The Press Box - Katie Couric and the Cult of Sports Longform

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

Bryan and David talk through details of Katie Couric’s memoir such as how she withheld insensitive comments from an interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and how the media pitted Couric against other women in the industry (4:35). Then, they dissect Lindsey Adler’s tweet that addresses the repercussions of highlighting longform journalism and discuss how this specifically relates to sports writing (19:38). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline.  Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's me, Brian Curtis, host of the press box. And I'm his co-host, David Shoemaker. And we wanted to get together today to tell you about one of our favorite podcasts on the network, the ringer wrestling show. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, David, you can't talk about your own podcast as one of your favorites. Let me do the rest of this. The ringer wrestling show is your guide for all things pro wrestling. And this month, they're talking about all your favorite weekly wrestling shows, plus pay-per-views. You can find the ringer wrestling show on Spotify or wherever.

you get your podcast. I think that's right. David, what's on your mind this week? There's all these Facebook leaks that are about to come out, right? I think they're out. So they're officially, here's my question for you. If you had to bet, what do you think is going to hurt Facebook more? The leak of these so-called Facebook papers and the news that will arise from them,

or the fact that we're calling them the Facebook papers. And it gives the impression that regardless of whatever is in there, that this is a major government conspiracy level expose. I think there was some sort of thinking within the consortium of journalists that's coming out of these stories about what we should call this thing. Facebook files was the original Wall Street Journal header for this. But yes, the Facebook papers, something momentous about that. We have the Pentagon Papers.

We had the Panama Papers. Now we got the Facebook papers. It's also funny because in a story about Facebook, it makes you think about these things as physical objects. Like I've seen at least one person on CNN today with a stack of papers in front of them. I'm looking through these papers. Imagine just how paralyzing, I mean, just how embarrassing that would be if you just walked into somebody's office. And they were like, here are two reams of your printed out emails. Doesn't that seem so much more significant than just someone's sitting down at your Gmail and trying to page through it?

I'm worried about hacking, but I'm more worried about hacking and then printing. Yeah. Facebook is closer to paper, at least spiritually, than most of the other social media network. right you're saying that because our moms use it yeah and it's photos and stuff like that like you can you could basically you know smell the wood on facebook right yeah it does it has the whiff of something that was handed from one person to the other person like you take a look at this i'd love to get your thoughts on this what's can is there anything that i mean facebook is just like they're right in the middle they're right they've been in the crosshairs for so long because they're

so powerful but what is the what is what on earth is that happened. I mean, people, the only thing that can happen to Facebook is if people stop using Facebook, right? Yes. Imagine just the curve, imagine the degree of difficulty it'll be to, to explain how to switch to a different app to the vast majority of Facebook's users, right? I mean, isn't that, isn't there sweet spot people that just only, it's like the AOL homepage of old? Maybe I'm just being too over the top here. Facebook's, I'm sure, a wonderful place. Well, I saw CNN's John Avalon, suggests that we need a sequel to the social network. So what if there's a sequel and explains this in a 90 minutes time and then people can understand just why they should switch from Facebook to something else?

The biggest, that's really good. I think the biggest problem with the sequel would be like, we knew Mark Zuckerberg, I guess, when that movie came out, but we didn't really know how he, I knew him from photos, you know, but like now I feel like so many of the characters in that movie are well known that even if they got the same actors who made those people famous, I think we'd still be people. would so be complaining that their portrayals aren't very spot on. Yeah, I agree. It feels like those Bush administration movies that started coming out in the 2000s. It doesn't really look like him. It doesn't really look like Dick Cheney. Coming up on today's pod, Katie Couric has a new memoir out.

We talk about the scoop she suppressed and her career in TV news. Plus a tweet from beatwriter Lindsay Adler got us thinking about the cult of sports long forum. We've got thoughts. All that much more on the press box. a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here

along with producer Erica Servantes. David, let's start with Katie Couric. She is the former co-host of the Today Show and anchor of the CBS Evening News. She's been doing a lot of online-y things since then. She is in the news because she's got a big new memoir, an unsparing memoir, as book reviewers are contractually obligated to call it out.

It's called Going There, Rebecca Traster has a big and very good profile of her in the cut that we're going to quote from here in a second. I want to start by talking about this incident that has gotten a lot of attention. 2016, Katie Kirk is interviewing Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice on the Supreme Court. She asked Ginsburg about Colin Kaepernick, San Francisco 49ers quarterback who was protesting police violence at the time. Ginsburg called the protest dumb and disrespectful.

