The Press Box - Did We Ever Decide How to Cover Trump? Plus: The Athletic Pivots and the End of the Draft-Night Woj Bomb

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

Ahead of the NBA draft, Bryan and David talk through the announcement from Woj that he will not tip the picks on Twitter before they’re made (0:25). Then, they discuss Trump’s outing in Miami and the media’s uncertain coverage of such events amid his second indictment (9:53). Then they touch on news of layoffs at The Athletic and consider what this means for the website and beat writers (25:55). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Derek Thompson, the host of the podcast, Plain English. We tackle technology, politics, culture, history, everything that's happening in the world and why it matters. New episodes of Plain English drop every Tuesday and Friday on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David? Yes. The NBA draft is Thursday night. Coverage here at the ringer.com, of course. And our pal Ryan Rosillo had ESPN insider Adrian Wojnerowski on his podcast.

last week. And Woj made what in our world counts as a pretty big announcement. His annual draft night tradition where he tips the picks on Twitter before they're made is no more. Woj is going to focus on the ESPN TV show.

He's going to do the big trades. But he's not going to tip every pick before it's made. What do you make of the end of the draft night Wojbomb? Well, it will be missed, especially in its most recent incarnation of saying but not saying. But like many things, many annual occurrences on Twitter, it sort of played out. And I think we'll all be happy to move on to the next thing.

It's on the Rassillo podcast, Wouge talked about the best use of his time. in a way that feels like he's been taking some stock. I mean, it feels like a, and I say this, as someone who's had a great deal of therapy, it feels like a post-therapy revelation conversation, right? It's just like, what, how would I be, how am I serving the world in the best way? And he's right, even if,

even if he were somehow robotically able to be 100% Wojonged screen and still tweeting at the same time, I found myself distracted by the fact that tweets were coming out while I was watching his face on the screen. You know, like, it was actually like, I as a consumer was unable to process the degree to which he was tweeting and talking. He mentioned that on the pod, that like you're almost serving two different audiences. There's Twitter audience who wants to know what's going to happen as soon as you know. Yeah. Who wants to essentially undermine the television show.

and then you as the television performer have to serve the audience that, at least theoretically, doesn't know what's going to happen yet, that doesn't know what you just tweeted. And once there's competition, now listen, probably the high point of this whole thing was just the horse race,

borderline literal horse race component of Shams or whoever beating him to the punch on a pick. You're like, seeing that happen, you would just be like, wow, he did it, you know, checking the timestamp. But once there's competition, Once there's once there are now multiple other people who are tipping picks, um,

sort of the most defiant thing he could do or the, the boldest thing he could do is to walk away, right? Because, I mean, I, there's a million different corollaries, but there are some, there are some ways that you can sort of revolutionize a way that a sort of journalism is done. You know, you can, you can, whatever. Like, say that you're the guy who, who, who, the first person who was tipping hosts and musical guests on Saturday Night Live, right? Oh, I'm going to put it out like the day before they make it

public because I have a source. Well, then you realize at NBC, there's probably like a hundred people who are on the email chain, right, that know these things that have the same amount of access that you do. All these people, all any other reporter has to do is find a different point of entry. And it's not like some mystical feat. If someone else is doing the same thing you do, then you're, you're all just running, you know, you're all just doing the exact same exercise. So leave that to somebody else. Let that stuff come out on its own. You're not providing any service to the world by being one millisecond faster at typing a tweet. And, you know, leave it to the people who are, who potentially could profit from it. You're not getting it. ESPN's not giving you a bonus for

impressions, presumably, you know, be on TV. And like your hypothetical S&L tipster, this is information that's about to come out. Yeah. this is not something teams are hiding or considering or whatever. This is something that within seconds or minutes, we will all know. Well, and it's not even like a free agency thing where theoretically, you could assume that there was only one person that knows the answer where James Hardin will sign until he makes it known to a wider circle, right? It's only James Harden. And so if you're racing to get that news out, presumably you're not actually talking to James Hardin, but there's the few. that you're getting something directly from the source,

then that feels special. But if everybody's getting it from, if everybody, if every reporter could only break free agency news from like a source in the NBA front office, well, there's a lot of people there. Right?

There's a lot of, this is all going to go, it's all going to go out to numerous journalists at the same time. So what do you, what service are you really providing? He said on Ryan's podcast, and I encourage you to listen to the whole interview, that he created his Twitter account in 2009

basically to tip picks. Remember at this point in history, he's working for Yahoo. He's competing with ESPN. So by tipping picks, he is undermining a competitor's broadcast. And also in this kind of interesting way, saying, look, that's the artifice of television.

