The Press Box - The Athletic-New York Times Marriage, Nikki Finke, and Late Night in Peril

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

Bryan and David break down the merger between The Athletic and The New York Times. They discuss the policies and standards enforced for both outlets, the evolution of the sports section at the Times, and the importance of finding identity (6:26). Later, they say goodbye to reporter Nikki Finke (34:06) before switching gears and diving into the transition of the late-night show from cable, with figures such as James Corden and Trevor Noah leaving their respective shows (48:16). 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

The time has come to get ready for the 2022 World Cup. And what better way to prepare than by revisiting the World Cup's most amazing goals? I'm Brian Phillips. I'm making a podcast about the history of the men's World Cup, told through the stories of 22 iconic goals. The show's called 22 goals. It's out now on the Ringer Podcast Network, and we're having so much fun. David? Yes. We here at the press box are very interested in network sports theme music. And I've got a very important update from ESPN, which has decided to change its NBA theme song for the upcoming season.

Dude, I feel really terrible for asking this. But was it, was it the John Tesh theme prior? to this or were there several songs in between? First of all, the Ringer HR department just sent you a note. You haven't been watching enough basketball. I watch a lot of basketball. I watch a lot of basketball with the volume turned down. That's just sort of the deal that you make. The deal that the pact that I've signed as a parent is it just like,

things can happen in the background, but I can't fully give myself over to them. So I don't have the previous theme song queued up, but it's the one that goes, Oh, right, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that song. Yeah.

It's been around since 2006, and it's called, wait for it, fast break, most generic possible name for an NBA theme song. Mm-hmm. But this year, David, ESPN's going to change things up. Here is the new theme song you're going to be hearing when you watch basketball with a sound up. Oh, I'm excited. Let's do it. Sounds a little bit. militaristic, a little bit more structured than I think I would have anticipated.

Militaristic is not unusual in the genre. Sunday night football is a little militaristic. Oh, sure, but that's more of a militaristic sport, I feel like. Maybe it's just my John Tesh childhood, but there's more of a jazzy quality to the NBA in my mind than I thought would come through in the song. I like jazzy, but I also like important. I want the theme song to make me think rightly or wrongly that the game I'm watching is really important. Yeah. That's why we spent approximately 19 hours on this podcast talking about Mr. Big Stuff and taking it to the streets and the other songs ESPN would randomly insert into the finals.

But no, no, this is not the 60s on 6 on Sirius XM. This is the finals. let's be important here. But these songs are like, they're not only catchy. I feel like for normal people, which is to say people, not us, this is how they identify what network is showing the game they're watching.

They can hum these songs. I mean, I think a lot of people, they don't even know the names of the announcers. They're just like, yeah, yeah, that guy does the NBA. He's, yeah, I see him a lot. But if you say, what is the theme song for the NBA on NBA? see, oh yeah, here we go.

John Tesh, baby. I can hum that. What's the Fox NFL theme song? They could probably come up with that. Yeah. Or what do you think about this? I kind of like it. Yeah.

I'd say first listen, which is really the test rate, is if you hear this 23,000 times, do you like it or not? It's hard to predict. I like it less than I like the Thursday night football theme song on Amazon the first time I heard it. That I was like, yeah, here we go. I'm ready for some football. I'm going to feel that way at halftime of commanders bears this week. But I was like, yeah, I'm ready. This one is kind of a, it's kind of a yeah, okay. Yeah, it's hard to imagine. What it'll feel like after a season of this. But like I said, a little bit more structured than I was expecting. But I think it's funny

because I'm humming it off mic and I actually feel like it's a better hum than it is illicit. Sometimes these songs, you can't, usually the hum pales in comparison to the actual track. This is one that's almost made for the hum. So maybe it's a

maybe I'm misreading it. Maybe this is perfect. Good hum. Message Jimmy Patero from David. By the way, do you think John Tesh, who, thanks to the quick Google search, is still out there on the road if you're in such metropolis is as Salida, Arizona, or, you know, Jupiter, Florida, Largo, Florida.

Santa Barbara in the new year, you can go see and play. Do you think he plays the NBA theme song in his live shows? Absolutely. And I'll tell you, it took the kids to see John Williams at the Hollywood Bowl last year. Oh, yeah. And he played the Olympic March, the one we hear on NBC every two years. And I was like, yeah, here we go. now forget E.T. and Raiders the Lost

Dark, this is what I want. The sports theme music perform live. So if Round Ball Rock is not part of John Tesh at Santa Barbara or whatever that city in Arizona you said was, I'm out. My tickets are going back to ticket bastard. Coming up

on the press box, the athletic and the New York Times got married. Now they need to sort out their differences. We explain. We also say farewell to Nikki Fink, the reporter who terrified and some would say terrorized Hollywood. Plus, David, should Seth Myers and the rest of late-night comedy take their acts to cable

news? All that more on the press box, a part of the ringer. Podcast Network. Media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Erica Servantes here. David, in professional wrestling, there is a term of art for two people who are suspicious of each other, but now. find themselves on the same team. Oh, like an uneasy alliance?

An uneasy alliance. How are they going to be able to coexist, I think, is the second tier of that? And then the third is, I mean, you're going to shake your hand or slap you in the face. Exactly. Well, we have an uneasy alliance in the world of sports red. It's between the New York Times sports page and the athletic. the website the Times bought for $550 million earlier this year. By the way, I had to fact check earlier this year.

It does seem like a long time. We are in the same year that the New York Times Athletic transaction went down. This is a total sidebar. I was talking to somebody on the PR side of the business just yesterday about how just ridiculous these numbers are. We're going to talk about Nikki Fink later. How much did she sell Deadline Hollywood Daily for for $10 million or something like that? And now it's just like, obviously, it's different. corporate structure here, but just that we're in the $500 million range. It's just all fake money.