Kirk reported that part. But as Traster notes, she left out this quote from Ginsburg. Quote, it's contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and their grandparents to live a decent life, Ginsburg said, which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from, dot, dot, dot, dot. As they become older, they realize that this was a youthful folly, and that's why education is important. So there's no possible argument that this was not a bad decision, a really bad decision by Katie Kirk to leave this on the cutting room floor, is there? It was a terrible decision. And did Kirk herself right about this?

Yes. That's why we know about it. Right. So it just seems a little bit, I mean, it's not, it just seems crazy. I mean, I guess, you know, one could understand, even if you utterly disagree with the argument that you sort of, like, had a tacit agreement about the portrayal when you get, you know, when you embark upon an interview like this. But even still, what would be the point of saying it now? Like, if you're going to be, like, amorally in the bag for Ruth Bader Ginsburg when you're doing this profile, like, why are you, like, why out her after she's dead? I mean, I think Katie Kirk says in the book that once she wanted to talk about the kind of decision she made good and bad when she was a TV journalist or an online journalist in this case.

And I think the second part of it is for history, shouldn't we know that Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought this? Isn't that useful rather than just suppressing it forever? Yeah, it's just surprising that one would make that ethical pivot, I guess. But it's not unheard of. It's funny because as journalists, you make all kinds of very small stakes choices when you're writing an article or airing an interview doing whatever about, should we use this quote? Should we use that quote?

A lot of times it's like which one sounds better, which one helps more with my story, whatever it is. Small stakes kind of thing that will affect the way the person is portrayed. I can't think of a more clear-cut version of that than I have a Supreme Court justice talking to me on the record. like what what would i possibly what would possibly be the reason to leave anything out that they said yeah i mean doesn't it seem by the way that like these supreme court

justes are obviously very inaccessible but when they're accessed they're just like disarmingly expansive about these things oftentimes yeah i guess and i think part of it's just never hear from them Yeah, but there certainly doesn't, like, it doesn't seem to be any sort of, sort of, you know, removal, you know, that you'd be willing just to be like, yes, I have an opinion on this thing that's happening on TV right now. Do you want to talk about the new episode of Succession? Because I can, I can break that down too. Like, there's no, there's no, like, I'm not going to touch on that. Let's just stick to matters of law and order or, you know, whatever.

furthermore, David, the decision-making process that Katie Couric used was really interesting. This is from Tracer's piece. A representative of the Supreme Court called and told her, this is a day later, that the justice had misspoken and asked her to omit Ginsburg's responses, an extraordinary request that caused Currick unease. Of course, it would cause you unease, right? If somebody's press person called later and said, hey, that stuff they said about so-and-so, can you just take that out? Currick, Tracer writes, prompted to call two friends, the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks and former ABC News Chief David Weston. Brooks told her to take the response out since Ginsburg was old and likely didn't understand the question.

So David Brooks is the one offering the advice. And number two, if Ginsburg was old and didn't understand the question, isn't that also very germane news? Yeah. since Ruth Bader Ginsburg is on the Supreme Court in 2016? Yeah. I mean, listen, the last part, the lack of understanding to me is the only sort of relatable part of the ethical journey of this, of this situation, right? I'm not sure that that should motivate you as a journalist in one way or another, but it certainly can motivate you as human, you know, if you believe that to be true. I mean, I think the truth is maybe if you really wanted to, if you really wanted to parse it out, there might be some truth that like she's too old to understand the ramifications of what she's saying, you know, but she certainly seemed to understand what she was talking about.

As a Supreme Court justice, she is, she cannot understand the ramifications of what she's saying. I mean, I know, I know you're just just like test driving this, but that sounds ludicrous. I mean, that's amazing, right? you can also have no opinion about certain things like that. I don't want to pigeonhole the book too much here because there is a ton in this book from the early stories about it. I don't know if you followed the whole New York Post versus Katie Couric thing. It got their hands on the book a couple weeks ago. And it had just been doling out these bits, which is fair game. That happens all the time in newspapers.