They're giving you a TV show. I know this information. You don't need to watch a TV show. you can just read me on Twitter, which is part of how he becomes this unbelievably big sports reporting entity that we now know as

now know as Adrian Wojnerowski. 2018, so nine years later, he's working at ESPN. And ESPN says, hey, we're not undermining the broadcast. We are the broadcast. So pick tipping, at least in the old form is no longer something

we're interested in. So that's when Woge, as you mention, grabs Mr. Thesaurus and starts finding ways to tweet this information without saying they're going to pick so and so. He uses words like

they are locked on. The team is tantalized by, enamored with, unlikely to resist, has a laser on, have no plans to pass on. And this was my favorite from 2018. Jaron Jackson, Jr. has grown comfortable with the prospect of Memphis drafting him

with the fourth pick. I'm not telling you what the team's going to do. I'm telling you, David, what the prospect is going to do. Yep. He is, he is, I'm just giving you some internal monologue there with Sharon Jackson, Jr. Not, like, this is some kind of almost writing a profile. The other interesting part of that Rissilo interview was, to me, was Wojohn, being mad at Twitter's functionality in the musk era.

Oh, great. He didn't see, he wouldn't say it explicitly, but it was, but it was, he said the last year or so. So we can, we can do some intuition there, do our own, to our own, to our own, Woj has grown uncomfortable with the idea of Twitter and the musk era. Here is a little clip from his interview with Wright. You get, you have your feed, but what's in your feed is not what you've signed up for. It just is a little more of a confusing place in terms of what's appearing. on your feed. And it's just, it's different than it was. But what also happens is, what at least I

found happens, is when you have a lot of followers on Twitter and you're, listen, the more followers you have, the more retweets you get, it's just math. And so if you're tweeting like every two minutes, for me, my screen freezes up. It'll freeze up because the amount of retweets just freezes. And so you're always sort of having to reset. You're doing it on the laptop. It's a little the phone. It's a little slower typing on the phone. Anyway, there's just a lot of reasons to stay focused on the big stuff. If I'm Elon Musk and a guy who has almost six million Twitter followers is talking about how the functionality of Twitter sucks now, I might be concerned about that, especially someone who puts a lot of their output on my service. Yeah. I mean, I'm not,

do you think Wojj is the top line concern for Elon Musk right now? He's like in a oblique Twitter battle with Mark Cuban right now, another NBA luminary, but the pharmaceutical prices or the pharmaceutical industry, there's a lot, there's always a lot going on over there. And it doesn't seem like enough people to, you know, shoulder any additional workload for Mr. Musk. Elon's head is a little harder to get into than Jaron Jackson Jr.'s. Good admitted, even for the great reporters on this beat.

Coming up on today's pod, from the 2024 presidential campaign, did we ever decide how to cover Donald Trump? Plus, the athletic is pivoting again. What are you getting your favorite movie for its 31st anniversary and some summer announcements? All that much more on the press box. A part of the ringer podcast network. Hello Media Consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker,

producer Erica Servantis here. I was thinking about this, David, while watching 2024 coverage. We sure had a big discussion about how to cover Donald Trump, who's of course running for the Republican nomination, did we ever to borrow the lingo

of the business world come up with any action items about this? Did we ever come to some kind of consensus? Because it feels like it's time, doesn't it? I was going to say, what is the better metaphor here? Is this like the, I'm missing my college final nightmare that we all have

over and over again? Or is it the, the I turned in my piece with a giant TK and my editor just texted me good to go.

You're like I was going to put I had this I had this whole plan of what I was going to do in like the second in like the third quarter of the piece and somehow we're just going

maybe it's okay maybe it'll be fine if he thought it was fine maybe every reader will think it's fine. But this is a much bigger deal, right? I mean, it does feel like we had a lot of conversations, just meetings about meetings, right? We had our meeting planning meeting,

but we didn't actually have, like, the meeting. And we're, you know, going to have this conversation, partly as guilty as anybody else. I don't know the answer to how you do it. But it does seem like there's, I mean, implicit and basically everything Trump's done, I mean, in the past year or so, I mean, and,

and you could trace it back even before that is this sort of like momentum, right? I mean, it's the, it's the, almost a too big to fail sort of thing. And a lot of people have pointed and said that's what, that's sort of the plan, especially in so much as it relates to whatever charges he's facing. You know, you're running, you can, if you can paint everything as a political hit job, then that makes everything a little bit more manageable in a certain way, or at least you can coordinate it off in a certain way. and it feels like, you know, he, he sort of pulled it off in a much bigger way.