It feels like you could get $10 million for one year of substack now. Yeah. Not mentioned selling the whole site for $10 million. Yeah. And then the people who buy it are buying or, you know, they just have to justify it to their shareholders based on how many like, you know, peacock subscriptions, your blog just earned them or something. It's just all so, Such a bizarre transaction. Ben Strauss has a good piece about the Times athletic marriage in the Washington Post. First off, as a season observer of this industry, I want to say, I can't believe sports writers would be suspicious of each other.

I can't believe a New York Times sports writer would look at an athletic writer, David, as an untimesy invader of the old gray lady. I can't believe an athletic writer would look at a Times person as someone who's a little too in love with the publication name in their email. email signature. I can't believe any of that. But apparently there have been strains in the Times Athletic Marriage. Here are some of the particulars, as reported by Strauss. Number one, what do athletic writers get to call themselves? The Times people don't think athletic people should call themselves Times people. As Strauss writes, the athletic created a policy clarifying the issue,

quote, always identify yourself specifically as a representative of the athletic and not the New York Times. What do we make of that little identifier that got thrown into this marriage? I wonder how many

athletic writers are out there who were eagerly claiming to be Times employees. I imagine there were some, but I imagine the issue is much more of just sort of an awkward sort of transactional moment, right? Where someone's just like,

like, oh, I want you to meet Brian Curtis. He writes for the New York Times. And you have to be like, no, I'm sorry. Two people who are, you know, trying to do me a solid in this moment. I don't work for the New York Times. I work for one of their subsidiaries, I don't know if you had that experience,

but I definitely had that experience back in the old Grantland ESPN days. When someone would just be like, yeah, this is David from ESPN. You have to be like, okay, let me introduce you to the concept of a website that you may or may not be familiar with. Did you ever fudge it in an email when you were right reaching out to someone?

I'm David Shoemaker from ESPN.com. I do it. I mean, it's not fudging it anymore, but I go Spotify really quickly when I'm trying to open a note these days. Yeah. I'm from a worldwide audio company called Spotify. Yeah, you may have it on your phone. I don't remember Kevin Van Valkenberg and Wright Thompson being like, you don't get to call yourself an ESPN employee. No.

You're a, you're a grandlander. That better be, you better be identifying yourself as such. This was also in Strauss's piece. One athletic staffer who had snapped a photo in front of the Times building in Manhattan and called it his new office, was asked to take it down. What? Now, I'm all for ending the terrible sports writing practice of snapping a picture of the empty field from the press box and saying, my office for the day.

that should get you driven out of the business forever. But I'm not sure that a picture of the Times office in Manhattan should have to be taken off social media. Aren't there other tenants in the New York Times building? Am I, was that just a threat in the media not long ago? You think they're working for the law firm that's up there? I'm just saying, it's not exactly like, you know, if there are other people there,

It's not like just some gross misrepresentation. Another issue that's come up in this marriage, David, standards. Are athletic writers complying with the kind of reporting standards, sourcing standards that New York Times writers have to comply with? And this has come to bear on the career of one NBA insider Shams Sharania. We know the New York Times is not really in the insider. scoop business in sports or really anywhere else in the particular way that NBA and NFL insiders practice it. Well, former sports editor Jason Stallman tells the Washington Post this.

When we learn more about Shams and his methods, we were really, really impressed at how rigorous he is. Not only was there not any lingering concern over whether that worked under the Times imprimatur, but we were kind of dazzled by it. Okay. Feels a little bit protest too muchy, but we can keep going. I'd be interested to know whether that quote was uttered before or after that tweet. We talked about on September 21st about the Emey Udoka business with the Celtics scandal, I think, is a fine word to use here. Yeah. Where Sharania called it an improper, intimate, and consensual relationship.

Mm-hmm. Both talked about how that tweet, that word was doing a lot of work there. It doesn't feel like that would have been tweeted slash reported the same way if this was a person who was in business or in entertainment or politics and it was going through the desk than New York Times like that. But that's an interesting. Well, no. And we've seen time and time again, the tweets like that from Times employees, even newsbreakers are sort of policed, well, I was going to say internally, but internally slash publicly on Twitter and stuff like that too, right? other employees will say, this doesn't meet our standards loudly and in front of everybody else. Listen, I mean, I think you could, we could spend a whole podcast saying positive things about Shams,

but I don't think, I find it hard to imagine that many of those compliments would fall in line with the expectations of the Times copy desk or whatever. I mean, it just seems like he's operating again, we're going to talk about Nicky Fink later, and this is not what Choms is doing at all, but people who are kind of operating in their own sphere kind of according to their own their own guidelines. And I don't know.

I mean, I guess it's completely feasible that that quote is correct and that everything that Shams does is 100% above board and meets the guidelines of the New York Times. If that's the case, then I think that there's probably, I think we should expect to see a whole new era of tweeting by Times employees who have now been introduced to new methods and new ways

of breaking news on Twitter. Not only means Times guidelines, but dazzles the people who know something about Times guidelines. Dazzled. You know, I don't think you ever, when you're talking about guidelines,

I don't think you, I don't think dazzles is a place you want to go. Like Stephen Glass was a dazzling writer. You know, it's a sort of thing you hear people say. It's like, I'm shocked at how great they are at this.

It really gets the whole business of writing for the Times, doesn't it, where you have the platform of all platforms in American journalism. Like there's no, no bigger place, no more storied place other than maybe the New Yorker. But, and I say this is somebody who wrote for them way back when from time to time, you do feel like you're writing with a tuxedo jacket on. Well, you're talking about writing for play magazine, right? I've heard for the paper too every once in a while.

But when you were writing for play, were you allowed to call yourself a Times writer? Oh, that's a good one. Are there walls up at that point? I believe there the email said play, comma, a quarterly sports magazine in the New York Times. They definitely wouldn't have let me, by the way. There was no social media per se back then, but I would not have had the picture and said, here's my new office. No, sir.