But it was done with this just amazing anti-curic slant to every. everything. It just felt like, oh my God, I've gotten in a time machine and gone back to a time when it's like the New York Post versus Katie Couric. Yeah. Was there just this elemental battle between print and television, between tabloid and morning news star, later evening news star. Mm-hmm. That was really, really weird. Yes. It also, as Tracer notes, just made people want to buy the book more probably.

Mm-hmm. because it was sold, all these were sold as like, here is an explosive revelation in Katie Kirk's book. And tomorrow, here's another explosive revelation, which isn't like, boy, I don't want to read this. It's just the opposite. I have to read this book, which I might have been on the fence about.

Yeah, they're probably not too worried about affecting the sales. I mean, if they could make it zero, that might be a good, you know, that might be a fun game to play. But I think it's more just being. being just attacking, right? Just, just seeing, just trying to make correct feel wounded by it, you know? Well,

and trying to run up the score on your own hits. That's what the New York Post does. It's great that they, it's great that they're still on it. I mean, it's great that like, there's something perversely amazing about still being on the kid.

How many times is like the editor-in-chief of most major papers turned over in that span of time since like the last attack, the original, you know, anti-coric phase. it just seems pretty crazy that it would just never I mean it's it's just going it just keeps going I mean it's like it's such a relic of the past does anybody does anybody care about any morning show as any more to the degree that the new york post still cares about the former host of the today show that's what was always funny and you know I've talked about this before about television news as it got smaller the beat of covering television news seemed to get bigger it least in comparison.

And you'd be like, all these shows are shrinking in audience. But like the stories being written about them. And there is an Apple series right now that's based in part on Brian Stelter's reporting about the Today Show. Or he's a consultant on that show. I can't remember his exact relationship there. That is happening. Remember the cable news reporting of like 10 years ago when Gabe Sherman was on the beat?

And it was like, oh my gosh. And you'd look at the number of people. actually watching the cable news show. It was really small, but just all the palace intrigue about it. It's just very, very funny to me. Lots of stuff from Kirk's book about being a woman in network news

in the 90s and 2000s. She was known, you'll remember, David, for her perky smile. But this, as Traster writes, it helped her connect to people, but also put her in a kind of box, the literal television box,

yes, and a box of one-dimensional expectations. Here's something I didn't know from Tracer. When she first took over today, her reputation for buoyancy was so vast that the New Yorker ran a cartoon of Morose Eeyore in a full grin with a caption, Katie Couric will do that to you. That actually happened. Katie Kirk talks in the book about being pitted, often by the press, as competitors with other women in TV news. So she and Diane Soria were genuine competitors because they had the same job. for a time, but they were also pitted in this kind of one-on-one universe where this woman must

be in a battle behind the scenes with this other woman. As Katie Couric says in this Tracer's story, you think Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings and Dan Rather weren't ruthlessly competitive, too? Yeah. Then she went to, you remember, to CBS to host the evening news. That was a very big deal at the time. Kirk says in the piece, she felt male executives at CBS did not treat her well at all. as Traster writes her frustration and self-recrimination about not landing the plane that was the evening news broadcast remain palpable.

Such an interesting career. And I, and let me tell you what, I'm a sucker for the anything written about the old days of network news. I read media memoirs all the time. I have very interested in this book. Probably would have read it even if it was a B-minus memoir where we kind of went here, but not all the way here. but I definitely want to read the Katie Kirk memoir. Oh, yeah. I'm not sure if I will, but I'm enthralled.

I'm enthralled with all of this. You want me to read it and tell you about it, I think. Is that the level you find yourself on? Our relationship has been based on such things for a long time, yes. I also have to tell you about this Boston Globe tweet, since you and I are always laughing about the idea of someone breaking their silence or opening up. Yes, of course. This is the tweet.

Katie Couric opens up about her new tell-all going there. Now, wait a minute. The act of writing this book was opening up. So you, Boston Globe, are telling me that you have Katie Couric opening up about opening up. That doesn't sound like a big score to me. No, not exactly. No. It just sounds somebody on Twitter, Benjamin Hart, I think, at New York Magazine, was like,

she has broken her silence about opening up. I want to talk to you, David, about the cold of sports long form, but let's first 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. David, I am sadden to report that we had a Travis Trit news cycle last week.

Ooh! The country musician canceled four concerts because the places he was performing had standard COVID safety protocols. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, Hey, Travis, here's a quarter. Call someone who cares. Mix to Andrew M. Graining and Terry McDonald. I also have to tell you about this, by the way.