You just keep, you just barrel ahead. And if, and, you know, if you don't call the meeting, then everybody else forgets to have it. And suddenly we're not talking about, well, how do we deal with the, with the, you know, burgeoning Trump campaign, the incipient Trump campaign. We're using only in journalism words here only. But you're talking about now how do we, how do we, how do we, how do we not only, you know, change our vocabulary, but address the fact that we were using that vocabulary for the past two months. You know, how do we, how do we, it's one thing to say, we're going to do it, we're going to do Christmas different this year than next year, right? I mean, you know, like,

you have a bad, you have a terrible Christmas or whatever. Like next year, we're going to, we're going to spend five hours with the family, then get in the car and drive to Grandma's house, all right? And we're going to have, we're going to like, appreciate our time there. We're going to, we're going to wait till we go, we leave it for the other aunts and uncle to the next morning. But if you wait until you're in the car driving to Grandma's house, the first thing in the morning to figure it out, it's not going to work. You know, it's a much harder thing to figure out. And that's where we are. Christmas Day, as it were, was last Tuesday when Trump got indicted in the classified documents case in Miami, Van de Fair Charlotte Klein, who does really great job

on media. I encourage you to read her stuff over there, pointed out that after that Trump offered cable news viewers this kind of split screen. So he, he, He's just been indicted on these very, very serious charges. Charges, every expert you saw in cable news agrees puts him in enormous legal peril. But then he went to a Cuban restaurant in Miami, where, as Klein points out, the patrons saying, happy birthday to him. So think about this if your cable news. Donald Trump has been indicted.

We're sitting here in talking in grave tones about that. And what our viewers are seeing is patrons singing happy birthday to Trump, as if Trump's going to get a free dessert from this restaurant because he happened to go there on his birthday. CNN's Jake Tapper had had quite enough of that split screen. In a cafe, it's going to be settled in the court based of the facts and law. The folks in the control room, I don't need to see any more of that. He's trying to turn this. He's trying to turn it into a spectacle, into a campaign ad.

That's enough of that. over at MSNBC, Nicole Wallace was having the same problem. Garrett Hake, Dallas is very own Garrett Hake. Their correspondent on the ground was doing some serious news recapping while Trump was enjoying himself at the restaurant. Here's Nicole Wallace. I want to explain the picture on our screen. Trump has gone to really a famous place that all Republican candidates, actually probably Democratic candidates go as well. It's Versailles.

It's in Little Havana in the Miami area. You're still a candidate for president. That's the picture over your brilliant words. We don't need to see that anymore. We know where he is. It's interesting, David, because in the first version of this meeting, as you put it, we all agreed, okay, let's not carry the Trump speech unfiltered. That's a bad idea because then you're putting all these lies onto your television screen.

Did we cover the Trump B-roll? because this is sort of a very subtle thing, I think. This is not Donald Trump looking at a camera and saying the Justice Department, the Democrats, Biden, blah, blah, blah. This is Donald Trump walking through a restaurant. Yeah. But now we have two news anchors being like, nope, that's out too. That is misleading our viewers in some way about what happened here today in Miami.

Yeah. I mean, I think that there's obviously an effort, I think a right-minded effort to sort of not normalize the Trump campaign to not make it feel like it's that, you know, he's just doing the regular stuff that any candidate would do even when he is because that sort of makes it feel like it gives it legitimacy. I think you probably, I mean, let's go back to the meeting that we never had. I think it's still incumbent upon you to explain the rationale for its illegitimacy on a recurring basis. You know, it's funny, when I think about those woge tweets, I don't know about you, but the thing that I always think about is how much time he must have spent preparing all of the terminology, all of the indirections or misdirections. or misdirection, not misdirections, indirections to, you know, to tweet a thing without actually saying the thing,

that could have been just an unbelievable amount of time, right? Just making a list of things they'd say or the right way to say at, oh, wait, is that too explicit? Whatever. I kind of feel like you have to have a disclaimer almost before every time that you say former President Trump on a news network where you say, you know, there's Donald Trump,

a deeply unsurious candidate. There's President Trump who, whether or not he's legally liable, did appear to fomented insurrection on January saying, you know, like, you kind of have to, like, explain his illegitimacy every time you say his name. And you've got to have, like, a scrolling list of different ways to put it across to the, to the viewership. Because being just generally dissatisfied that he's on the screen, I mean, that's, that's significant as a host to take that kind of stand. But it's also, but it also doesn't really say. anything if you're if you're not sure about why or if you're on the fence politically or or you know, whatever. I just, I think it doesn't take quite seriously enough the fact that America is not fully read into everything that's going on in a national politics level, even as it, you know, pertains to Donald Trump. And I take the point those anchors are making and I might even agree with it. We should note that there's a long history in this country of embattled politicians. going out on the campaign trail the next day and smiling through it.