George Vessy would have sent an email about that. But, you know, that was always part of it, is that you had to be more careful. You had to write in a more upright way. Sure. And if I were a times person, I'm saying, wait a second, I'm writing in a t-toxedo jacket every day. And that guy over there is writing in a vintage t-shirt. And we're owned by the same company. Why is this one way and not the other way?

Let's be fair. This is 20-23. Every 2022, everybody's writing in sweatpants. But metaphorically, your point is taken. Yeah. I think that that's fair. I mean, and I'm not saying this solely to pander to Craig Gaines. and Jack McCleskey and the rest of our just incredible copy desk at the ringer.com.

But at some level, and we have a very serious fact-checking and copywriting operation for a website such as ours. And at some point you have to like, you know, I think any normal person I think would give themselves over to the fact that they're making your piece better, right? And even the times when it's like, you know, three in the morning and you're going through notes and someone is sort of rewritten a line or two, almost wholesale, at some point, Like, it's really easy to be like, no, that's a stat, you know, whatever. But then sometimes, you know, you look at it and you're just like, you know what?

Maybe I should be open to this because they're right most of the time, almost all the time. You know, I mean, I just feel like it's the whole point is to say some, a lot of times those strictures are privilege, you know, and then you should really see them as such. Now, you know, do you feel that way when someone else is going by different rules? I understand the objection. But in some sense, you can't have it. both ways, right? It's like if they're, if they're going to, if you're not going to let them call themselves Times employees, then you can't really get mad at them for not acting like Times employees. If they're the pirate ship, they get to dress like pirates.

Exactly. Yeah. Vintage t-shirt, sweatpants, pirates, yeah. Never thought of the athletic in particular is a pirate ship, you know, but we'll go with a metaphor for now. It's Halloween. I think this comes back to a bigger question for the New York Times sports section, which is, what is the New York Times sports section in 2022? Yeah. And particularly, what is the product to use that awful word that it's delivering every day to readers?

Because this has been a question way before the Times bought The Athletic. way, way, way before that the sports section was always way down at the bottom of the power rankings of the paper. But now it has gotten smaller and smaller. I have it here, the paper copy next to me today

and there are five stories in sports. Three stories about baseball, one story about soccer, and one story about NASCAR. And they're all reported stories, you know, what you would call conventionally reported stories. So it's like, I just think there's this question of if you're at the times, you're thinking, wait a second, we know what the athletic is every day.

What are we? There's something like a comprehensive sports report about what happened and what is happening, even if there are a few gaps in the coverage, as Strauss points out, different teams. What are we every day? Mm-hmm. And I don't have a real good answer to that question. well it's hard to imagine i don't even know what a comparison to this acquisition would be it's a very modern acquisition right i mean it in terms of coverage it's like you identify a hole and then you just swallow whole sorry for the wordplay another company that does that all

that you're looking for and more um but i think in most other instances you'd probably see this whole conversation would have been squashed by by integration, right? That like everybody would, well, actually probably they wouldn't formally come over to the New York Times because you're right. New York Times sports doesn't have the mantle that even a startup like the athletic does. So you would have all of your New York Times sports writers become athletic writers overnight, right, with elevated positions or some sort of designation that maybe that set them different, set them off per whatever negotiation had to go on. but the only reason why when you go to New York Times backslash sports, it doesn't just redirect to the athletic is because of the institution of the New York Times and really specifically the institution of a physical paper that ends up on Brian Curtis's desk, right, so that you can

have those five articles. Now, you know, someone, a total outsider, someone who's never even heard of the New York Times or the athletic might say, well, why don't you just put athletic articles in the New York Times print edition? That would probably raise many more hackles than anything we've discussed so far from the institution of the Times. Would it really if you had the New York Times sports section powered by the athletic? I'm not thinking about the sports desk. I'm talking about just Times lifers, like people who have been like the institutional powers inside the New York Times. And again, this isn't based on personal experience. The one who bought the athletic? Yeah, no, I'm not the very top, obviously. But, you know, the questions become bigger when you start sort of

aggregating into the physical paper. I mean, I understand why that would, I don't know that it's any more legitimate in that direction, but I would, I could, you it's totally expectable for people to freak out about that from the inside. But I mean, it's, I, listen, I think that whatever anxiety, people inside the New York Times sports world are feeling, and it's, I don't mean that as a derogatory term. It has to be, you know, powered some point by the,

by the notion of their own sort of mortality, their own expendability, right? I mean, that's it. It's like we, we like, we are necessarily different because if we're not different than what are we? And that's why I think you have

to find an identity of what are we. Because, I mean, as I was thinking about this today, before we came on, the 90s, the Times Sports section, edited by Neil Amder, it was a steroidal 1990s sports section.

Last great days of American newspaper. And when the money's flowing and here we go, we're covering everything and it's big. 2010's, the sports section really starts to pull back from Yankees gamer in a conventional sense every day.

Metz gamer every day, rethinking this whole idea of what should New York Times sports be. And the answer they came up with was kind of like it's going to be a giant sports illustrated bonus feature well with these stories from around the globe. remember snowfall.

It was, snow was falling on the New York Times sports section every day. It was always a snow day in New York Times. You'd reopen it up and go like, oh, wow, I didn't expect to read this today. I didn't expect to read this today. Lots and lots of features. We were working

at a place. You mentioned Grantland, which had a little bit of that quality too. But the times, I remember during that period, a lot of times it'd be like, okay, but where's the thing about LeBron today? Where's the bacon cheeseburger to use a further tortured metaphor today to go with all these interesting little starters that you're

given me. There's just the thing about the thing, the column, the sports of the times column, that you're going to feed me today that's about whatever the big news of the day is. Now they've gone to gone into a third era and what feels like a much smaller era where it's like, well, we have some of those features that are unexpected. We have some of the sports coverage, what you would call conventional sports coverage, but we don't have a lot. lot of either one of them. So again, if we're looking for an identity here, there's a lot of really cool parts of the section.