He went on Tucker Carlson show on Fox News, Travis Tritt. Yeah, I saw a screenshot of this. Did you see that the Chiron said country music sensation? Travis Tritt. That kind of stopped me short. Because sensation implies that you are happening right now. Yeah, there's a newness, a freshness to it. You're young, you're going.

The other thing was, don't we have a term that we've had for decades and decades, which is country music superstar? Which could mean you had your last hit in 1982, but you are and forever will be a country music superstar. Yeah, living legend. You can go a lot of ways. It's sensation just sort of. Maybe it's to make the older viewers feel like they're part of something new and exciting.

But it doesn't really make any sense. And I'm not exactly sure why they went that way. Got a big scoop from The Verge, David. Facebook is considering a full company rebrand as soon as next week. Full company rebrand. It was enough more Twitter joke to write. What about the Facebook? We would have also accepted

What about Trunk? Thanks to Matthew Zitland, Henry Rodman, Alex Sam Payne, Scott Tobias, and Nick Field for that one. And today's winner, David, is about the Philadelphia 76ers Ben Simmons.

Ben Simmons tried to get traded in the offseason. That didn't work. He held out. That didn't work. He went to practice and didn't seem to want to practice. That also didn't work.

The athletics, Sham Sharania writes, Ben Simmons is willing to do whatever it takes to get out of Philadelphia. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write has he tried getting in one little fight so his mom gets scared. Oh, that's really funny.

Thanks to Sneaker Critiker, if you came up with the second best fresh prince gag in Twitter history, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. Listener, Evan Hipp, by the way, sent us the good local headlines after the Ben Simmons suspension. They were Ban Simmons

and my favorite, BS walks. Really good stuff. All right, David, let's talk about the cult of sports long form. This was a tweet that seemed to demand a press box segment. Lindsay Adler, New York Yankees beat writer for The Athletic. She's been on this show. Adler tweeted this last Wednesday, Journalism's obsession with very few writers

who make a living writing 5,000 words, stories four times a year is a real detriment to the industry when young writers think that a job like beatwriting, a boot camp for fundamentals, is inherently beneath them. I believe I smashed that retweet button when I saw that tweet. What do you make of Adler's idea and the cult of sports long form? Is this like the journalism equivalent of the kids only show? shoot threes and dunk when they're growing up? Like is this? Yeah, but...

They don't learn the fundamentals anymore. But there's an argument that shooting the three is more efficient, a more efficient way to play basketball, where only writing 5,000 word stories may be a less efficient way to be a sports writer. Anyway, please continue. I think that what you, the tweet is entirely true, but I also think it's sort of normal to point at the, you know, assert like the the most successful or prominent subset of any group and and give them way too much attention, you know?

So here's my only issue with that. What does successful mean in this case? And what does best mean in this case? And how did that happen? Because what would you say, 5% of sports writing, daily sports writing is long-form sports writing? 10% am I far off there, but 100% of sports writing aggregation and aggregating services tends to be long form oriented. Yeah.

So I feel what's happened is everybody's brains have been reprogramed to think that the best sports writing equals long form sports writing. It gets tweeted. It gets in those long-form halls of fame that people are being enshrined in every week. It gets into the best sports writing book that comes out every year. And to Lindsay's point, it gets beaten into the heads of young people to think, oh, well, this is what best means. Full stop. And I think at some level, that's really, really weird and really, really silly.

Because you and I both know, working here at the ringer, there's like a big game last night. There's a huge demand to read something tonight or at the very latest tomorrow morning. Dan Devine Alert, here we go about what just happened. That piece in almost every case is never going to be the best. But why isn't it the best? Well, I mean, I would say, I mean, completely selfishly or self-centeredly, like at the ringer, not, I mean, not specifically gamers, although we do, you know, some great gamers.

