The Press Box - Scenes From the Trump Trial, the NBA’s New Rights Deal, the Afterlife of the Alt-Weeklies, and Remembering Howie Schwab

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Bryan and David start the show by remembering Howie Schwab, who died over the weekend. They reflect on his legacy as a producer, researcher, and the final boss on ‘Stump the Schwab’ (1:00). Then they discuss the Donald Trump trial, at which cameras were barred from the courtroom and Trump struggled to stay awake (9:41). Afterward, they get into upcoming bids for NBA rights (15:56). They then talk about the Summer Olympics, how much of it they'll watch, and who will be featured (27:43). Later, during the Notebook Dump, they bring up the afterlife of the alt-weeklies (36:35) Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey there, humanoids. It's the Maskman David Shoemaker. It's a new era in professional wrestling, and that means a new era here at the Ringer Wrestling show. Kaz here, every Monday and Thursday hang out with me and my guys' shoes on the Masked Man show. And Ben Cruz here. Come kick it with me, Cal and Brian on Tuesdays for Ringer Wrestling Worldwide, where we hit on the most interesting headlines and even react to some of Maskedmans and even your hottest takes. Don't tap out. Tap in to the Ringer Wrestling Show feed now on Spotify. or wherever you get your podcasts. Worldwide? David? Yeah.

Can we start off by saying a few words about Howie Schwab? Please, yeah. Celebrating the Schwab, if you will. Howie Schwab died Saturday. He was 63 years old. The only way to describe him is as a completely unique figure in the sports media. That's what I was going to ask you, because you know this stuff better than me. Are there other Howie Schwabs lingering behind the scenes that just never got the,

never got the game show to create a public platform for themselves? How many Schwabs are there in the world? I think there are a lot of Schwabes. I think Howie probably paved the way for the bear, Chris Velika, and Hembo, who we often hear about on any Mike Greenberg program, to come in front of a camera from time to time. Mm-hmm. But there's this whole class of people who are researchers,

and that was Howie Schwab's first job at ESPN. He was a researcher. I believe he was the researcher for a time in early ESPN in the 80s. But they are the people who make anchors seem smart. Mm-hmm. And if you remember early Sports Center, early 90s, mid-90s, you'd have all these anchors come out, and they were not only imposter.

possibly funny and hip. And they had, not only did they have great catchphrases, they knew stuff about sports. Yeah. They had an authority about them. And you would watch and be like, oh, that guy knows more about sports than I do. Yeah. He's got facts and figures at his fingertips, those cool graphics they would always devote to some odd stat or another.

That was the work of Howie Schwab and people like Howie Schwab. Yeah. It is kind of a miracle in retrospect. ESPN turned out as well as it did. Because it could have been a bad version or a worse version of a very successful thing. Yeah. But because of the Schwab's new word you've coined for the whole research and behind the camera class at a network like ESPN, because of the Schwabes, it turned out better than it ever had to be. Yeah.

Which is pretty amazing. then as you point out in 2004, ESPN does something magical. They give Howie Schwab a game show. It was called Stump the Schwab. What happened was big sports nerds like you and me would play against each other at the beginning of the show. Yeah.

And then the final boss, if I can use a phrase I've heard somewhere lately, would be Howie Schwab. you would get to sit across what looked like a blackjack table from him with the host Stuart Scott sitting in the middle had kind of forgotten that Stewart was the host until I watched a little bit of this on YouTube today and you would try to outdule Howie in sports knowledge.

Yeah. It's a little bit like when Ben Stein's money except you felt better about yourself after watching it. Yeah, no, it's part of this class of like DIY game shows early MTV had a handful of them that really played up to the to the diehard audience right I mean it

remote control I think and stump the Schwab had a lot in common but but it's it's um it fit even I mean more perfectly more else than it at ESPN I mean it was ironically sort of underproduced in its way but you're right the existence of Howie Schwab was necessitated by the fact that viewers know a lot about this,

know a lot of facts and factoids about the subjects that the network covers. That's the diehard audience, right? It's the people that that would be turning away if the anchors, the Sports Center didn't seem like they knew what they were talking about. And that's the Schwab's base. A whole class of people like that. People that would read sports trivia guides, people that would call sports radio stations.

and have the impossibly obscure fact or figure at their fingertips. And what's funny is if you think about it, not only does Howie paved the way for the bear to be on college game day, but listen to like, for instance, any one of our ringer podcasts, I was listening to Solek and the boys do the draft show the other day. And I'm like, this is the Schwab. Solek is also the Schwab. He's just the front facing talent.

