The Press Box - Andrew Cuomo, COVID-19 Content, and Sports Media Layoffs | The Press Box

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss the rise of Andrew Cuomo (01:00), the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (18:00), how you and your non-news website can continue to create content during the coronavirus pandemic (20:00), and sportswriting during this national emergency (32:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly and welcome to The Ringer Podcast Network. We hope The Ringer can provide you entertainment and companionship during this time. So as always, feel free to check out The Ringer.com, where we're still covering the latest in sports, pop culture, tech, and media. And the Ringer's YouTube channel can provide endless amounts of entertainment. You can find that at YouTube.com slash The Ringer. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of The Ringer here. Lots and lots of great stuff to get to today. David and I will talk about how you and your.

non-news website can continue to churn out content during the coronavirus pandemic. We'll talk about the pain sports writers are feeling while the games are canceled. All that plus the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, I want to start with a man in the news, more than a man, really, someone who's in charge, who has been cast by questing Democrats in a lovelorn media as the leader we need now. David, I give you New York governor, Andrew Cuomo. I don't even have the words to express my admiration for them. FDR always had words.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear. To me, that says it all today. Everyone is afraid. Everyone is afraid. You think these police officers are not afraid to leave their house? Do you think these nurses are not afraid to go into the hospital? They're afraid.

But something is more important than their fear, which is their passion, their commitment for public service and helping others. That's all it is. It's just their passion and belief in helping others. And that overcomes their fear. And that makes them in my book just truly amazing, outstanding human beings. So what you heard there, David, was kind of an elevation because before Andrew Cuomo was doing FDR at those daily press conferences, there he was actually doing FDR, the quotes and everything. He has become our kind of national fireside chat, has he not?

Yeah, I mean, there's something very comforting, certainly, about his presentation. And I think it's only fitting that in, you know, the modern age, the fireplace has been replaced by the PowerPoint presentation. But there's something incredibly comforting about it is just sort of matter-of-fact style the, just sort of like just the utter simplicity of that like San Sera font and just like how and the whole and just the way he, I mean, honestly, let's be real. Very little of what he says goes beyond just like, you know, your high school senior. like your high school senior doing a persuasive argument assignment, right? But just, but his presentation is such, his character is such that it just becomes,

it just, it transcends. And everything from that clip you just, you just played was just a plus material, but material that could have applied to, you know, 99.9% of, of national catastrophes that we've,

this country's been through. But there's just, but it's just the plainness of it. And it's, it's weird. It's not like Joe, it's like Joe Biden's out here, you know, and so many Democratic candidates who have been running on this campaign of sort of return to normalcy. But I don't think there's really a normalcy to speak of in America. I don't think necessarily quoting FDR does more than pay lip service to what. I do think that there's a return to, I don't know, just a

sort of simplicity. And Cuomo has a sort of hard nose simplicity. I think that's really hard. I mean, that's really just a perfect match for this moment. Write down to him saying, this is my personal opinion and having the PowerPoint presentation say personal opinion before he gives his opinion. I mean, could you stand in starker contrast to a president for whom everything is, you know, reflected through a lens of personal opinion? So there's two things there, right? There's the anti-Trump part of it, as you're alluding to there. What Donald Trump has done is hold these vain, glorious press briefings that are, filled with lies. See his exchange this weekend with Yomish Alcinder.

Joe Biden has not really done many interviews until this last week. He's sort of still struggling to gain visibility. He's kind of ducked taking a very hard line anti-Trump position. Got asked by Chuck Todd last week if he thought there was blood on Trump's hands. He responded, I think that's a little too harsh, right? Which is what a lot of Democrats are not looking for at this moment. So Cuomo has sort of stepped into a vacuum. And it feels like that lane for the anti-Trump of the coronavirus was going to be there. This is one of those roles that the media was going to look to cast no matter how all this turned out. And it just so happens that he has placed himself in that position. The amazing thing I want to say about it first and it's most obvious

thing is nobody liked Andrew Cuomo before this. He was a bully. He was ideologically squishy. He was that sort of old school establishment politician that had fallen out of favor, at least for Democrats online. Somehow, and help me think this through, when viewed through the lens of a national emergency like this one, all those characteristics have either,