Yeah. Powering through whatever indictment or charge or scandal that has been slapped upon them. That's, that in a way is a way that Trump is being very normal here. You could, you could, again, argue and I would agree that him walking into a restaurant and having this, you know, hey, everybody's singing, happy birthday to me, I'm fine. that what he's trying to do is be like being indicted on these charges is no big deal he is trying to fool people but again that's something that politicians have done for a long time so trump goes from miami to his golf club in bedminster new jersey and then he gives a campaign speech there's no other way to describe it right he's going up there and saying these charges are bull

and is going to talk for 30-ish minutes, denouncing everything that's happened that day, and again, trying to change the subject. CNN and MSNBC declined to carry that speech. This is how Rachel Maddow explained it on the latter network. Because of that, we do not intend to carry these remarks live. As we have said before in these circumstances, there is a cost to us as a news organization to knowingly

broadcast untrue things. We are here to bring you the news. It hurts our ability to do that if we live broadcast what we fully expect in advance to be a litany of lies and false accusations, no matter who says them. And I do not say this with any glee. I hope it is clear that this is not a glib decision. We take our responsibilities seriously. We revisit decisions like this all the time. We make the best call that we can in real time every time. So you see what Trump is clearly doing in instances like this is exploiting the networks and journalism's general interest in getting a response from somebody who's in circumstances like his. Somebody's been indicted. We need to get their response in fairness.

But what if the response is a 30-minute campaign speech? That's going to be full of stuff that's not true. then you get Rachel Maddow going and we're just not going to show it. Yeah. Trump says he's not guilty. Well, that's true. Yeah, I mean, Trump's,

one of his most powerful sort of insights into the way the news machine works is, I mean, if there were no television, I mean, if you were running as a candidate in the newspaper days, then there's time to process, right? You can listen to the whole speech and then say, President Trump said nothing of substance as it came as it pertains to the the charges against him, right? That's just a one sentence toss off.

But with the expectation that you're covering everything in real time with, you know, armies, you know, they pan back and there's 15 people sitting at the news desk so they can make sure that they have every expert, you know, ready to chime in as soon as the story breaks. it's like the more prepared you are, the more, as a network, the more prepared you are for the breaking news, the more you're bound to cover the breaking news in real time. Not even breaking news, the thing that's happening in real time. So whether he's giving a speech or walking into a restaurant,

it is sort of, there is a certain defiance and not going, and saying we're not going to cover this right now. But, you know, I mean, that's just a matter of saying it. You can choose not to cover it. You know, you can cover it as soon as it's over as soon as you have time to process and synthesize. But it feels a little bit insufficient, right?

One note to people born after the newspaper or newspapers very rarely said things like Trump said nothing of substance. Right. They probably said Trump railed against the charges. But you're right. They didn't print the whole transcript. Yeah. They had time to select a quote or two. By the way, here's something I've noticed reading campaign coverage.

So we all decided at the meeting. that quoting Trump unfiltered is not a good idea. But I've seen tons of journalists quoting Trump's advisors unfiltered or his spokesman. Because again, they're trying to do what journalists do with normal candidates, which is, if there's something said, you go to them and get some kind of response. I would I would encourage you as you read stuff to look for this because Trump's advisors sound exactly like Trump. There was one, a story the other day about Desantis going to Nevada. And Trump's advisor had some, you know, crack about, oh, you know, we're going to go there and do this

and stuff like this. I'm like, is this news either? I guess this is more normalish, quoting spokesman, you know, taking cracks at other candidates. But I'm just like, that's so funny that that's how we decided this was the workaround here. We're going to quote an advisor, spokesman. who sounds exactly like Trump. I thought you were going to imply that it was actually Trump, just doing his old, you know, John Barron routine. It might have been. Are we sure you were talking to Trump?

How many advisors does Trump have in his immediate? So we know he doesn't really have any lawyers. Does he have advisors? Well, there's Pat Summerall's daughter. Right. Who I'm still totally obsessed with her role in the whole Trump campaign. But other than that, it seems to be kind of a loose. loose grouping there.

Yeah. People. So again, two reporters, make sure you're talking to an actual advisor, not somebody who sounds a lot like the embattled former president. Coming up in 30 seconds, David, the athletic is changing its mission again. Is this a good thing for sports fans and sports writing? But first, let's do 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. where they are always, always gratefully received. This week's runner up, you heard that rumor that Chris Paul could be headed to the LA Clippers. One of those aggregation accounts tweeted out a picture of him and Kwai Leonard and Paul George that said, Who's stopping this squad?

It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, The Second Round. This week's winner, David, comes from Adam Walton, Bob, Travis Barnett, Todd H., and many others. there was an Atlantic piece an Atlantic piece I tell you with the inviting headline that read Killer whales are not

our friends stopped rooting for the orcas ramming boats the author of that piece sticking up for boats was one Jacob Stern Jacob Stern

love it when the byline oh yeah exactly matches the story. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, did a boat write this? We would have also accepted a photo of an orca with a caption,

Debate Me Boats. If you help keep this bit afloat, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, in the notebook dump, let us talk about the athletic. There has been some news out of that website. Ben Strauss in the Washington Post, and I encourage you to read his story in full

as well, reported that, quote, nearly 20 reporters were about 4% of its journalistic staff had been laid off. This is last week. This one hit me hard because one of the writers leaving that publication is Bob Sturm.