Who's like that? We decided that this wasn't like a behind the camera, front of the camera kind of dichotomy. You could put people like that on a podcast or on a television show. And as you say, there was that level of authority. And people would be like, I am like you. You can talk like that. This no longer has to be in the shadows.

Yeah. The Schwabs, David, have come into the light. I met Howie Schwab one time. This was in 2017, and I was doing a profile for the ringer about Dick Vital. Down there in the Sarasota area of Florida. And I'm driving to Dick Vital's house. Please follow me here. And the first thing I see is Dick Vital standing in the driveway of his house in khaki pants.

The real vibe of your grandpa knows what time you're arriving and he's waiting for you in the driveway. So say hello, we go into this Vital house, which is absolutely gigantic. And inside the house, unbeknownst to me is Howie Schwab. And it became clear after exchanging a few pleasantries that Howie Schwab was living there, at least temporarily during the NCAA tournament, as kind of an in-house research department for Dick Chattel. Because of the tournament, he was doing, he was, he was ready to give research at moments notice to Dick Vitow. Yeah, because Dick was doing so many radio hits that he would have to supply him and literally sitting next to him and supplying him with stuff.

Oh my God. That's amazing. I need, I need a Schwab. How great with a podcast would I like wrestling podcast be if I just had some deep knowledge wrestling researchers sitting next to me, me little note cards all the time. This is the problem. When the Schwabs are on the podcast or on camera, they no longer help knuckleheads like us.

Too good, yeah. We can no longer keep them behind the scenes. Let me tell you something. When I met Howie Schwab in 2017, he was still furious at being laid off by ESPN four years earlier. I did not bring it up. I did not ask him about it. I was talking to him about Dick Vital,

and he was telling me something like, that company's full of shit. ESPN treated me like a number was saying that when he was laid off, he wasn't even allowed to go into the office and say goodbye to his friends there. Oh, wow. And then he wound up just leaving behind a lot of his stuff in his cubicle because he just wanted to leave. He wanted to be done with it.

Yeah. And he was so, so upset. And it reminds you, every time we have one of these ESPN layoff stories and we do a podcast segment and I write a column and then we move on with our lives, those decisions. decisions, the consequences of those decisions do not go away. People are still really deeply hurt. That's an awful event in their life. So we have this conversation then later that night or maybe it was the next night, we're having dinner out at a very nice restaurant. Dick Vital is doing a periscope hit

for the NCAA tournament. Dick Vital had not been watching a lot of basketball over the two days I spent with him, but he was doing periscope hits to update his fans, and I kid you not, Howie Schwab sitting next to him is supplying him with stats. Is giving him a matchup when he forgets it. He is being the Schwab in my presence at a restaurant with Dick Vitale.

That's unbelievable. I will never, ever forget that. All right, coming up on today's show, David, scenes from the un-televised trial of Donald Trump, a cheat sheet on the NBA's TV rights negotiations, how to watch the Summer Olympics, which believe it or not are coming up and the afterlife of the alt weekly.

All that and much more on the press box. A part of the ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Brian Waters here with you. David, the Trump trial has officially begun. Oh, has it ever. Oh, boy, it has. We got opening statements this morning.

Donald Trump charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. all of that connected to the hush payment to Stormy Daniels. The big news from the court this morning is that Donald Trump has pulled a Mike Francesa once again. Suzanne Craig of the New York Times reports Trump is struggling to stay awake. His eyes were closed for a short period. He was jolted awake when Todd Blanche's lawyer nudged him while sliding a note in front of him. Why is the idea of being jolted awake even fun?

funnier than falling asleep in a public place. You'll remember last week that Maggie Haberman reported Donald Trump falling asleep and that Donald Trump did the death stare at Maggie Haberman afterward. And if it feels a little weird like Suzanne Craig and Haberman are putting on a fedora with a little press card in it and rushing to a payphone to call the home office about the news from the Trump trial, it's because that's kind of what's happening. here. Yeah. There are no cameras in the courtroom. We are relying on written accounts in the occasional courtroom sketch. And that's not totally unusual. Part of the reason this is happening

is New York has fairly restrictive laws about this and the judge in this case decided not to have cameras in the courtroom. But how weird does it do that you and I this fall could sit down and stream almost any high school football game in America? Sure. Not college, high school football game in America, but we cannot watch what everybody is noting as the first criminal trial of an American president live. No, it's really weird. And it changes the coverage of it, obviously, quite a bit. I mean, as great as it would be, or is whatever, as different as it would be to have footage

of Trump dozing off. It gives so much power to the written word. in this case, the tweet. But you're right, scurrying to pay phones, filing stories, all that kind of stuff. The reactions of the journalist is a very small number of people

who are actually in the courtroom and reporting on it. That's really all we have to go off of. And it's a very bizarre, I mean, honestly, it's a throwback sort of way to, to take in the news, although it must be said that, you know,