Ken Belson's NFL reporting, Jenny Vrentis, Kevin Draper's Rachel Nichols scoop is still reverberating and was when I was watching Rachel Nichols doing her comeback on Showtime the other day, Tyler Kepner on baseball, all these parts of it. But I was just thinking,

like if you're going to build something or rebuild something that has the identity of, this is what the time sports section means. every day that is distinct from the athletic. What do you think that is? It's really hard. It's just really, it's, I don't have an answer because everything I would say ends up sounding like, you know, the long form wing of whatever a startup that only

lasted for six months. Well, if you're saying here, we're the feature section of the athletic that I don't think we would call the athletic strong suit being like big high flying features. stories. That's one answer to me, or at least part of the answer. But it's not really just the, I mean, it features part of it, but I think it's also the sort of, like the really zoomed out view, right? It's more, it's more about wide lens and thoughtfulness than, you know, nitty gritty reportage sort of when in, in terms of it being sort of,

maybe you closer to the to the ideas section than you know the feature section you came right where i wanted you to come which is more voice more columny type things the new york times opinion section currently employs 1,000 columnists if you are a carbon-based life form and you have touched the political world in any way you probably have a column at the new york times right now but sports I look at it I'm like shouldn't the sports

of the times column that hallowed column occupied by Bob Libside and Red Smith and George Vessi and all these Ira Burkow and all these other people

shouldn't that be like three times a week? And shouldn't it be manned by a couple of people who are like, you know what? Draymond Green Punch that's my column tomorrow.

Live golf. That's my column tomorrow. A little bit like what Sally Jenkins does at the Washington Post. where it's like NIL, Serena, what's the story today? I am going to try to make sense of that for you. And that voice is going to be on the time.

So when you, whatever way you open the paper, there's something like, here is somebody making sense of the big story of the day for you. Sure. And I would take that further into basketball, media, baseball. You know, they do have on baseball on these little, these kind of semi-voicing section, but I'd be like, if we're not going to, if we're not going full in this other way, I want the smart person making sense of those things for you. And that happens like a couple of times a week.

Or even better, this is the New York Times after all, when a story happens. It's going to leap on there. And as you say, it's a little zoomed out, it's a little generalist. But it's like, these are the people. And I just think those people are eminently, some of them already work for the paper and the ones that don't are eminently findable. And then you bring in the big Ken Belson thing about Roger Goodell. And the Jenny Vrentis thing about Deshaun Watson.

And those are absolutely still part of the world. But that's what I would do and sort of have a really, really crackerjack team that dips its toe into that world a little bit. Yeah. I mean, is that enough? I don't know. Can you get the word count? Of even the sports page that you have right there in front of you, if that's all that you're doing?

I don't know that you need to just just do that. You still run some features. You still got our old pal Jonathan Abrams writing about the NBA. I mean, I'm talking about, you know, throwing away some of those constituent parts. But you're just talking about a general identity. Yeah, because I look, I look at the Times art section. And there are times over the last couple years where I opened the art section. I'm like, I don't know.

There's nothing I want here. This isn't, this isn't for me. me, but they have the good critics. Oh, there's a Dwight Garner book review. Yep. Yeah. There's a great TV column. There's Tony Scott on movies. Like, yep, yep, yep, I want to read that. Wesley's got a piece. Like, yep, I want to read that. And I would just think of like, if you can have voice in the art section, you can have voice on politics. Surely you can have voices on sports. Sure. In a more regular way. Yeah. And voices that rise above a beat too, right? And you don't want to, you don't need just, even at the highest level, you don't need someone

who's specifically the voice of football coverage, because that eliminates the voice to a certain extent, right? Like you want, like you were saying, you want to go to the sports page and say, there's not a topic here that I'm interested in, but I'm interested in this writer who's writing about something that I'm not necessarily interested in. Bingo. Bingo. Because the athletic, look, the athletic is necessarily going to be more beady.

you know individual beats teams it's going to be a little more zoomed in you know beyond like Marcus Thompson writing a couple of really good draymond green columns over the last couple of days but you're going to have you're going to i still feel there's a lane for that and again where that gets you and ultimately how you whatever you call this thing that used to be the new york tide that was the new york time sports section still is the new york time sports section in concert with the athletic is an interesting question Well, and listen, there's no place, I don't think, in any of these spitballing sessions, I don't think anyone's going to suggest that what the Times needs is more like sports explainers or anything,

but something that being that you're, that you're, you know, casting a slightly wider net with whatever the official Times sports page has, right, that your audience is broader and presumably not as, not necessarily as into each sport in a granular level. coming at it from the point of view that you're talking about, opinion pieces, columns, bigger think pieces, allows you to get a little bit more explanary within the context of doing something that's more highfalutin, you know, that's more thoughtful.

Yeah. And inevitably, what something like that will do is, if done well, will actually achieve a sort of synchronicity that is normally more ham-fisted than not, right? That if you actually are taking us, if you embrace that identity, then you can lead people to the athletic without fear of redundancy, but pretty seamlessly.

All right, Joe Khan. We've already done advice for Jimmy Petaro about the theme song. Joe Khan, Brian and David's advice about the New York Times Sports section. Coming up in 30 seconds, David, goodbye to Nikki Fink, the reporter who terrified Hollywood

and is the late night show headed to cable. 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 Pressbox pod where they are always, always gratefully received. I don't know if you tuned into any of the Mets Padres playoff series with or without sound,

but they were doing shots of the celebrities in the stands and Nathan Fielder popped up. And all I can tell you is he looked very Nathan Fielder, which is to say very uncomfortable. being on camera. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, Who could have guessed a man known for entertainment at the intersection of absurdity and existential dread

would be interested in the Mets? We would have also accepted while the Mets were losing, ultimately losing two out of three. It's comforting to know this game is only a rehearsal. Thanks to Aaron Schaefer, walnut, brownie, brain, and gopher balls for that one. But this week's winner, David, from the world of Irish folk dancing.