I interface with the athletic largely in terms of Dallas-based sports news. Bob is a radio host in Dallas and he was the guy who wrote, I'm trying to think of how to best put this, the Cowboys columns that were full of film study and numbers, but were not self-consciously filmy, numbery columns.

They were just like, here's the good column about the Cowboys. Yeah. That happens to come from film study. And that, first of all, got me off on an interesting foot with this, because, again, I'm not rooting for any layoff, but I'm like, wait a second, you are telling the best writer on the Cowboys beat, that you no longer need as services.

Yeah. The Cowboys being one of the biggest beats in all of sports writing. Mm-hmm. What is going on here? I think there was a sense of conventional wisdom that we knew the athletic, which is losing money, was perhaps not going to be able to keep its current staffing level. First thing I actually want to ask you about, though,

is about beat writing before we get to the particulars, the athletic. Yeah. what's beat writing going to look like in a couple of years? Because again, speaking to the newspaper area, you and I grew up in this world where most beats at papers were fully staffed. In a lot of cases, they were able to travel to all the games, have the kind of resources.

The beatwriters had the kind of resources they needed to cover teams. What is that going to look like in the next couple of years? As we see newspapers continue to decline, And now the athletic, which had pitched itself as the savior and destroyer of newspapers, cutting staff and reducing budgets to do that kind of work. It's tough. I mean, I think that the most positive, the most upbeat view is that it's almost like like Nate Silver, like 538, Nate Silver's prognostication firm.

it's moved around a bunch of times, right? Nate Silver is not now an ABC News employee, their last home of 538 and may well resurface doing, you know, the same work again somewhere else. You know, for good reporting, it seems like the long view is there's always a home for good reporting, right? And it's just a sort of, what matters is,

I mean, what changes is who's willing to sort of write the checks at moment in time. I think the real, you know, with the real crushing aspect of what's going on with the athletic is it seemed like they were setting up shop to try to be that for the long haul, or at least that was the, that was the, you know, mission statement. Obviously there's different, I mean, listen, we new things are going to continue, new opportunities will continue to arise. None of us would have, you know, predicted, well, none of us would have predicted the, you know, potential legitimacy of substack a few years ago, right, as a as a as a as a main income driver main income source. And we've seen a lot of sports writers go that route. Now listen,

it takes a certain level of platform to really have a significant return. But, but, but that's there. I think that it, but I, but it's in the short term. I mean, that's the long view. The short, in the short term, it's, it's just, it's hard. It's hard. It's hard. to process, right? I mean, I don't, there's not an easy answer for where good writers and good reporters go. And we've said it a million times, but it's, it's like, it's like the conservative crusade against the mainstream media. It's like, well, all people who are saying this, you know, people on Fox, everybody else, you're all, you're all relying on the mainstream media to do your work, right? That is the, that is the building block on which you do everything. And

and even places like the ringer, you know, that we have so many good reporters, but we're so reliant on the day-to-day work of beat reporters just to like understand news to process news to do the basic work of of compiling stats and analyzing stats and all that kind of stuff and if there's not that infrastructure in place then everything else starts to fall apart and that's what i'm so interested in because beat writing is really expensive if you're going to do it full bore. If you're going to send that writer on every single road trip, especially in the sport like baseball,

which is a really long season. So you put them on a lot of planes, you're putting them up in a lot of hotels. You're saying it's important for you not just to cover this team all the time, which you and I could do from the comfort of our own homes, but it's important for you to be in the locker room, to be

forming relationships, to be getting little tidbits that you can't really get when you're sitting around and not on the road every day. Mm-hmm. Again, there has been no moment in newspaper history where that was guaranteed. Newspapers were happy to take writers off the road when they were running out of money. Or when there just wasn't a lot of reader interest in a particular team, anybody out here can read the L.A. Times to see the difference between the way the Dodgers are covered and the angels are covered.

Yeah. It's a big, big difference because there's just a lot more interest in the Dodgers. but there was always a sense that, well, that's going to exist somewhere, and it's going to exist at least in, okay, you have a dedicated writer, they have a lot of travel or some travel. And I just don't know anymore. I mean, to me, the athletic, one of the best things the athletic did was try to reinvent that job a little bit,

telling beat writers, look, we don't necessarily need a gamer every night, a form that has been around forever and might be of limited usefulness or at least limited interest now. You can write a couple of different columns a week where you process everything you've learned and give it to readers in a really different way. I remember going back to when the Cavs are in the finals,

one of their B-writers would just write like, here are like 35 thoughts about the game last night. It was literally a numbered list. And it was like, this is cool. this is a cool way for me to read a person who knows everything about this particular team to read their download at the end of the night without using possibly archaic newspaper forms. But now we're now we're sort of thinking and this gets to our next point, which is the change in the mission of the athletic, this is not going to be a team by team concept anymore. Strauss knows this in his Washington Post story because guess what they found. NFL beats English Premier League,