24-hour news channels have the same kind of points of reference that we do, but their coverage is definitely not a throwback in any sense. We still have to kind of wrestle with all that. Yes. It is a throwback in the sense that the way Damon Runyon covered Al Capone's tax evasion trial is the way that Olivia Nutsi is covering the Trump trial. By the way, this is what Nutsi tweeted. the American public has no view inside of this courtroom.

There are no photos allowed, no video. The only documentation of the scene of the former president sitting as a defendant in this criminal trial will come from the reporters and sketch artists inside the room. I'm going to share every detail about what I observe, no matter how small, no matter how superficial, because all the details provided by the assembled press will amount to the most complete account of this trial

that we can offer to the public. And then Nutsi added, I feel like the David Attenborough of the Trump trial, which really captures the vibe here. There was also a weird side effect of all this posting and filing by the reporters in the courtroom. It came from the judge who felt that they were describing the physical characteristics of the prospective jury members so much that they were endangering the anonymity of the prospective jury members. They say this is what's happening. There's no, there's no video here, which wouldn't show the jury anyway.

But there's no video. So they are just writing and writing run you-esque copy about here's the guy who went up there. Even if they're trying to, even if they're trying to be careful, you have 10 different journalists carefully describing the same person. And it's just like the old, you know, the old parable about the, you know, blind men and the elephant or whatever. Eventually, you're like going to understand this great, you know, you had a bit of a more comprehensive picture. of who you're looking at. So Derek Thompson did the allegory of Plato's Cave on the podcast last week,

and now you've got the blind man and the elephant. I don't know. Plato's Cave is a lot more high level than what I'm working with here. We're really covering the classics here on the press box. Thank you both for explaining what those actually meant because I wasn't totally sure in either case. We did get a funny media sub-story here, David,

about where the members of the jury that were picked for the Trump trial get their news. So of course this was something of interest to the lawyers. Juror number two, and I hope I'm not violating any trust here, gets their news from true social and Twitter slash X. So that'll be interesting to watch. Juror number one, the Daily Mail, Fox News, MSNBC, and the New York Times. Pretty much covers the waterfront. One juror, this is alternate juror number four, picked the New York Times and

Reuters. How good do you feel if you're in the Reuters newsroom about getting a shout out from the Trump jury? And speaking of news, the first witness for the prosecution this week, the man with the most perfect and wonderful name in all of media, former National Inquirer publisher, David Pecker. Not making either of those facts up. All right. Item number two, David. And something to flag for future discussion on this podcast. This is a huge day for the NBA TV rights. NBA has basically had two television partners since forever. ESPN, which does the NBA finals, and Turner, which takes you all the way to the conference finals. Yeah. Well, today, midnight tonight, and I can only assume there will be a live stream

in the home offices of John Arand and Andrew Marchand to commemorate this moment. But tonight at midnight is the end of the exclusive negotiating window that those two partners have with the NBA. And after that, more potential partners come in. They can start televising NBA games or streaming NBA games starting after next season, 24, 25. So let's do a little rundown here of the players in this game. ESPN. Yeah. People think they are almost certainly coming back.

ESPN is trying to load up for bear for their direct-to-consumer offering. They've been buying rights like crazy. The only thing that would hold them back seemingly is how much they've just paid to the NFL and the college football playoff and everybody else. Yeah. But everybody thinks ESPN's coming back in some form. Coming back as a partner or making a comeback more broadly speaking. Well, the broadly speaking part is TBD, but coming back as a partner to the company. the NBA. Sure. I mean, listen, we've seen over and over again across sports that it is

worthwhile for the leagues to have ESPN as a partner because it allows a different level of access and coverage on the Sports Center and other shows that are effectively marketing tools for the for the sports league. So I'm sure that there'll be a piece of this one way or the other. second partner is Turner or Warner Brothers Discovery more broadly. I don't know about you, but whenever I'm watching the NBA playoffs and I go over to TNT, I realize that the only other programming on TNT is a three and a half hour version of Star Wars because it has so many commercials. There's wrestling on there too.