According to the independent newspaper, Irish dancing has been rocked by major allegations of competition fixing involving dance teachers and judges. It was a very elegant, overworked Twitter joke to write, The jig is up. The jig is up. Thanks to Timothy and J.M. Junkins for that.

Should there be a limit? Should there be some sort of baron on like how large a quote unquote world has to be for it to actually be able to be rocked? Possibly. Because tiny subcultures could be incredibly rocked by relatively nothing. Is that word the only one that we can use in those situations? Well, if you're going to do it as a journalist, I feel you have to say the insular world of Irish stepdancing was rocked.

Right. because we do see that. Yes. From time to time. If you're flatly disappointed by a scandal in Irish dancing, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. For our next Ringer podcast,

can we do a pod called Stuff Our Moms Discovered in the 90s? Wait. A separate podcast or is this just a segment? No, no. This is a podcast. We're not stepping on Harvilla's territory. here. Stuff are moms discovered in the 90s. Episode one, Irish stepdancing. Episode two, sun dried tomatoes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Episode three, Longer Burger Baskets. What is that?

You don't remember Longa Burger Baskets? I'm sure I do. I don't know the name. What is a Langer Shoemaker. David doesn't remember Longer Burger Baskets. Oh, my mom's house is full of baskets. Is that? Yeah. If you know, you know, as a kid say on Twitter. Episode three. We'll learn about it together. Oh, I know what those are. All right, yeah. Way to go. All right, in the notebook dump, David, let us say goodbye to reporter Nikki Fink.

She covered Hollywood. She blasted away at executive she thought were stupid or venal or both. She died at age 68. Her high period, as Matt Bellany tells us, in a new piece in puck, was roughly 2006 to 2013. when she was writing for Deadline Hollywood Daily. Quote I found of hers in The Times Obit, she said this to Market Watch back in 2006. If there's an open wound, I'm going to pour salt in it.

We were talking about Shams earlier. Was Nikki Fink kind of the proto-Shams, proto-woge of Hollywood? That's tough. I mean, I think that, I think that if you take sort of the most arch view of of Shams or Woodriver as like someone who deals in information, you know, someone who deals in, you know, with insider info, intel and sources and whatever else, and distributes it perhaps much more widely than anyone had ever done before, sort of creating a market for themselves.

and yeah, I mean, there's a lot of parallels there. But I don't know. I mean, Nikki Fink, I think part of what made Nikki Fing so significant is that she sort of birthed this marketplace, right? Did she prove that you could, I think Matthew Bologna wrote about this on his newsletter?

She proved that there was money here. There was traffic here and sort of taking this very insidery approach and airing petty grievances and whatever. else. I don't, I think it's, I think it's easy for people on the outside who are not, I mean, and this, I'm concluding myself in the statement, people who are not involved in the business and don't know any of the boldface names or whatever else, like, to sort of glamorize

her in the abstract without really dealing with the things that she did on a day-to-day basis. I would not, I would not associate any of what she did in terms of just, you know, trying to ruined careers, actually successfully ruining careers and reputations, everything else with anybody else who's currently doing the job. I think it would be really impossible for anybody to do that on a sports beat in 2022 and certainly not, and certainly anybody with the kind of acclaims that Choms are woges has done it with. Yeah, I guess I'm talking about it more at a zoomed-out kind of way of finding this particular part of the news cycle, claiming it is your own.

Yes. Increasing the speed of it exponentially. Mm-hmm. Doing it differently. You know, they're doing things differently. Of course, when they start out in conventional sports writerly, Oregon, she's doing things differently than the trades like variety in Hollywood reporter at the time. I also think, and again, this is from us reading this from outside the bounds of Hollywood.

She had this way of doing what sports insiders do, which is, you know, how we always laugh. like the lowest level NFL or NBA transaction. Something just doesn't even affect fantasy. It's like 900 retweets. She would do that. Remember, we'd read her column and be like, I don't know who the person she's talking about is. I've never heard the name of this executive that she is talking about.

But she's covering it in a way that has the effect of making this seem like the most important story in the world. and this huge scoop, even if I don't know exactly who this person is. Well, I mean, this is, maybe I'm splitting hairs here. It's not only that you don't know who the person is, it does give you the impression that you should know who they are. But if you're writing about a producer or a production assistant or a junior agent or something that, you know, someone who's, or even a full-fledged agent,

but if you're writing about somebody who the vast majority of the audience doesn't know who they are, and they also don't know that there are 200 others of these people in the industry, right? Then it really does misinform your audience to act like, I mean, if somebody had never heard of, of whatever, if somebody had never heard of basketball writing,

and they wrote like a widely publicized blog-length takedown of, you know, our own Justin Varyer, you know, for no reason at all other than like, you know, they had a bad phone conversation, that it would really be,

it would really be deceptive for something, because you would just be like, this, Justin Ferrier is just one of one and he really had it coming. You know, I mean, it's not, it's,

the balance was like so far off, so much of the time. That's what made it appealing, you know? I mean, she was a, she was a, very, like,

she was a, I'd say, great writer, but for what she did, she did it really well, you know, nobody would confuse her with Hemingway or something, but like she,

there's a voice, that her era of the internet had created, you know, established, whatever, that she did better than just about anybody else. But when I talk about her era of the internet, that's also the big, you know, the sort of looming question with Nikki Fink and many others in different genres that did the sort of thing that she did, where there's a sort of right place, right time aspect, even if you separate out all the viciousness. And if I had been there, I wouldn't have been and I wouldn't have been, I would not have put myself in the right place at that right time. It's not like, you know, Mana fell from heaven or anything.

I mean, she actually, she clearly went out and got it and had the brilliance to do it. But to what degree her, I mean, to what degree her power was established just by the fact that she got there first, I think is an interesting question. And using the tools of the era. Yeah. Blogging. Mm-hmm. Drudge report links, as Matt points out, being faster and more nimble than her competitors, which again were basically the Hollywood trades at that point.