become assets or at least we're not seeing them in such a negative light. How did that happen? Well, I mean, I don't think that sort of the anti-Quomo contingent has totally disappeared. There was a, you know, a rather powerful piece in current affairs. It's called Stop Trying to Make Andrew Cuomo happen that referenced all of the sort of pro- Andrew Cuomo stuff that's been going on. But, you know, what was kind of most shocking to me about that was, I guess, in an age where our, our liberal torchbearer is Joe Biden. Or we're even like, you know, the, you know, if you're the Bernie Sanders of the world have sort of glaring flaws in their gun control

votes or whatever that you can point to. Cuomo is the sort of, you know, in the sort of cabaret seat of, you know, New York governorship. His negatives are much more sort of ephemeral. And I think you put it pretty directly. Now, listen, you can easily pin down some real sketchy behavior. going on in the back rooms when it comes to, well, everything. I mean, down to like marriage equality,

other things that he touts as personal victories. But as far as like his record, it's all just sort of like, well, nobody likes him, you know? I mean, he's actually just a bully. He's, you know, his, he's only in it for himself, that sort of thing. Which is maybe the greatest master's stroke of this whole thing is making it feel like he just sort of fell backwards into the, this role as America's governor, right?

That this was all just sort of incidental. And he would have been doing this even if nobody were watching. Being able to portray that as sort of the background of this, I think, is the most, is the greatest success of the whole thing. Yeah. And I think to some extent, a certain portion of the public wanted the Democratic bully. That's who they wanted. They wanted not the Trump bully who was lying and, you know, was pumping up his own role in

this and and giving out wrong information battling with me. They didn't want that. They wanted to take charge Democratic guy. They wanted the guy who said, as Cuomo did last week, if someone wants to blame someone, blame me. There's no one else responsible for this decision. That's when he was closing down all the bars and restaurants and stuff in the state. He said on Friday, we're going to go out and kick coronavirus's ass, which is, which is, you know, not exactly a specific medical term, but there is a sort of, you know, rallying kind of effect in that. I tell you the weird thing about watching him do these briefings and appear in other places, he's actually made me like Chris Cuomo more, which I didn't think was possible at all.

And go on. Well, because, you know, Chris Cuomo to me was always just like on a regular Tuesday night. You'd flip by that and go, man, this is just so overheated. and tonally bizarre. And then at the very beginning of this crisis, or at least the beginning of when a lot of people started to get their minds around this crisis, he started having his brother on.

And they were doing this thing that seemed like a too cute Cuomo on Cuomo thing and talking about mom and dad and all that stuff. But it kind of works. I got to say, it's not bad. And the Chris Cuomo style of, I'm the truth teller, the scenery chewing truth teller

works a lot better when the whole nation is plunged into crisis than it maybe did during a simpler time. Yeah, I mean, listen, I have married into an Italian American family that is

just literally like separate from the coronavirus crisis, but almost contemporaneous to it. I mean, just starting a couple of months before has just been totally like enraptured by the fact that they all finally admitted to each other

that they're like big Cuomo heads. Like they're all, they all just have like an unnatural sort of like, wait, why am I thinking about Andrew Cuomo right now? Or why am I like, like, like why is Chris Cuomo?

Like, they, they, they, they love them both and they don't have any reason why. I'm sorry, I missed that conversation around your dinner table. I don't would like to be present for that way.

It was quite a conversation. But, uh, I do think that there's something very, there's just something really appealing about, about, about both Cuomo's. But I agree the sort of,

it's not even not so it's partly the tone but more of the tempo of chris quomo's show that it just felt a little bit like i don't know you're right overheated is the right word it's sort of just like the beat like like the like the they borrowed the metronome from nancy grace or something and just like they can't quite get into a regular news cadence but um he's in pandemic mode all the time yeah now now the pan now he's found a moment that suits his his his tempo um and listen i mean just to go back on like them being together. This wasn't them together, but there was a moment during