There's wrestling on there too. Great show last night. And of course they got inside the NBA. Yeah. The only good or just about the only good studio show in all. all of sports. So you figure if the NFL was like an existential thing that the networks had to have, like what is NBC?

What is Fox if they didn't renew with the NFL? Yeah. We're just about there with the Turner networks. Yeah. All that other programming aside. And then there's the fact that they've got inside the NBA, so you don't want to throw away one of the most successful studio shows ever. Well, they're also, I mean, I have not fully up to date on this.

but they're also using the NBA as one of the legs on which to stand their BR, you know, their Bleacher Report sports app on Max, you know, every sports platform on Macs. So they have a vested interest and obviously, and bigger than just the programming on T&T. Absolutely. Absolutely. Got to feed the app, right, in all cases.

Third player would be NBC. It's been a while since the NBA on NBC was, a thing. Though I noticed it was almost an overworked Twitter joke that everybody was tweeting out round ball rock to commemorate the start of the NBA playoffs. Oh, yeah. A lot of nostalgia for the NBA on NBC, including from you and I, because that's what we grew up with. Yes, absolutely. I'm not sure there was a cooler marriage of sport and network. And song, yes. And song than the NBA on NBC. I don't know, practically speaking what that would mean now. we're not going to have Bob Costas and Pat Riley

in the studio next year as far as I know. Marv Albert and the czar of the Telestrator would not be calling games for NBC. But if they were to get it on. But why not? Why not just lean all in? Why not? Just lean in. Bring back all the old people.

Have the same music. Use the same like pixelated graphics from that period. Who says no to this? Who says no to this? Riley is the busiest of the guys I just mentioned. So he yeah, but yeah, maybe not Riley, but you could get it. You could get everybody else on there. We could, we could figure it out.

Also, by the way, if NBC gets back in the NBA, Mike Dorico's called a lot of basketball in his time. Noah Eagle has called some basketball in his slightly shorter time. It'd be kind of interesting announcer-wise. And then the fourth player here, David, more of a group category. It's a tech company. Streaming company. out on his podcast the other day when Bill talks about stuff happening behind the scenes

in the NBA, I just mark that down as this is completely true. But he noted that there's almost certainly going to be a tech company that has a massive piece of this pie. One, because what is more NBA than leaning into the online world? The NBA is the most online of all the major sports leagues. Also, the NBA just is not like the NFL, right? The NFL could go to all its partners and be like, we want massive dump trucks full of cash and we want the NFL on free television. Yeah. NBA does not have that kind of sway.

Also, the NBA is already behind, as we mentioned with ESPN and Turner, a cable paywall in any cases. It's not that big a jump to go from partly behind a cable paywall to partly behind an Amazon Prime paywall, for instance. Yeah. I mean, and obviously you could still do it. I mean, obviously, splitting it up is what we're talking about, right? I mean, you can, it's like, it's like, you know, varying your stock portfolio or whatever.

Not that I know anything about that, but you, but you could, you can maintain the security of ESPN coverage. You can maintain the relationship with T&T if you, if you want to. And you can also carve out, you know, an extra third just to cash a giant check from Amazon or whoever, you know. I mean, and, and certainly to get a foothold in there, if that's the way the wind sort of start, blowing, you know? How long, how many years are we negotiating right now? Most of the, the big of the chunk of a decade is where we're negotiating right now, the better part of a decade. Yeah. So, you know, I think it's, I think it would probably be safe if you wanted to make a bet that like cable television in some form of fashion will

still exist by the end of this. You're not just totally, um, sacrificing your future, but it, but it's probably safe to have a toehold somewhere else to. So if the, if we still, stipulate that they're going to have three or more partners. Then the interesting question is, what are all these partners getting? Yeah. You know, with Amazon and the NFL, it's like, okay, you get Thursday night football, which is clearly the worst package is going to have the worst games on there. And then we're going to add one playoff game to the streaming world.

Peacock last year, Amazon this coming year. Yeah. Okay. It's a small piece of the pie. How big could Amazon's piece of the pie be? Andrew Marchand has a column in the athletics say, would it maybe include the conference finals? Hmm. You're putting a big chunkier playoffs on prime.