I mean, you think about our boss, Bill Simmons, who, you know, wanted to work in newspapers and didn't, and we shot down over and over again until he was just like, I will write for the, I will write on the internet, you know? And it's certainly, you know, there's probably a version of events where Nikki Fink was just like working for the Hollywood reporter and well compensated and relatively happy, you know? I mean, it's a, it is, it is a, both a sort of incidental and very active rebellion from the status quo.

And by the way, the, the trades, as they are commonly known at that point in, in a history were about as insular and sort of deliberately blindered as any business, I mean, it's a trade journal. I mean, it's not, we're not, there, these aren't glossed. These are, they're called trades for a reason, right? I mean, it's, it's, they were basically just like, you know, tractors today is for the tractor industry or whatever. You know, I mean, there was a, but they posed as a, as a larger thing. They had the, and so there is this giant open lane for Nicky Fink to come along and, and take the world by storm.

A variety was literally written in a different language with all these terms that you did not understand, unless you, you know, read variety for a. couple of weeks to figure out what they were talking about. There was an open lane there, and that's one of the biggest changes that's happened to media since you and I have been around, which is news that people thought was only interesting to a certain audience. I think Matt makes this point in his puck story was actually interesting to a much bigger audience. So the sports version of this was something that was in agate type at the back of your newspaper sports section about an NBA signing, that people.

just assume, well, nobody in Dallas or Kansas City cares about that. Well, it turns out a lot of people do care about that. It turns out. That's the medium, right? I mean, people, there were enough people. There were probably enough people in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex that cared about that, but getting to those people, you know, with the, when you're, when you're already working on, you know, with the limitations of who are your subscribers and everything else, that it's, it's finding those people. And yeah, those people always existed. They're always going to be enough people that were interested in the minutiae of whatever industry. I mean, look at how Tractors today is doing now. But it was the internet that allowed those, you know, the right 25,000 people, 50,000 people,

now a million people, whatever, to access it to make it worthwhile. I want to read you one more quote from Matt's piece and puck. He writes, none of what we're talking about changes the fact that Nikki was a terrorist, a journalistic terrorist, sure, yet a terrorist nonetheless. She presented herself as a no-bullshit reporter who kept Hollywood moguls honest, yet she perverted the profession by blackmailing sources, often targeting the week and weaponizing the internet to push her bile directly into our inboxes. Outsiders could never really see Nikki for what she was because they found her copy so irresistible.

And after all, Hollywood is such a silly place to begin with. who really cared if there was a woman wreaking havoc in the name of an executive promotion scoop. I really like that last line there, because especially as outsiders, I think you and I adopted the view or glommed onto the view of Hollywood executives, man. You know, what do they know? They're always screwing things up. So if you're, if you are using the methods that Matt talks about, if you're covering the beat in a particular way,

you're doing it around a theme that probably everybody agrees with no matter how much they know about Hollywood. Yes. If they're way into Hollywood, they're like, Hollywood's not making the movies I want them to make. If they're like you and me and take a medium interest in the movies and entertainment and all this stuff,

they're like, Hollywood is not making the movies I want them to make. It's the suits that are the problem. And the fact that, her output was about at the end of the day, the suits are the problem. I just, I think that powered a lot of it, especially for people who were not super invested in the top. Yeah. I mean, for an industry that is as kind of cloistered, secretive at that point in time is just about anything else.

But there's very, it's hard to think of a parallel for someone that's like that private and yet has that much, you know, you know, interplay with our daily lives, you know, everybody goes in the movies. Everybody watches TV, especially then. And, you know, to, to, to, when someone comes along like Nikki Fink, and she's like, this, this dude's an idiot. Look at all these mistakes he's made. It's really easy to sit at home and be like, yeah, he is an idiot. I've had some of those same thoughts.

But, yeah, so in some sense, yeah, that was, that. That was, it felt like fair game, even when maybe it wasn't. And then, of course, that just leads down the slippery slope of like, well, you just, if hatchet jobs or what drives traffic, eventually you're going to run out of people who quote unquote deserve it, right? And then you've got to start sinking your hatchet into people who may or may not deserve it. And people you have petty grudges against or whatever else. You know, there's definitely a shelf life to legitimate hatcheting.

even if there's any legitimacy there at all to begin with. As Graydon Carter once said at Spy Magazine, that's a fine piece of hatchetree. The obits fill in a little bit more of Fink's life. Childhood on the north shore of Long Island, according to the New York Times. She was born into money. She was a debutante. Worked in Moscow for the AP. Worked at the Dallas Morning News.

I did not know that. Wrote a book about agents that was never published. New York Post, New York Observer, New York. York Magazine, L.A. Weekly, where she started the deadline, Hollywood column, went out on her own in 2006 in a very move that would be very substacky, as we would call it now, sold the publication for $10 million in 2009, then had the inevitable split with owner Jay Penske. There was a story, David, from 2014, that she was talking to Politico about potentially covering Washington for Politico. Speaking of interesting marriages and uneasy alliances, I can only imagine what that would have been like. But we could have had Nikki Fink and Maggie Haberman

at the same publication at the same time. Roll that around in your brain. Then I saw this tweet from Lila Bayock that I thought was really interesting. During my tenure as a New Yorker fact checker, I spoke with CIA agents and North Korean diplomats and movie stuff. but the most difficult subject I ever interviewed was Nikki Fink.

She continues. I spent a week talking to Nikki every day. This is for Tad Friends profile of her. At the end of the first day, she asked me to ghostwrite her memoir. By the end of the week, she was blasting me online and threatening to sue me personally. After the piece closed, I was sitting at my desk, shell-shocked, and David Remnick stopped by to thank me for my service.

He said, go home, take your your boyfriend out for a nice dinner, have a really stiff martini, and bring me the receipt. Wow. Yeah, well, that sounds about right. One more topic for you before we get out of here. It's the death of the late night show. New Peace in New York Times by Ben Mullen and John Koblin. Here are some data points for you.