hey, we can cover those teams and those stories having national resonance. Other people are reading them. But MLB and NHL, you write those stories and it's mainly for the local fans of that team. So now what we're going to do is not necessarily think of it as

a beat writer on every single beat. We're going to have all these generalists. Strauss writes this in the Washington Post. The note said, an additional 20 reporters would be moved from their current team beats to new ones, including regional coverage or general assignment roles. Now, this is a little scary to me. Because when I think of what's the vision of journalism, the vision of sports writing,

the people at home are going to want to read, and particularly readers of the Athletic and the New York Times are going to want to read, generalist general assignment writers is not at the top of my list. Yeah. I don't think it's at the top of the list of the things the athletic has done well during its life. Athletics had good investigative reporting, good beat writing. They've had some good columnists like Marcus Thompson, done good work on the media beat. But general features, I wouldn't say that that's a particular strength of that website.

when I read those features, a lot of them to me feel like they are reverse engineered from other features that were popular. And how can we figure out oral history X that will goose the traffic? And now you're saying there's just going to be this free-floating population of athletic writers trying to turn those out. I don't doubt that you can go find some viral stories there that the New York Times will, you know, tweet out and maybe buy a promoted tweet for, but that didn't sound like something I want as a reader at all. You're right about when you say reverse engineering. I mean, I think that's part of the whole problem.

That's part of the whole problem. And like, you know, the tech industry maybe, you know, in a broader way, but certainly the sort of like modern investment in journalism movement, right? I mean, it's just sort of you buy a thing and then you're like, it's just all the pitch meeting. It's like it's it's it's it's it's it's like the 100 in in a succession, you know. It's just like it's we don't have a plan, but man, do we have a pitch, you know? And, um, and it, listen, there's there's there's, I mean, it's, I mean, it's, we got Sports

Sports Illustrated was sold and they were talking about licensing the name, you know, and the, on the like fanny packs and stuff, you know, I mean, that's, sure. That's like, that's like a piece of it, but then what does that have to do with all the people that work there? You know, what does that have to do with the people that are actually creating the value of the company that you just bought? Yeah, or the vision you have for the company. Yeah. Because that's one of the weird parts about the New York Times, right?

If you are selling your sports journalism company or journalism company, period, there's going to be no better steward in the world than the New York Times. Here's a place that cares about journalism. That is going to protect the journalistic elements of what you do. But when it comes to the athletic, I'm like, who is the person at the New York Times who has this vision for what sports writing should be? Who is that person? I've never in all, everything I've read about the athletic and thinking about the New York Times before the athletic, I have never seen that single person on the masthead who's like, I understand, here's my, I got it. I've got a plan for sports writing in 23 and beyond. Well, is any other writing on this, I mean, over the past several weeks?

had given you any indication of who that was supposed to be? Well, let me give you a line from Strauss's story. During a call with sports staffers this year, Times Executive Editor Joseph Kahn said the company had more people covering sports than any other topic. They needed to find more integration, according to two people on the call. Well, yeah, you have more people covering sports because you bought a sports website. Yeah. You bought a website that had people manning all these beats.

You do. Yeah. And I haven't seen anything. reported or in practice about what the vision for that is. So we have executives, and again, I'm not talking about specific people because I don't have the ability to. It could be executives by the company, right? Executives insist on making this integration work, making this company work within the New York Times. But, I mean, at the time, we talked about, if there's anybody at the New York Times

who has a vision for how this could work, it was probably an existing employer manager who felt like they were blindsided by the acquisition of the athletic and that they were worried about keeping their own jobs, right? So you're, so, I mean, if you, it's, if you can't just get it. It's like, listen, we're back to, we're back to having meetings without, we're back to, we're forgetting to have the meeting. You can't just hop on the conference call after a year and be just like, where is that integration I demanded?

Well, integration is not a thing, you know? I mean, it's not, it's not like a concrete plan. Integration is a, is a, is a buzzword and a concept. You know, I mean, and so, I don't know, it just seems like it just, I mean, this is just the saddest story of the modern kind of acquisition era, right? We're going to buy something. We're going to, oh, man, with our, with all of our different integrative opportunities, this thing's going to really flourish. And then we'll, you know, and then we'll all pat each other on the back. Well, if nothing happens and it doesn't work or it keeps playing along in the same way that it was doing before, hamstrung by whatever changes went into the, you know, the layoffs that.

that preceded the sale or post-dated it, then, oh, well, we just toss it out. You know, we got to think of something else. Well, I mean, what was the plan in the first place? And if there wasn't a plan, I mean, you're just playing with people's livelihoods, right? And even to use the buzzword integration, there's been very little integration. These basically, the New York Times and the sports section and the athletic are two, have been functioning as two things.

there is not been integration. And I've been so interested to see that feature on baby gronk. Did you notice this whole thing the other day? Baby gronk is this 10-year-old, aspirationally viral football player or his dad wants him to be a viral thing. And the athletic did a Q&A with a dad. And there was some really fascinating and alarming answers in that Q&A. but it was a Q&A.