Would it maybe even include the NBA finals at some point? Are we far enough along in history that the NBA would think about doing that? You know, five years ago, you would say it's just too soon. Maybe even two years ago when the NFL was crossing the T's and dotting the eyes, it was too soon. to think about that? Yeah. Is it still too soon to think, okay, in five years, Amazon,

we're not going to give you the NBA finals right away because you would have to create your own, first of all, you have to create your own production staff, right? Start producing games, hire announcers, do all those things, show us that you've met certain thresholds. But could you stream the NBA finals in five years?

Probably so. Probably so. I mean, and listen, all it takes is a specific stance from the league, right? I mean, you could, you could split it up. The Super Bowl was on CBS and the Paramount Plus network this year, right? Or over the top, they're owned by the same, you know, corporate body, obviously. I mean, that's the same, that's the same company at play there. But is there not a case to be made where you just say, hey, we're going to divvy this up between NBC and

Amazon, you know, Amazon gets exclusive streaming rates because obviously both sides would say no, you know, on first offer. NBC's could say, oh, we're going to put on Peacock, you know, whatever. that's fine. And maybe that's a play they would make. But if you're talking to Turner, they have a streaming platform too. But maybe Amazon just gets the runoff. You know, and maybe that's maybe they can actually split it up that way. And even if that doesn't work, you can, you know, force your network partner to pay a lot more for those rights. I just think that, I think at the end of the day, whatever streaming service is going to be used to drive up the price. And one of the when Warner Brothers Discovery or, you know, NBCU or somebody is just going to have to just write a check that they probably can't even cash, you know, whatever, just to say, we want to keep the finals into perpetuity.

Because they don't want to, they wouldn't want to hamstring their own streaming future, you know, by splitting things up. John Arand had a prediction in his final column for Sports Business Journal. And he does his predictions column every year that has a weird, weird way of coming true. and he said, what if in this new NBA rights deal, we see a future where ESPN just doesn't have the NBA finals every year. They were new with the NBA. They got a huge piece of the league. Maybe they have the finals. But the idea that we can just count on Mike Breen calling the finals on ESPN and ABC,

that doesn't exist anymore every year. There's so many different permutations here. We haven't even mentioned the in-season tournament, which could be sold second. separately that was clearly just created to be an object to sell at a TV auction. Marshan mentioned the local rights with all these regional sports networks going sideways. Yeah, that's what's huge. I mean, there's no, no league has more marketable personalities than the NBA, and we've talked about this a million times before.

It's almost as simple as the fact that you can like see their faces when they're, when they're playing, when they're playing on every broadcast. But I mean, I'm sure this is nobody's top motivator, but you could, I mean, you can imagine a world where if something, if, if, you know, imagine your streaming platform. If Amazon or if Apple just got, you know, wanted a piece of this and this got X'd out, but somehow found a way to like backdoor in the rights to the New Orleans Pelicans, right? We got the local New Orleans Pelicans and we're just going to put the entire strength of our marketing department behind turning Zion Williamson and brand, brand, Ingram and, you know, whoever else, into just like megastars and telling their story on a day and day out basis, you know, like really, like that could be the biggest thing in basketball, right, regardless of what their record is. I mean, there's, there are a lot of, there are a lot

interesting permutations, but that's, you know, that's obviously involves a level of creative thinking that is going to be really secondary to, you know, how big of a check can we write. I like how you pick the pelicans because that would be the ultimate test case. Yeah. Can we make America care about the pelicans on a daily basis? Just show them going out to eat in New Orleans. I would watch that show every day. Summer Olympics, David, we are less than 100 days out.

And I know this because I saw a picture of Mike Toriko standing on a rooftop in Paris commemorating the occasion. It's like smoke coming out of the Vatican. That means it's less than 100 days until the Olympics begin. Let's do podcast Truth Serum here. How much of the Olympics will you watch? Oh, man. I'm not going to lie.

I mean, there's a possibility. The answer is, you know, a total of an hour and a half. There's a chance that it's a real significant amount more than that, just a kind of depending on, I think, the way the kind of culture catches on. I mean, there's definitely a world in which I watch the vast majority of the Olympics through, like, Twitter videos of, you know, funny announcer moments, you know, or whatever. But, you know, if it, if it, if it catches everybody's attention, if it becomes a real big deal, this is, if it's a thing wrong, if it's monoculture, then I'm happy to be a part of it.