Trevor Noah is stepping down from the Daily Show. James Corden is stepping down from the late late show next year. Samantha B has been canceled and the Tonight Show they report might get bumped up to 10.30 Eastern if NBC goes through with its plan or or at least

its idea of nuking the final hour of prime time. So four data points make a trend story. What do you think about the potential death of late night? Oh man. Talk about institutions. Talk about

the kind of the information trade, not information trading, favor trading. For the celebrities? Yeah, I mean, none of it's not, it's not malicious and it's not,

you know, problematic particularly. But, I mean, these are late night shows or institutions. Well, one, because they're institutions,

because they've been around for a long time, too, because they're relatively cheap to make, right? You can afford to pay Jimmy Fallon a trillion dollars because the rest of the show

is relatively, free compared to just about any other production. And, you know, there's just in terms of just booking guests and stuff, I mean, nobody cares almost ever what happens. You know, there's not very little of interest that all happen when movie star X goes on one of these shows that promote their movie, but it's part of the trade, right? It's part of both the literal and figurative trade. It's the, it's the way the sausage is made, sort of, you know?

and I might not care what Julia Roberts is saying on, you know, she's not going to say anything interesting on one of these shows maybe in the way that she would have in years past. But, you know, hearing, kind of overhearing the fact or seeing on a muted television that she is on one of these shows reminds me that the movie that she's coming out exists slightly and makes me probably incrementally more likely to see it. That's the way the stuff works. And, you know, a lot of these PR machines haven't really, I mean, there's giant chunks of

it that haven't changed in a long time. That's how this stuff. That's how the sausage gets made, you know? And so I, it's, it's hard to, you know, wonder. I mean, it's easy to see why they still exist. But do they still exist for the reasons that they once did? No. And do they still exist for the, any particular reason at all?

I don't know. But I, but they, but they exist. They, you know, they are what they are. Well, the celebrity chunk has become outdated. I mean, 25 years ago, when Julia Roberts went on one of those shows, it was a big deal because you didn't hear Julia Roberts talk all the time. There wasn't, there weren't Instagram accounts and Twitter accounts and all that kind of stuff. There was no. And there were, I think, fewer celebrities, I think, by any reasonable metric, right?

I mean, there are fewer people who could, there's a smaller talent pool for going. I mean, I think that we would probably put like the TikTok stars of today in terms of general, you know, celebrity above the tiny Tims of yesterday. or whatever, you know. So that chunk's gone. The part about watching it live was such a big deal. Rob Burnett, who was Letterman's old producer, talks about this in the piece. Like, there was this sense when you were up late that you and the late night host,

even if they had taped it hours earlier, you were the only ones awake. Oh, yeah. This was the only person on earth who was awake to talk to you at this moment. And there was this intimacy about that. I was like radio was the same way. if you listen to overnight. That's why our bell was such a big deal.

It's like, oh, my God, there are two of us on Earth who are awake right now, and we are sharing this experience. Well, there was also no, like, DVRing. There was no on demand. There was, you know, I mean, either I guess you could set your VCR to record in our youths, but no, there was definitely, I mean, there were definitely times at the peaks of various shows, you know, peak Letterman, peak Conan, you know, where like, it would, like, people would actually, you know, you could be sitting at the bar with your friends and just be like, well,

now I have to make a decision. If I leave, I could get one more round, or I could leave now and make it home in time for Conan. You know, I mean, those are conversations that people would have. Not really the same thing anymore. So the celebrity chunk is not so valuable. The watch it live chunk's not so valuable. We know the streamers have tried late night shows or late night style shows and people just don't it's people don't care. Here's part that might still be valuable. Topical comedy at least as it relates to politics. We know Stephen Colbert's show basically got saved because Stephen Colbert became

Trump guy again, anti-Trump guy again. And it was like, oh, here is a reason to watch this. He is talking about Trump every night. So one of the ideas floated in here is, and it's particularly with Seth Myers, is what if we take the Seth Myers show, which is the in the old Letterman slot on NBC and what if we put it on MSNBC?

So what if you get the Seth Myers monologue and his little news segment, which I think is his monologue, and instead of, you know, Emma Stone, what if we get the author, newsmakiery persons that he also talks to as part of his show anyway?

And so it's a similar show, but it's on cable news and by the way, solves the problem of what the hell do we do with cable news in the waning era of that genre? What do you think about that? Well, I think there would definitely be people

who have a moral case against it, right? I'm not sure that I really care that much about the place of comedy on a news channel. We already let in Greg Gutfeld. The drawbridge has gone down, David. Is this where I'm supposed to say, no, Brian, I said comedy? The, um...

Yeah. the I mean it does make sense right if you're if you're especially now I mean if you if you if you if you if you have such a like a micro targeted I mean it's not a micro audience obviously people watch news I guess just you know but if you have a such a specifically kind of defined genre that your channel addresses like you're covering politics right you're covering the news it's not necessary it's not it's not necessary sorry that you are run that you're doing straight news shows all the time. I mean, clearly the primetime blocks of all these channels aren't straight news.

So why can you not do comedy that relates to the news? CNN is showing documentaries and Anthony Bourdain on. Yeah. CNN, Arnees really pressed it. I mean, and listen, the odd hours like MSNBC is showing like old dateline murder stories. That's not exactly hard news. CNN, according to Puck, this is my last Puck reference of the day. They are considering

putting some kind of comedy show after Jake Tapper. because they've reconsidered their whole lineup. They got Jake Tapper. Then they got kind of a show for a couple of hours after that. It's kind of a general news show. And there's like, what if we had a comedy style show there? So it was the headlines we've just talked about on CNN. It's still very much about the news, to your point.

