was kind of like, are there some people who just blog and some people who only write 4,000 word pieces and will. the Twain ever meet. But I think Grantland was pretty loose.

Like you would get people back and forth everywhere. I remember I had 4,000 word pieces and then a blogging responsibility. I'm pretty sure you edited them. Like I had to write a college football blog every week.

You remember that? It was like, Chris, and then I'd be like, Brian, you want to wait for NBA shoot around on a Wednesday night? The Mavs are playing. Wait, what?

Yeah. Mavs are playing. That sounds fun. For fingering the killers a blog to mine. I also think podcasting somewhere in this. Yeah, of course it is. Because it's way easier.

You know, it's way easier. but it's also kind of the same thing. Yeah, I think it has a lot of... There are often with Andy specifically when we're doing the watch, it feels like writing a blog. Because I think that that podcast is kind of taken over 30% of our relationship.

You know, that's where we see each other physically, probably the most, is in the studio. And we'll kind of come in and 10 minutes before the pod, look at Vulture and the Hollywood Reporter and see if anything, recent is jumping out worth talking about to do a top of show about before we do like an episode breakdown. And that is the same prep you would do as you got into the office and we're

like, all right, guess I got to look at ESPN.com and see if anything happened that I can write about. If I can pick a rebirth of blogging, there's no less fake than the death of blogging, probably pegged around 2020 when Substack really starts gearing up. There's a couple of factors there, too. first there's the die-off of journalism jobs or at least mainstream journalism jobs there's this idea that scale is kind of going out right that you're not going to make something like old HuffPost or the New York Times

you want to make something a little bit smaller but then mostly it's just because substack starts paying money to people to come right for them I also think that the infrastructural decay of the actual experience of reading things on the internet is both in terms of like

the toxicity that you might encounter, but just like pop-up ads and like this site froze while I was trying to scroll down and it didn't navigate writer. Their search is broken. And just to have that clean, pure, if I want to read this writer, all of their stuff is on this site and it's clean. And it's a good experience. And if they're linking to other people, I can do that. You know, I mean, I think that that definitely gave it a lot of life. But God bless everybody. But it's, it's an essentially it's like a much more financially incentivized model, whereas I think this was a side job and a fun thing when I first started it. I don't know that I would write a blog for fun anymore, you know? Yeah. It is funny to see people like Matt Iglesias and Ethan at, you know,

and also just kind of return to blog them by way of substack. Well, I do think it is a form that is durable and suits certain writers. Like you were talking about volume shooters. I've always idolized them. Going back to like Ben Hecht, like I think, like, you know what I mean? The original volume show. No, but he was.

I mean, he was doing crime stories. He was doing crime reporting, and then he was writing columns, and then he was writing screenplays, and then he was writing short stories. Like, I like, I like taking lots of shots. And so it suits my personality now to know I can get him again tomorrow,

or I can get him again in a couple hours. And not, my brain is not wired to be like, I've been working for nine months on this thing that I'm about to say. It's just way easier for me to be like, I've been working for about six hours on this, and now I'm going to do it. And once I'm done, the next one comes up. Oh, that makes total sense.

I also feel that in this kind of partial return to blog, and there's a little bit of, I can do my thing, but not at a mainstream media organization anymore. I don't need to carry that passport in my hands to validate me somehow. And again, it's upstack. It's not like, hey, it's my, a little blog spot thing for fun, but it is different, I think.

Yeah, but also think about how different it is to read Ethan Strauss on his site compared to Ethan Strauss. Well, he would, you know, I don't think he was really writing

this kind of stuff for ESPN, but like you would have to go find Ethan within the canyons of ESPN.com. You know, that was always like a grant land issue is like what's in the carousel, what's getting linked out? Like, are we getting out

above the parapets of the people at ESPN.com know that this is like a sister or cousin's site and that they can come read this stuff. And at least with the substack, it's like once people have that, they're through the door, there's no ambiguity about what they're here for and you're giving it to them right away.

Yeah, you're emailing it to them. Yeah. Oh, my God, try to find something on ESPN.com now. I'm going to give you 60 minutes to find a single byline. All right, Chris Ryan, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks so much for having me,

this trip down memory lane, yeah. That is the press box. I'm Brian Curtis, but I sue magic by Bobby Wagner. I want to take this moment to invite you to listen to our three previous installments in our 25 for 25 series. We had Nick Wright on to talk about the future of sports debate. We had New York Times columnist Jamel Bowie on to talk about the future of the opinion columnist. That was a great conversation as well. And Joel Anderson and I made a visit to the media graveyard, publications that died in the 21st century or attained zombie status.

We've got to do a sequel to that too. Joel, speaking of which, is back Thursday for some more talk. I think we will poke into the NFL draft. And Shoemaker is back next Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then.