All sports media podcasts need to have a Mari-Povitch style element where you get a lie detector test about how many non-football events have you watched over the past year and then somebody comes out and reads the results. say, ah, you know, you were, you were talking like you watched Summer Olympics. You were talking like you watch regular season baseball. Oh, my God. The results say not so much. That's terrifying just to think of that.

Brian Steinberg had a big article in variety about how NBC is going to televise the Olympics. It's really interesting because there's been this whole debate year after year or every four years after every four years going back to when I was a kid about how much do you show live. and how much do you then save for the prime time in America hours that pay the bills for NBC? Well, in 2024, they're going to show everything live on Peacock. Yeah. So then the question becomes,

well, when it finally becomes prime time in the United States after most of this stuff has already happened live, what do we show? And their answer is, according to Steinberg, to make the prime time hours a little bit like a talk. show or a variety show. Yeah. That features a bunch of non-traditional sports television personalities.

Mm-hmm. For instance, the opening ceremonies will be hosted by Mike Tariko. Mm-hmm. Peyton Manning. Mm-hmm. And Kelly Clarkson. Wow. Not a trio that I ever thought I would be able to fit into one sentence,

especially on a media podcast. the closing ceremony will be hosted by Mike Tariko and Jimmy Fallon Snoop Dog will be doing man on the street interviews from Paris Steinberg reports our colleague if we can call her that Alex Cooper will be part of NBC's broadcasting efforts Wow they do have one really cool idea which is called the gold zone

and the gold zone so many jokes I'm not making right now the gold zone is going to be like the red zone of the Olympics so the red zone solved the problem of you know how do I watch eight football games at once but the gold zone is real time or the gold zone is real time okay yes the gold zone is real time because in that hour and a half of the Olympics that I've watched

previous years I'll sit down with my kids before bedtime be like let's watch something and it's like beach volleyball. And it's like, oh, this is a great 35 minutes, but I don't have a spreadsheet in front of me where I can compare what else is happening with right now. Yeah. With this beach volleyball match. Yeah. And I would love to have something that just whirls me through all these sports. Yeah. There's nothing like watching beach volleyball with your kids. And then all of a sudden you just like open the Twitter app and see that you just missed a world record being set in the, you know, in the 100 or something. And you're just like, oh, I wish I would have known that was going on. Yes, world records that you'd go to. Also, this is an amazing sentence from Steinberg's article in variety. The network, that is NBC, even plans to deploy five heart rate monitors among the parents of athletes. This is so fraught. Why would you do that?

So that you can see just how great their hearts are getting. You're worried that we're going to have like a coronary event while they're? Why, yeah, why draw attention to the potential? for a coronary event. You would not watch that though if you had just the EKG on the screen while their son or daughter

is in the swimming. What's it going to be horrible if somebody is just totally stone cold and their heart doesn't move at all? Suddenly like flat lines. Yeah, somebody's mom is just the villain of the Olympics

because they just don't care when their child is out there doing a flip. All right. I just found in a quick Google the weirdest Olympics hosting team, at least before Mike Toriko, Peyton Manning, and Kelly Clarkson. It was the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary on ABC hosted by Paula Zon and Tim McCarver. Wow. That is definitely the comp for NBC 2024. All right, David, coming up in 30 seconds, the afterlife of the alt weekly in those ads that appeared in its back page. But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious. All of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the Pressbox pod where they are always, always gratefully received. I've got some sad middlebrow chain restaurant news for you.

I know what story this is. I'm very up on it. Go ahead. Red Lobster. For those not up on this as David, as up on this is David, is reportedly considering filing for bankruptcy. Yeah. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write

millions of jeering lobsters all crying out, who's in hot water now? The story that I read, and I actually didn't go any further than the first one, said it lost something like $11 million on their

endless shrimp. That is correct. The endless shrimp deal. Then they extended it because it was so popular and then ended up losing so over $10 million. Like is it, could you not call it off? Do you not have some fine print on the little tabletop placard that could be like, we are going to stop this if it becomes a problem? You're not like walk away from the table after $5 million down the tubes. Well, it became a permanent part of the menu apparently. Yeah, but still, if they run out of shrimp, that's the, you don't get to like file a class action suit against them.

It's just like the legendary story about one of our friends' dads who was at the all you can eat barbecue place and the owners came over and said, please stop. About six or seven plates of barbecue. Yeah. It's too bad for Red Lobster. Red Lobster, I never went to a Red Lobster until I was in my 40s. That was just one of those that my family didn't go to. So I kind of always geared queer. But I've been quite a bit over the past five years or so.