It's funny. And does it belong there more comfortably now than it belongs on network TV? I just think that's such an interesting question. Maybe there is a sort of everybody's life. There is a sort of inherent awkwardness to a very early. earnest hour of news, be it, you know, the straight news variety or the more, you know, talking head style in which you like sort of purport to cover all the big news of the day. And then the clock hits, you know, 59 minutes and 59 seconds. And then all of a sudden

it's just someone else who's like, let's start over, right? Let's let's roll all that back. And that's why you end up with, I mean, part of why you end up with all these kind of very dedicated audiences to the different channels because you are there for the sort of personalities and for the kind of established coverage and there's a familiar rhythm to the whole thing or whatever. It's also why the networks are constantly thrashing around trying to figure out who's going to be the next film, the blank, right? Because they need personalities to drive the blocks because the content is sort of definitionally repetitive. It does sort of make more sense to just do something different after Jake Tapper does his thing for an hour, right? Yeah. I guess you could

let Jake Tapper host the comedy show. That's the other thing, which is going to retrain our cable news hosts to be comedy hosts. Come out with the monologue. I'm sure a lot of them would be very eager to do it. They probably think they're doing it sometimes anyway. So yeah.

A couple final things to leave you with. We had an only in journalism word of the week. We've already canceled this feature. Sorry, folks, but it's back pretty much on a weekly basis. It's comes to some listener, Lawrence Las Kalinas, who is hopefully, resident of the DFW area. Sure you saw David that country music superstar Loretta Lynn died last week.

I did. Daniel Desroachers, Kansas City stars Washington correspondent tweets, when I worked in West Virginia, there was a running joke that national media couldn't describe Appalachia without using the word hard scrabble. He continues, and look at the Loretta Lynn Obitz, all of which describe her quote unquote hard scrabble childhood. Nobody has ever said

the word hardscrabble until I just said it. Yeah. But a million journalists have used the word hard scrabble, particularly when talking about Loretta Lynch's childhood. It's a great. It's a great word. It's a great word.

Also, for some reason, now I'm thinking of scrapple and I'm hungry. So I guess you're right. No one said it out louder. I don't think of my mind would have immediately gone there. Another interesting piece I saw this week in the New York Times, George Vessie, sports writer, sports columnist later for that New York Times sports section we were just talking about.

He ghost wrote Coal Miner's daughter for Loretta Lent. Not just ghostrope, by the way. His byline was actually on the front of the book. He wrote Coal Miner's daughter. Is that one of the coolest things a sports writer has ever done? Yeah, that might be. Robert Lipside writing Dick Gregory's memoir somewhere on the metal stand

but you wrote coal miner's daughter. Wow. That is awesome. Finally for you, David, report from listener Bruno Alves. He says that on the Red Zone channel on Sunday, Scott Hanson, we know Scott Hanson, big voice red zone guy,

NFL network. Love him. Referred to embattled Panthers quarterback Baker Mefield and embattled Panthers head coach Matt Rule, who is in fact since progressed from embattled to actually fired. Scott Hanson, if you're listening out there, we salute you. Did you, did Baker-Mayfield arrive embattled? I feel like it needs a little bit more clarification.

He's been embattled for some time by just about any definition. But has this season, did he start the season fresh and reclaim embattledness? Well, when we go through all the levels with politicians, your color, full. And then you're embattled and on and on. But we need one for NFL quarterbacks. Baker Mayfield and Carson Wentz are beyond embattled at this point. Yeah.

They're just going to be benched. Now for a man who's always embattled when he's not disgraced, here's David Shoemaker. Guess is the strained pun headline. All right. Today's headline, David, comes to us from those jokesters over at NFL.com. NFL.com, the spy magazine of our time.

Always good for a funny headline. It involves the New England Patriots, the resurgent New England Patriots, and their third string quarterback Bailey Zappy. Not too many people other than Bill thought the Patriots would be as good as they are, but they have rallied around Zappi and they shut out the lions this weekend.

What was NFL.com's strained pun headline. Zappy, it's definitely like zapidididudah. Zapi, Zapi Zappy comeback? Is that it? Something like snappy, is that a snappy comeback?

Well, it was a shutout, so Zappy comeback would have been perfect, but they didn't really have to come back. Zappy, many Zappy returns? Well, let's say somebody was concerned about the Patriots. A little concerned.

ending? I was concerned. I have no concerns anymore. Nothing is clouding my head. It might be a song about this. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Don't worry.

Oh, don't worry, be zappy? Wait. Don't worry, be zappy. Okay. So it wasn't the best headline. But it's an incredibly strained pun. He is David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis.

production magic by Erica Servantes. We got a pod up last week from Greg Bluestein, the dawn of Georgia political reporters on the Herschel Walker race. Boy, was that something else last week? That is up on the press box feed. I'll be back later in this week with another pod. And David, we're finally going to start this. Remember when I always tease like,

yes, here we go, the best media movies ever. And it just, I think I teased that two or three times. The movie version of She Said, the book by New York Times reporters Jody Canter and Megan Toey, is coming out next month. Oh, wow. And I cornered fantasy. Actually, I didn't corner him. I just emailed him. And I said, can we finally do the best media movies?

We'll talk about She Said and we'll do the best media movies. And let's just take it back to all the president's men. Because that kind of feels like the modern media movies after that. Like to me doing Citizen Kane and stuff, it just becomes a very unwieldy list. So we're taking it back to 1976. We're going to do this next month. And I am going to attempt to watch a whole bunch because, dude, even over the last 40 plus years, there's a ton of them. A ton of them.

And a lot I hadn't seen. And a few, including the one I was watching this week, between the lines. Have you ever heard of Between the Lines? I don't know. Which one is between the lines? It's from the 70s. It's about the equivalent of a Boston all weekly, kind of like the Phoenix. stars Jeff Goldblum and John Hurd and has this amazing cast.

Oh. I'm watching it. I'm like, this is awesome. Where did this media movie come from that I had never heard of? So this is not just slotting the big ones that you know in the list. This is going to be interesting. I will tweet about these as I watched them from the press box Twitter account. Nice.

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