Andrew Cuomo's presser, I think yesterday where I just like turned, I left the room, came back and he was talking about Italian families gathering around the dinner table and how it was more to get people together than just to eat the food. And I watched for a minute

to try to watch him circle it back around. I'd missed what the point was entirely. But I was like, I'm enjoying hearing this guy talk about red sauce. Like this is, this is great stuff. There's just something really, there's just, it's just, it's just, there's, I can't, I can't even think of a situation. I mean, I can't even think of a counter example. This is, this, this, this is a perfect moment for him and, and, and yeah, for both Cuomo's really. So the bit about talking about family and, and, and putting in those terms, I think that's another reason he's been able to step into this vacuum is emotional leadership, right? This is, this is performative emotionally. Every time a politician opens their mouths, it's performative. I get that. I'm not, I'm not saying it. But as you and I've talked about on this podcast,

many times, Trump is not even doing the simple performative stuff. Yeah. Saying it's going to be okay. We're going to figure this out. You have people that are working and fighting and working as hard as they can for you, America. Maybe because in the case of the Trump administration, they're not. But he has not done that. Alex Shepard had a big piece in the new republic about the canonization of Cuomo, a good and appropriately skeptical piece, I think. But he hit on this. He says, Cuomo has talked about missing one of his daughters who was quarantine after possibly being exposed to the coronavirus and the blessing of getting to spend time with another daughter over the past two weeks he has worried about his own elderly mother

those are the kind of conversations that actual people are having about coronavirus right now right they are talking like you and i do about what's it like to suddenly spend all day every day with your kids what's it like to worry about your mom who's far away who you can't get on a plane and go see because that would actually be the worst idea for everyone involved. And just doing that through his own lens and just acknowledging, I think that that's the way people are talking about the virus. That's part of what's been so effective. Yeah.

There are downsides of this, of course. Cuomo, even during the crisis, has made decisions that seem unwise. He waited longer than other governors like Gavin Newsom out here in California to close those non-essential businesses, use the state's prison labor to produce hand sanitizer. He has carried on this bizarre feud with Bill de Blasio. Apparently

they have taken the Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, blood feud that will never end slot of American life, just going on and on. And then Shepard, who I mentioned his new republic piece a second ago, he talked about how a lot of this is actually performance, right? This is

what we're grading this guy on. He says, the president's admittedly disastrous press conferences and tweets get as much outrage as his administration's myriad failures to prepare the country for an inevitable outbreak. In Cuomo, the bruiser striving to be a father figure, the press has found the perfect counterpoint, right? Again, to my point, we were looking at some level for the performance of leadership in a time like this. Cuomo was smart enough, you know, in the right place, the right time enough, whatever it is, to deliver it. And Trump wasn't.

And that is partly what we're talking about when we seek to canonize Cuomo. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, Cuomo's been, by the way, before we get too far away from the family stuff, I do not want to, I do not want to fail to admit his little moment of Zen-esque looking on the bright side segments in every press conference where he does. just encourages us all to find a piece of joy in our day or whatever. That's, I mean, just, but there is a very fatherly thing about that too, right? Where it's like, you know, your dad, your mom, they can be fountains of great wisdom, wonderful advice, but that always comes hand in hand with some just real, like, shinsy shit, too,

you know? And I think that Cuomo has been at this for a long time, right? I mean, this has been this level of this level of, this level. of national prominence, yeah, has been the goal and has been, you know, for a long time and for his entire life, you're right. And I think that, that it's worth pointing out,

I mean, just in a very, you know, general political sense, sometimes you age into this stuff, right? I mean, it doesn't, even if it's all handed to you, maybe there's a different moment for everybody. And this is certainly the moment for him. He found a sort of, you know, he found a, he's found a rhythm and he's found, just like his brother did with his TV show,

that works really well for what we're doing right now. I mean, what we're all going through right now. And I think that there's, to talk about, you know, compare to the president again, I mean, I think that pointing out, I think that there's a level of dissatisfaction, not just fear, but dissatisfaction that we all fear