It should have been a written piece. This is the whole thing about it. Should we platform this guy or nothing? I don't care about that, but I think you should write a skeptical piece about it. Yeah. And probably note what we all found out after the piece was published, which was that lots of sports media people had been spammed by this guy

trying to get attention for baby grum. That's kind of nice to know. Or you should probably maybe quote somebody else other than the dad so that he doesn't have the whole forum. Yeah. And again, that was one of those where I'm just like, I don't, we don't even need to have a platform discussion. I just think this was,

this was the wrong forum for this story to take. Mm-hmm. By the way, so I promote a tweet for the baby gronk story, for the athletic. Interesting how that happens, because I bet I got a lot of attention. Yep. A couple of other things I want to hit you with before we go.

The promiscuous use of Twitter anniversaries. Oh, no. I was doom scrolling through my feed yesterday. And I noticed something that I've been noticing more and more. This was on the account, all the right movies, which I guess is also a podcast. Here's the tweet,

Batman Returns was released 31 years ago today. And then what follows is a 39-part thread about the making of Batman Returns movie, by the way, you and I both really like. Did I miss? something, did I miss a meeting to now use that word for the very last time on this show, that we are celebrating 31st anniversaries of beloved movies? Yeah.

Is that happening now? Do we need, I realize the anniversary is very arbitrary construction as it is. Yeah. But then also, by the way, I tweeted about this and somebody pointed me to the tweet on Retro News Now, another account that says Michael Bolton released his six studio album, 34 years ago. So we're doing the 34th anniversary of Michael Bolton's sole provider. I mean, on the one hand, there's no reason to celebrate the 30th anniversary any more than

there is to celebrate the 31st anniversary. Yes. But if we're doing that, if we're just saying, look, these numbers are all arbitrary. Shouldn't we just not worry about the anniversary? Should we be like, here's some cool facts about Batman returns? Every time you see that famous tweet where it's just like so and so, I mean, an iteration of whatever, you know, it's a shorter amount of time between, you know, Top Gun 1 and now than it was between when Top Gun 1 and like the invention of the automobile or whatever, you know, and you're just like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm that old. you realize that the actual like proper nouns and numbers don't really mean anything it don't really as much as the way that it makes you feel and that's what it that's

the whole thing with all the anniversaries it's like if there's there is there is there's almost zero difference between 31 and 30 for that matter between you know 75 and or 74 and two you know it's like you know you kind of see the construction of the tweet and your mind processes immediately what you should be seeing or what you should be feeling. And then you just appreciate the tweet. There's not a difference, you know? And but why are we doing it?

I mean, because it gets the same reception. I guarantee that that thread would have made, the difference between it being 31 and 25 is insignificant on the day that it comes out and people are reading it. Right? Which is so, yeah, it's so fine, but a Twitter account is basically like a journalist talking to the editor. It's like, hey, I'd love to write about Batman returns. What's the peg? What's the 30,

31st anniversary? Great. Consider it assigned. Can you just tweet about it? But you're right. There is probably something of us readers and news consumers where we see that, we see the so-called peg. And we go, aha, 31st anniversary, yes. I've seen ESPN's account do this, like 27 years. ago stone cold Steve Austin storm to the ring with a zamboni machine or something. I'm like, yeah, we'll never forget where we were 27 years ago today. I love that there's just a sprawling pop culture calendar now. And by the way, I just want to say this, I'm not above an anniversary peg. Well, I was going to say, yeah, okay, go on.

I've got a couple things in the hopper right now that have a nice round anniversary peg on it. I just find it entertaining 31st anniversary of Batman Returns. Let's all celebrate. Other thing I've noticed on Twitter, by the way, this should be a recurring segment, is you've heard our boss Bill Simmons talk about that Jason Williams was a problem genre of tweet.

Yes. This is where you find a very flawed basketball player or really any athlete from yesteryear and carve out like a one-minute clip that makes them look like Magic Johnson? Well, yeah, I mean, but it's not always, it's not, it's not mandatory that it was a flawed player. It's just that this same rubric gets applied

to players flawed and unflaught alike. Yeah, because you run out of great players. I've seen Barry Sanders was a problem. Yeah. But it's kind of like the Batman Returns, eventually run out a nice round anniversary, so it's Jason Williams was a problem. I'm not sure going to say you ran out of good Batman villains.