just are sort of like day after columny think pieces, relatively short are some of the best stuff that we do. Absolutely. You're right. I mean, I think there's a practical, speaking specifically about reactions and stuff like that. I mean, there's certainly a practical element to longform.org, singling out pieces that will have some sort of currency

a week or a month or a year from now, right? So it's within their best interest, not to clog up their website with stuff that doesn't really make a lot of sense out of context. And also, I just think there's this sort of like, you know, there's like, I don't know, I think if you saw someone's tweet, there was just like, man, you know, every time film The Blank Reporter has written about, you know,

an NBA playoff game, they hit it out of the ballpark, please read their entire Uvra and just like dropped a link to the archive. I think you would I think you might you might click through if you if you you know were interested in the subject and trusted the tweeter but I don't think you'd end up reading a whole lot you know I mean it's just it's you can acknowledge it something's good without it sort of entering that sort of second level of discussion yes I agree and I understand especially also not just the long form websites but like books book anthologies that get printed this book's gonna sit on a bookshelf for three years then a magazine

piece that has a very particular treatment is going to hold up in another way. But I do think we get way to, we slap the label best on the magazine treatment or the long form treatment way too often. And I do think people sort of forget that those are not synonyms. And by the way, this isn't new. I remember talking years ago to sports writers who wrote in the 60s and 70s. and they'd be sitting there, David, after World Series game, oh man, you got 20 minutes, you got 40 minutes,

you're writing in white heat, and you got to get it out, and the paper is going to close, and you've got to send it to the desk in a very ancient way, and that's it. Those are the conditions you're writing under. They would look over to the right, and guess it was sitting over there, Roger Angel of the New Yorker, and they would do this every night, every night,

every night during the World Series, and then a month after the World Series was over, Roger Angel's big piece about the series would come out in The New Yorker. And I remember talking to these guys decades later. Now, they don't hate Roger Angel. Nobody hates Roger Angel. But they were like, just think of the difference

that those two things were written under. And think of how many stories I had to write for the New York World Telegram or whatever while he's sitting there gathering notes and doing one big story. Guess which one's, going to get anthologized. Guess which one's going to get remembered forever.

And Roger Angel's awesome. But does that mean that's the best and mine's not the best? Because I was giving people what they wanted the next day, not a month later. It is just an inherent in the whole thing, I think. Yeah. We've also spent time in this space, you know, talking about people lamenting to people don't read books anymore. You know, I mean, it's like there's. We have.

That sounds like we're old. men. Do we really lament that one time? No, but people, I mean, people, just, they retweets or they, you know, they, they skim, you know, whatever. It's just, it's like it's, yeah, I mean, I, like I said, I agree with the tweet through the wholeheartedly, but I think that there's a lot of, I think there's a little, it's, I mean, it's pretty self-evident why we do it. All right. Even within the whole self-evident category, don't we agree that if you read those best American sports writing books over the years, that it wasn't just long form, but it was a particular kind of long form. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know we're definitely celebrating a very, very narrow thing. Right. It's, first of all, written in a particular magazine, like a men's glossy or ESPN the magazine or any sport story written in The New Yorker. It was written in a very particularly long formy way

much of the time. Much of the time it was about a sad thing, a very, very sad thing, rather than a comic thing or a big piece. It was about a big idea unpacking a big idea. So there was that. I also think, and I'm on the judging committee of one of these things at the University of Texas, so if I'm part of the problem, apologies in advance. But when I read anthologies or stuff submitted for an award, what I see a lot of times, and this goes to Adler's point, is people being rewarded for taking a home run swing. I got up there, man, I had Richard Ben Kramer and Gay-Ten,

Talise and Frank DeFord in my mind, and I got up to the plate and bang, there it goes. And oh, it was just caught short of the warning track. But I gave it a big swing. I tried to hit a home run. Now, I am not anti-home run swing. With you, with anybody, I'm like, man, if you have the goods and you're ready and it has lined up and you feel you could do it, go for it. You know, there's no reason not to go for it. But a lot of the times, I think with this award stuff, we reward home run swings rather

than, man, you hit a great double right there. Yeah. The situation called for it and you hit a double and you're standing up on second base and brushing off your uniform pants. And we don't reward that. And so what happens again, we're talking about reprogramming young minds. You program people think everything has to be a home run swing. And people look like Adam Dunn up there half the time when I see long form.

It's like, this was not a 3,000 word piece. or this was not a 3,000 word piece written in this particular way. This should have been a really, really good 1,700 word piece or 1,500 word piece, but that wouldn't have gotten anthologized. That wouldn't have gotten you

the online Twitter accolades. That's true. You would not have been able to tweet. This piece took me four months, 15 days, six hours, and four minutes. Please read it and share because it was a more modest thing. And again,

is that like a huge problem? that is, you know, breaking our world like climate change? I don't think so. But I think within sports writing, it's a sneaky little problem. And we shouldn't do it. I think we should even it out. I want best deadline writing.