that he gives voice to in a really interesting way, right? I mean, there's, again, a very fatherly piece of that. It's the kind of grumpy dad thing, but it's not just we're scared. We don't know what to do. We need to find somebody to tell us it's going to be okay. we need somebody that's going to be like, here's why it's dumb for every state

to be bidding on ventilators against each other because this immediately becomes a thing you can like talk to your friend about. You know, this is a conversation that we can all engage in. We can all just be like, yeah, that is dumb, you know? And that's a sort of community that in the Twitter era, and even in the world that exists outside of social media,

that's very much our culture right now, right? It's just like finding a common gripe. And we're all sick is not a gripe. It's a malady. I mean, that's a, that's a, that's a, you know, a terrible situation. But he's managed to find a way to make us all to bring us together with happiness, with gripingness, with, with, with, with, with rosy-eyed looks to the potential for this thing. We can all paint a house that we've been made, paint our house like we've been meeting to for six months or six years. There's a, there's a real sort of magic of the moment that he has. And it's, it's, uh, you know, it's pretty incredible to watch. Did you, uh, as soon as you saw cable news. carrying these Cuomo press conferences live. Did you set your timer for 10 minutes before we started getting why isn't Cuomo the 2020 Democratic nominee takes? Yeah. I mean, I think part of Cuomo's appeal at this point is sort of that he's not that guy, right?

I mean, that even though this is clearly his lifelong path, his lifelong trajectory, you know, he didn't get the Jillin-Brand Senate spot, you know, even though he was much discussed for that. He's had some setbacks. He wasn't, this hasn't been, it hasn't been a yellow brick road the whole way, at least in terms of elected off, at least in terms of winning everything or, you know, getting everything that he was mentioned for. And he was certainly mentioned as a potential nominee. Not this isn't the first time. But, you know, if he comes out looking rosy at the end of this, I think partly it'll be because we get to have that conversation about him. Why not him? Without him being, without him having actually been an option.

him being an option would have been probably the worst thing for him. Totally right. All right, David, time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod. David, we've done a couple of different versions of the thing where the despicable person gets the coronavirus. The last one was Harvey Weinstein. Today's winner and not to put them on the same level at all. but Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan.

It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, the coronavirus has tested positive for James Dolan. Thanks to bam at a biostan. You must be seen to be fully appreciated. David, you know all about the run on toilet paper that's been going on at grocery stores. There was a CNN headline this week that read toilet paper makers colon,

what we are dealing with here is uncharted. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. Actually, it's uncharted. Thanks to Marv. And finally, David, a tweet from entrepreneur. I don't know what entrepreneur is, but they had a big tweet this week. The tweet read, quote,

scientists say they can recreate living dinosaurs within the next five years. Wow. some funny responses. That's all we need. More Fox News viewers. Send them all the stimulus money now. And I like this one.

I've seen this movie. It didn't end well. Oh, wow, that's great. Thanks to our pal, Zach Brooks. If you thought that even in a time of pandemic that comedy finds a way, congrats, you made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. David in the notebook dump,

let's say that you're operating a website during this trying time that is not strictly a news site. you're not going to be America's go-to source for coronavirus news. What do you do? How do you stay relevant content-wise? Well, you and I looked around the internet and here today, we can offer a public service by presenting the COVID-19 content checklist.

Yes. We're going to alternate here. I've got the first one. Number one on your content checklist. Make a list. make a list of anything. I was looking at the athletic today. Top 100 sports movies of all time.

Top 100. Are there 100 sports movies, period? Also on the athletic, the play-by-play broadcaster hall of fame, right? At this time, at this time in our nation, we need to finally decide who the best play-by-play broadcasters are of all time. We've got lists at the ringer, of course.

What do you, make of list mania during this period of American life? Well, okay, first of all, there's kind of an oddly obscene comfort in it, right? I mean, not only obscene in the sense that like, how can we be this deep into internet culture that we are like, that lists are the most common part of our internet language, right? But it is. I mean, that's true.