It's absolutely delicious. And, yeah, it's sad. The Shoemaker family wasn't humming for the seafood lover and you during your childhood. I just can't believe the endless shrimp is what, like, could they not, did they not learn a lesson from the sizzler or whatever came before? Or there was always shrimp on the Golden Corral, the Golden Corral buffet, right? But it was seemingly in limited quantities and they'd want you to fill up on the other things. Yeah. Well, that was the real, that's the genius of the bar, is that you got to walk past the ice cream, which costs zero dollars for the, you know, for the restaurant.

The baked potato. You have to walk past all that to get to the shrimp. Endless shrimp is great, though. Brian, our producer, says he just had endless shrimp last July and it was great. I think I've probably had it since then. It's good. I was going to say last July. No wonder they're going under. All right. If that joke gave you endless satisfaction, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter. show for the week. And thanks to the listener of the Count of Monty Grypto for sending that in. All right, very quickly in the notebook dump, David, let's talk about Alt Weeklys.

Because there is a new podcast out on Audible called Holdfast. It was made by two friends of mine. Michael Mooney, who I last saw on Bourbon Street, New Orleans after the Longhorns lost the Sugar Bowl, and Sam Eifling, and a third person, who I'm not friends with, but would love to be, Trevor

Aronson. And he did about what you can call the afterlife of the entire alt weekly apparatus. It's about this guy, Mike Lacey and his business partner, Jim Larkin, who had this alt weekly empire. It started in Phoenix. It would eventually spread all the way across the

country. We should pause here for 30 seconds and tell younger listeners what an alt weekly is. Oh, no. Or was. These are the free newspapers. You got in cities coast to coast. What would you say distinguish the writing in and all weekly from your...

A little bit of reverent, a little bit, you know, more granular. It was younger. It was a younger voice, right? It was, we're not, this wasn't necessarily appealing to your parents. It was appealing to you or your older brother or whatever, you know. It was the concerts you wanted to see locally. It was, you know, new restaurants you wanted to go to. And it was, you know, sometimes more not necessarily national, but larger scale news.

book reviews or whatever with just a more, well, from where we were standing, discerning eye, right? It was more pointed. And it generally had, or at least, felt like the premise was that it had more of the soul of the city invested in it, right? It wasn't, this wasn't, you know, Charlotte, North Carolina trying to be like New York, which is how someone, you know, especially in their 20s, might look at the Charlotte Observer or the way that the writer is their work.

This is the real Charlotte. This is the artistic side of Charlotte. This is the self-aware side. And of course, that's the small town version of it. Obviously, there is the Village Voice in New York, which is, you know, a major thing. I mean, in a lot of cases, some of these alt-weeklies were more well-known, or at least in the time, were more well-known nationally than the local newspapers were. Absolutely.

I think Soul of a City is good, especially it's like the difference between the Soul of a City and the rich guys who run the city. Yeah. And their soul or whatever it is that existed inside their corpus. I remember when we moved to New York, you and I were living together. And I picked up the village voice and I was so excited to read the village voice in New York City for the first time. And I turned to the arts pages and Jay Hoberman was the movie critic. What a legit.

Coolest byline in movie critic history. and he would do his best movies of the year. And I remember looking at him being like, I haven't heard of these movies. These are not like art films that are produced by Miramax that I considered myself a smart and worldly person for seeking out. These are the art films. Well, he also put, I famously remember,

I remember that he famously put Flight of the Phoenix on the list and what would have been, that must have been that first year we were living together, which was a mainstream movie that he just determined. Anyway, he had very eclectic tastes, but yes, it was very, it was, it was, it was high brown when it wasn't, it was, it was just deliberately pointed. Amazing stuff. You remember those classified ads that were in the back of all weeklies. I think I got my first apartment from a classified ad in the back of the village voice,

which is incredible to think about. I'm so glad you said apartment because I was talking about the adult advertising. Don't know what you think about that. That wink wink, kind of had those wink winky ads back there about girlfriend experiences and all that kind of stuff.

Well, part of the Hold Fast podcast is about that world because as we know, a lot of advertising, personal advertising goes over to Craigslist and away from newspapers and alt-weeklies. So Lacey founds backpage.com, which is seeking out part of that online personal advertising business, including the adult ads. And as the makers of this podcast point out, part of alt weekly journalism in the aughts is being funded with proceeds from Backpage. We'd love to think that we're all funded by a nice auto company or department stores.

a check to the local paper. That's not always how it works. A lot of good journalism funded that way. Well, not shockingly, Backpage came to the attention of lots of politicians, including Kamala Harris when she was the AG of California. Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin get arrested on federal charges in 2018. They say this is about free speech. The feds say, you are facilitating prostitution.