I want best column. I want best think piece. I want useful pieces. Useful pieces are really good in sports writing. Yeah. We need to celebrate usefulness. Yeah. They should give like a Pulitzer for explainers.

Well, let's not go that far. I always cite this with you. Michael Kisley read the story. I think it was about the MacArthur geniuses, which is one of my favorite lines of all time because it's so true. And he said, if you give me three or four of the winners of an award, I can fill out the rest of the list

without even knowing what the award is for. You can totally do that with sports writing long form. Okay, I see Seth Wickershams on the list. And I see Chris Jones when he was at Esquire. He's on the list. Michael J. Mooney, Chris Ballard. I don't even know what I'm talking about here, but I can fill out the rest of the list

because it gets a little bit predictable in that case. Also, by the way, too many power rankings in the world. I say this all the time to you. You want to rank the James Bond movies? Okay. But surely we as journalists know that putting pieces of journalism in order every year. And can I say this?

I don't know the awards. But putting pieces of journalism in order every year. we know that those kind of distinctions are bullshit and aren't really really valuable. The other irony I'll note here for you is that if we are canonizing long form, we're probably doing it less now than we did 10 years ago, to be fair.

But if we're canonizing it, we're doing it at a time when that seems to be less and less possible to have as a profession. Stephen Roderick, my friend, really great writer, he says in response to Adler's two, Well, the good news is that said very few writers are becoming less and less, and most write 8 to 10, not 4 or 5,000 word stories, where they start with zero sources and make exactly what they made in 2003 in real dollars,

not inflation dollars. Drive home safely. Probably another good reason, by the way, to divert people the other way, or at least tell them that these things are not, are not completely unequal. By the way, I did get the best sports. writing book in the mail the other day and they've changed the approach to this. I've noticed this book got a little better in the last couple years when like Howard Bryant and Jeff Pearlman edited

it. They just kind of admitted new writers and new pieces. Now there's going to be an eight member advisory board that says in the introduction, which will take a bunch of selections, a bunch of ideas, bunch of pieces, give them to an editor who will be different every year and then the editor will pick. but there's an eight-member committee, and it appears to be a committee that has people that have lots of different kinds of jobs, long-form writers, beat writers, et cetera. So maybe that will even things out.

I have no idea how this works. Do the pieces have to be submitted? Because that to me is the barrier for, is such a ridiculous barrier for so many things, especially, especially journalism, long-form journalism awards. Now, you obviously would, you make the case that maybe it shouldn't be specific to long-form,

but if you're edited if you're the editor of the best american sports writing anthology with some help presumably you could just read all the potential interest the potential winners on your own right you don't need like to there's no there's no reason why you're the magazine that you wrote for should have to mail something mail a manila envelope with a check for a hundred dollars in it or something to like get considered i don't think it's a hundred dollars, but you have to mail in the check with a copy of your story in it. But it does take usually the work of somebody on the editorial team. If that's the way of this works, who knows, to submit these things.

Yes. Well, and it also is going to reward people that submit more of their work than others. That's just the way it goes. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strained-pun headline. Yeah. Last Monday's headline about a man who communed with marine birds. was a man with few egress or egrids. Today's headline comes to us from the college football writer and author Ivan Maisel.

It's from the Lanyap, David, the weekly newspaper of Mobile, Alabama. Confidently say that this is the first appearance of the Lanyap here on the Pressbox podcast. The story is about a musician. Let's shorthand him as a saxophonist who was allowed to return to the peer in the coastal city of Fairhope, Alabama. So he's allowed to come back to the pier and play his saxophone. You know this story from other places. Can a saxophonist play in a public space?

In this case, yes, the city says, he may play there. What was the Mobile Lan Yap strained pun headline? Pier. Sorry, no peer in this, by the way. Doc? No, no, no, no, no location necessary. Sacks. Sex.

Six. sex and the oh yeah here we go so six we're in favor of this this is everyone has agreed to this all parties have agreed to this um say yes to sacks say uh um all parties group um all parties everyone everybody loves everybody I consens. Oh, consensual sex? Consensual sex. Oh, my gosh, that's great.

That's good. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. That was actually a plug for this Friday's interview day, because it is with Ivan Maisel about his son and his new book. I keep trying to catch his eye. You're going to want to hear this interview.

And David and I are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. you then, David. See you later, Brian.