It also relies heavily on engagement, right? I mean, at the ringer, we're doing a bracket for the greatest TV show character of the century. Yes. I mean, I'll just say that the engagement is skewing a little bit young right now, but, you know, Al-Sweringen's losing to know-ho Hank from Barry, which is kind of wild. But, I mean, that's, you know, it's a bracket that's inherently engagement, right? I mean, people are voting for the winner and to bring us, you know, I mean, this sounds so corny. To have something to bring us together at a time we're all literally. separated by walls and windows and miles and whatever else, I think that's helpful.

Or it's meaningful. And then, you know, if nothing else, it's a reminder. I mean, when you're ranking all the things, you're inherently like looking backwards, right? And that's, and looking into the past is obviously a little bit more appealing than looking out the window right now. So we're like watching television. Here's the one type of list I find a little bit oppressive. A hundred books to read while you're.

in isolation. A hundred movies to watch while you're in isolation. You and I are both at home during this whole thing with our kids. We are doing a couple of things. We are working full time, full time and a half in your case. And then we are also working full time as parents. basically not only doing parenting stuff that we might not be doing at 11 o'clock on a Tuesday morning, but also basically teaching our kids school because they're not in school. Right. So I am the geography teacher. By geography, I mean, hey, sunny boy pointed a spot on the globe and let's talk about it, right? You know, that's my idea. So you and I are also both privileged. Let's just put that out there. Right. We're not in some hardship that so, so many people are. But I've never felt a bigger

difference between me and a lot of people that are otherwise like me than I do when I see one of these lists. I don't have more time now that I'm at home. I have much, much less time. I'm not going to watch a hundred movies. It'd be awesome if I could watch one movie and still get all the stuff I need to get done today, done. Absolutely.

And listen, from the editorial from the creative side too. I have all the respect in the world for my coworkers who are like, well, my normal beat is not, you know, is out the window right now. So let me figure out a way to like fill all that time with constructing a list or a bracket or whatever else. Dude, if I get one less thing to do today than I had to do yesterday, I feel like I'm doing it's a incredible mitzv for my entire family that I get to, you know, hang out with my kids in the yard for five extra minutes. All right, David, do you want to hit number two on the COVID content checklist? Well, this is sort of related to what we talked about in the last one, but it's, I mean, in terms of the historical aspect, it's revisiting an old thing. And we all have, I can speak specifically for the ringer, we all have troves of old things, of great works from the years past. And this is the immediate version of it that is recycled is the wrong word. I believe the term of art that people use now is upcycling. but we put so much time and effort into writing feature stories

that are literally gone 48 hours later. I mean, the internet has like no Twitter has no sign of a PC road 4872 hours after it was written. We can revisit those old things. We can recirculate them. We can give them new sunlight, but it's not just that.

It's revisiting things that are even older than that too, right? I mean, it's, you know, we can all, we can get together. You can get on Zoom with your friend and watch WrestleMania 1. I can speak to that a little bit. You can, you know, drop, you can text message somebody and talk about, gee, I've got to, you know, I finally got into the collected works of Michael Connolly. Or when Ross William, pick your guy. There's, there's so many things that we can revisit now that just slowing down life.

And also, this sounds, again, corny, sort of taking life a little bit back to its basics gives you the opportunity to do. I think that's what it is, right? Because usually when you revisit an old sports game or an old figure from the pop culture past, part of what you're playing on there or what's being played on in your brain is this idea of, oh, when I listen to this band or when I watched this show, I was in my teens, right? It was the 80s. It was the 90s. Like, and you zoom back to that period in your life and that makes you happy.

What's happening here is it's zooming you back to just pre-coronavirus. that could be something that happened in December. And you're just saying, oh, wow, remember that time of my life when I could watch sports at all, when I could go outside when I could go to a stadium? I think it just kind of like triples the nostalgia factor that's usually contained in those stories and in those revisits. And that is something I would just imagine, and I haven't looked at the traffic numbers, but that people just have an endless appetite for right now. Let me give you number three on the list.

keep writing the evergreen pieces you were already writing before the pandemic. Okay. You and I, I think, have probably run of this each individually. I can't write a piece right now that I thought maybe I'd be writing in March because it just doesn't feel right, you know, or I literally can't go report this piece because I'm not supposed to leave my house. There's also another category. I was surfing through Twitter a couple days ago. It was all the usual death.

and destruction and awfulness of the virus. And then I come across Joe Posnansky over at the Athletic doing his top 100 baseball players of all time. And here comes number 11, Mickey Mantle across the transom. I'm like, oh, wow. It's a piece of content that is just absolutely not encumbered in any way by what's happening right now. I mean, that may be like 1% of things that are published. they just, they're not being stopped at all. Like, nothing happened.