You are engaged in a criminal conspiracy, among other charges. There are two mistrials, including one conviction among the many, many charges for Lacey. Larkin later dies by suicide. Again, I'm fast forwarding here. This is a fascinating podcast about this entire world. Hold fast over on Honorable, highly recommended. And also to put on your radar, as long as we're talking about alt weeklies, this book that has been sitting at me, sitting on my shelf just looking at me, the freaks came out to write by Trish Romano. Yeah.

An oral history of the village voice. What a great idea. Yeah. With all your old friends, Robert Criscow, James Wolcott, Tom Robbins, Michael Musto. Mm-hmm. How much does that sound like early odds in New York? I cannot wait to read this book and it's gotten fantastic reviews, including one from Wolcott in air mail.

All right, Dave, before we go, some running departments here. We got a lot of only in journalism to catch up on. Tyler Lauletta sends us the word patented. The Cavs Donovan Mitchell sets tone with patented 30 point game one. Also in only in wrestling and bouncing. No, I was going to say, only in wrestling too. That's a patented elbow drop. This seems totally normal to me to say out loud.

This is patented elbow drop. This comes from listener Jake. New York Times had a very big and kind of strange. Aaron Rogers feature. And they use this phrase. It is certainly not what the team's fans are talking about the Jets fans. We're imagining when Mr. Rogers arrived last year as the would-be savior of the Moribund Jets. Moribund.

He's hearing you say it out loud proves it. You don't hear that one said out loud very often. But an amazing term in sports writing history. How many Moribund franchises have you read about? What is What would be What is the more conventional synonym

for Morven? Shitty? But it's sort of there's like a gloom and doom attached to it, right? It's like, it's like this has been,

this is a, this is a, a plague of shittiness. There you go. You just said, you just used a better phrase than Morven. All right.

You hear that guys? Maybe not doable in the New York Times, but the ringer would absolutely run that. from listener Johnny Harvey, the word beckons belongs in the only in journalism dictionary. The postseason finally beckons for the 76ers Buddy Healed. Beckins is a wonderful word.

And Michael Lev, David, columnist of the Arizona Daily Star, self-reported an only in journalism word. Oh, that's big. We hear at the press box always encouraged journalists to self-report. That is the best and safest way to handle and only a journalism word. He was talking about a baseball player who's been caught stealing a number of times and he said usually it's Brendan Summerhill's

daring do that gets him in trouble. Daring do. Daring do is an incredibly funny word. It just sounds when you say it out loud. I don't even think I would hesitate when I'm reading it, but hearing you again, hearing you say it out loud

makes it just sound like you're saying something my child would get in trouble for saying at school. Daring do. I just want to say that over and over again. All right. It's time for a feature that is always full of daring do. It's time for David Shoemaker's. David Shoemaker, I should say, guess is the strain pun headline. Yeah.

I was rolling around the word daring do in my head so many times I couldn't get it out. Last Thursday's headline, David, about a Scandinavian country's new defense spending initiative was built fjord tough. So good. Today's headline comes from me. It's from Puck. It's a media story we haven't touched on yet about the Daily Beast,

my old home. Puck notes that the Daily Beast has brought in two media veterans to run the place. Joanna Coles, former magazine editor and Ben Sherwood, former ABC executives. Executives, excuse me. These are big

names, David. These are smart people. being brought in to run this site, what was Puck's strained pun headline? All right. Smart people. Smart people. The smartest people, you might say, David. These are the people we sent to save the beast.

The beast and the brightest? The beast in the brightest. Boy, I just held your hand. You fed me right up to that baby, didn't I? He is David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Brackson Magic by Brian Waters. Coming up tomorrow, not Thursday.

Tomorrow, we're taping it two days early. The NFL Network's Peter Schrager is going to be the guest host. Yeah. I've got to say this, David. One of the longest and most loyal listeners of this podcast, Peter Schroger. Back when you and I were doing this on the old Ringer lot, face to face, when you still lived in L.A., we put up an episode, I'd get a text from Peter Schroger, who was walking around New York, commenting on something we said.

Peter Schrager is going to be on this podcast to talk NFL draft and much, much more. And then on Monday, Shoemaker returns with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.