Well, that too. Yeah, it's true. And it's also, I think, a larger look into the sort of the lack of the a historicism of the modern internet, right? I mean, it's, well, there's no real neat parallel to the Batman Return Things unless that entire Twitter thread was just, you know, factoids from IMDB and Wikipedia that were actually not true, you know. but and there's been examples of that I guess but yeah it's it's sort of all we have to look at at this point and the people making those threads might have been there every day for every Jason Williams game in Sacramento or whatever but probably they're just looking at YouTube

highlight packages too right they're just like it's just it's the machine it's the same thing for Twitter threads and everything else it's the content machine and you run through a Jason Williams highlight package and you you said well wow I actually is really impressive and then you distill that down to an even more concise Jason Williams was a problem TikTok video and people click people like people do whatever else so um you know it's it's the nature of the beast right now this is a long way of saying that when I was surfing Twitter the other day I saw Val Kilmer trending oh no and it was a piece about how good Val Kilmer was as Batman mm-hmm in Batman

Forever. Yeah. So it was essentially a Val Kilmer is a problem tweet. Val Kilmer was a sorry, sorry Val,

Val Kilmer was a problem. Mm-hmm. So there's a pop culture version of this too. Batman Forever. A terrible movie. Absolutely terrible movie. But we can find

the one minute clip of Val Kilmer being awesome as Batman. Val Kilmer was a problem. Yeah. It goes to the discussion you and I had the other day about how

nothing can be a failure anymore. Yeah. Everything is a cult classic. Jason Williams is a cult classic. Val Kilmer as Batman is a cult classic. In the new content machine, you can't possibly fail. You're just waiting to be understood by a fan base or a Twitter account that needs content. Yeah.

Who will show the people that you really were great, no matter what anybody said. at the time. Valkilber was a problem. Someday someone will say Brian Curtis was a problem. Brian Curtis was a problem. Yeah, I'm aiming that somebody would even find the two-minute highlight reel of me. I'm not sure we're there yet. Only in journalism word before we go. Listener, Charlie W. has one for us, fulminate. Oh, yeah. Fulminate. It doesn't, it's so funny. It doesn't immediately seem, it doesn't occur to me as specifically journalism word, but it's certainly like an only in print word.

I definitely have like never said fulminate. That's the first time I've ever said fulminate. Yeah. It's weird because a lot of those words, you don't know how to say them. You, as it comes out of your mouth, you feel like this is, I'm not exactly sure where the consonants in the vowels go. Fulminate, you know exactly how to say. But yeah, you've never said it. And now it's time for a feature that comes straight off the tongue, David.

It's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah. Last Monday's headline about what the Canadian wildfires did to the East Coast was Apocalypse Now. Today's headline comes to us from Mike Morris. It's from the New York Times. One of the more depressing stories about both the Beatles and AI was the news that Paul McCartney is going to use AI, that is artificial intelligence, to help him create a last Beatles song. I'm resisting saying Paul McCarty was a problem

because Paul McCarty doesn't even deserve that treatment. But I want you to think of Beatles song titles. As you ponder, what was the New York Times strained pun headline? There's too many Beatles songs. Do I have to, do I have to, do I have to hum again? No, don't, don't hum. Is it like early Beatles or later Beatles?

Can you give me some? I'm not a boo. I'm not a boo. Let it be, let me give you a year. I think 1967. Relatively early. That's post help.

Dang. Is that yellow submarine that you're trying to do there? Coo-cook-co-choo. dun dun dun dun dun all you need is love all you uh i'm going to gift you i am the walrus okay i am the um god it's right there oh kuku kukukachu yeah sorry i just totally miss that uh um i am what is the most basic and clunky strain pun headline for a i i i am the walrus a i i am the walrus a i am the walrus oh that's terrible. He is our winner today.

I wanted to go out on a good note or a bad note, as it were. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic. As always, by Erica Servantes. David, this is the last Curtis Shoemaker pod for a while. Summer vacation. Yeah. Spring break,

or no, summer break. First break for in a while for me, I got to say, in terms of actually getting out of town for a sustained period of time. I'm going to be in the UK for a couple of weeks. While Curtis Shoemaker may be on temporary pause, the press box is going to roll on. Every Monday in the space, we are going to have a pod that I have recorded, pre-recorded,

that I'm going to leave you with. And this is fun stuff. This is stuff that I was thought about doing and probably ran out of time to do when we're in the, right in the middle of the news vortex. So I'll throw out some hints, David. But next Monday, we are going to have a director of one of the journalism movies. Yes. That Sean Fennessey and I put in our top tens, one of us put in our top ten, talking about the making of that movie.

By the way, nice round anniversary there. So that's next Monday. Monday after that, the next installment in our one perfect story series. Remember we had Stephen Roderick talking about Lindsey Lohen and Paul Schrader. than we had Wright Thompson on MJ. This is going to be volume three. One hint, Esquire. Also a nice round anniversary.

See, even the best do it. And then the Monday after that, we're going to have a very famous cable news anchor. Somebody we have mentioned on this show many times before. So journalism movie director, one perfect story, cable news anchor. Then Curtis and Shoemaker will return on our 301st anniversary for more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.