That piece is as far as I know, sliding down the conveyor belt just exactly as it would have before we all got into this horrible predicament. Absolutely. There's nothing better than the evergreen. I mean, listen, we love those things more than anything in the world. And now we finally have the leisure to put out to kick up our feet and read to discuss Mickey Mantle in our heads or with whoever's putting this thing forward.

Listen, I think number four is my personal favorite, certainly the one that's gotten the most attention around my household in the past couple of weeks. It's using your sports skills on non-sports things. Now, I think I accidentally affected a little bit of an announcer's voice right there because the thing that I can't... Using your non-sports skills on sports skills.

I'll leave the real impressions to you, but yeah, I mean, there's nothing that has been more appealing to my family as a whole more, as sometimes obvious, sometimes saccharine as it may be, is Joe Buck announcing the killing of a spider. Well, this is a coming of age video for sure. If you listen to the video in the background, mom is absolutely challenging her son's manhood

as they ask their kid to go kill his first spider. He's using a poker chip, so there's a lot going on in this house. Killing of spiders using poker chips. The kid's a little bit scared. That's fine. Raise your hand if you're not scared. of killing a spider. And yeah, he's got it.

He's got it. Just press the Kleenex against the wall and hope. Mom says here, if you killed it, then you shouldn't be scared of it. Mom, dad, you've taught your son a valuable lesson, 11 years old and becoming a man. I'm totally in favor of what Joe Buck is doing. I do want to offer one counterpoint on this. I don't really understand what Arnold Schwarzenegger is doing. on Twitter.

It seems like he's trying to be Arnold in a non-Arnold specific setting. And at first I think people thought it was really funny. And then they just kind of kept going on. I'm not really sure what I think about that bit. It's not specific to sportscasters, obviously. The social media right now is overflowing with with celebrities or borderline celebrities, major professional and media professionals who are adrift without a thing to do and who are out of the kindness of their heart or out of a lack of,

of anything else to fill their time with, you know, a need for attention, whatever it may be, they're kind of offering themselves up to charities, to people in general, to whatever.

I mean, there's, I saw Jake Johnson a while back on Instagram saying he would call in his, uh, animated Spider-Man voice and leave messages for kids. You know, there,

I mean, there's, uh, I saw that somebody like a broad, a Broadway, uh, actress, songstress who was,

who was opening up, I think, to like evaluate kids or like, listen to kids, auditions. I mean, there's, There's so many of them that there's a sort of, I would assume there'd be a sort of diminishing returns aspect to it.

But there hasn't been. This is like everybody is at home and everybody is looking for something to fill their time. But more importantly than that, I think we're at a place right now. We're like, we are willing to be gratified. You know, we're willing to like indulge in the most sort of like just the sort of the sort of old fashioned happiest aspects of our society. If someone's doing a kind thing, I think it's worth embrace. and worth pointing out and worth, you know, indulging in the time like this. Finally, number five on the COVID content checklist.

David, go old media. Keith Olberman, who you and I are fans of, has gone basically old school radio. Every night for a while he was getting on Twitter, putting a camera on, and just reading James Thurber stories. When I say old school radio, I mean like theater of the mind kind of radio, right? here's Oldman reading a portion of the catbird seat. Mr. Martin bought the pack of camels on Monday night in the most crowded cigar store in Broadway.

It was theater time and seven or eight men were buying cigarettes. The clerk didn't even glance at Mr. Martin, who put the pack in his overcoat pocket and went out. I did see one that was, I don't know if it was disturbing, but it indicated a possibly disturbing trend. I got a PR release from Texas Monthly magazine, Love Texas Monthly, saying that the writers were going to start an Instagram TV series called Texas Monthly Bedtime Stories. I'm quoting here where writers read aloud some of their favorite long form stories. Now, I'm sure in Texas Monthly's case, those will be some really great stories. I just don't want to, I don't want to encourage that,

right? Like, you know, we Arnold Schwarzenegger is bad enough. But if our favorite magazine writers get on Twitter, just start reading their own material, that's basically what they do anyway, right? We don't need any encouragement to just recite old stories. Just thank you very much. We'll just confine that to Texas Monthly. Nobody else get any ideas. All right, David, finally in the notebook dump, I want to talk about sports writers and the coronavirus. I have a piece up today on the ringer about this subject.

During pandemics, as I put in there, all hell is relative, right? People are sick. People are financially strapped right now. There's all kinds of horrible things in the world. with that proviso, the next couple of months is going to be just a terrible period economically for people in our business, especially the corner that we're in right now. Yep. And it's already happening.

We saw that fan graphs today with layoffs. We've seen newspaper people laid off freelance people, seeing work that they had counted on evaporating. And, you know, what's so unique about this national emergency is that I think, you know, a lot of times we'll have a recession or we'll have some kind of problem which will, you know, basically start a new ad crunch in newspapers or websites or wherever it is or traffic crunch in the case of handgraphs. This one is actually, I think, almost selecting sports writers by, because it's saying like, look, there are no games. So why are you still writing for the newspaper? You're laid off until the games come back. And who knows what happens by the way when the games do

come back. Yeah. Or, you know, you were a freelance writer who was going to write a gamer about the Detroit Tigers games. Well, guess what? There's no Detroit Tigers games. So you don't get any money. And we're just in the beginning stages of this.

And part of the reason I wrote this is because I just think this is going to be a horrific event for a lot of people. And there's nothing to do, right? You know, we can talk about media companies getting small business loans. there's as Ben Smith column in the New York Times today about oh, we should get away from the commercial journalism model for local news. Those are interesting ideas.

In the short term, there's nothing to do. And it's just going to be really, really, really bad for a whole bunch of people. Yeah, I don't even know what I can add to that. I mean, it's, it's, you know, talked a lot in the last episode about employers who are in positions of need, but more importantly, they've been looking for excuses to lay people off for a long time.

There's some of that, but some of this is, you know, obviously going to be partly out of necessity. I mean, I don't really find it hard to really embrace that, but okay. But I think the most important thing is what you said. It's going to be a tough time. I mean, it's going to be a really dark time for a lot of people, and that's exceeding the darkness of what we're all already going through.

you know, this feels like we are in a position, sports writers, like you said most acutely, but journalism in general. It does feel like we've been staving off this sort of moment for a long time, but there has been a sort of a feeling of inevitability that when we, whenever this moment came, whatever shape it came in, whenever a moment where that, you know, quote unquote justified some large number of layoffs or cuts or whatever else, that it would be hard for the industry to ever fully. recover from or impossible. And the scary thing is we might be looking at it right now. Let's do David Schumacher guess as a strain pun headline. All right. All right. This one's from before the pandemic. Several people sent it to me, at least before the pandemic washed up to this degree on these shores. David is from the Toronto Sun February 14th. I'm just going to read you the subheadline. The Blue Jays Reese McGuire arrested for allegedly masturbating in busy parking lot in Florida. This was the this was the back page.

Reese McGuire allegedly masturbating in a busy parking lot in Florida. What was the Toronto Sun's strained pun headline? Can we go with its reach exceeded its grasp for two weeks for two episodes in a row? That's good. All right. So wait, go hit the,

it's Toronto Blue Jays. Yeah, and what's the, what word could you use to pun off that particular act that would actually be safe for a family newspaper. Jerk?

Close, very, very close. Jack. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Jack. And where was he? He was in a... Jack in the car? Jack in the lot.

Flip that around? Flip that around. What? Jack in the, not Jack in the car. Oh, car jack. Car jacking. Car jacking. Fantastic.

He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Erica Zavantis and Chris Lameda. Magic by Jim Cunningham. We're back Thursday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian. David?

That's good. Yeah, that is dumb, you know?