The Press Box - The Ezra Klein Heat Check, Peter King’s Exit, Vice’s Implosion, and the Allure of the First-Person Essay

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

Bryan and David return this week with a lot to talk about! First they discuss Ben Smith’s tweet, which could lead to an instant think piece (:42). Then they get into Ezra Klein’s comments about President Joe Biden, comments that Klein says the president's supporters will not like (8:10)! In the notebook dump, they say a couple of farewells—first to Peter King (30:10), then to Vice (39:09). And later, they talk the allure of the first-person essay (45:05). 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

In a world where coaches are still the main characters, the players are now legally chasing the ultimate bag, and the game of basketball is always the top priority. There was only one brand you can trust to help you wade through all the madness. Hey, I'm Tate Frazier from One Shiny Podcast, and you can join me twice a week as we navigate the always entertaining world of college basketball. Every Monday, the ringer's comment helps me make sense of the biggest stories from the weekend, and on Fridays we talk to our many friends of the program. We're locked in on the best postseason in sports. Make sure you follow One Shining Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David, we got a lot to catch up on, buddy. Oh, yeah?

A lot of media during our wellness week. A lot of stuff. And I want to start with a tweet from Ben Smith of Semaphore. This kind of perked up my ears. Ben tweets, quote, everybody is hiring media reporters these days. Oh, yeah? I got that same feeling as when I'm walking through my house

and I smell someone cooking a grilled cheese sandwich over in the kitchen. I get excited. I smell an instant think piece. Oh, what else could it be? What are you thinking, Brian? Well, why is everybody hiring media reporters these days, David? Well, first we have to have three data points. to justify the existence of the think piece.

And I'll give them to you right here. Sports media guys, Andrew Marchand and John Arand have changed publications. Upgrading in both cases. Bloomberg is hiring a media reporter. The New York Times is trying to hire a media reporter after Jeremy Peters decided to stop writing lousy profiles of Dana Perino and move to a new beat.

So those are our data points. And then we get to the reasons, David, why are people looking to hire people like us? Reason number one is the media beat is on fire. Oh, yeah. And I don't mean that in the NBA jam sense of the term. I mean that in the someone is committing arson sense of the term. Just since you and I have been away,

there's been sadness at Vice, at Engadgett, at BuzzFeed, of sort of lost track of the times people have used the term extinction level event. Yeah. In their own think pieces about what's going on. It seemed like a kind of sad but snazzy way to put it early on in this horrific news cycle, but now it's become the control plus V AI text that you find in every column. Reason number two would be the Trump era. when media people became players in the big game.

We'll talk about this here a little bit more in a second, but we are still dealing with this idea that the media is either costing Joe Biden the election or from the other side, often from the former president himself. The media is costing Donald Trump the election. Yeah. Also, there's a lot more, I mean, I guess TV news is its own separate thing, but a lot more sort of identity-driven journalism,

not driven journalism, but there's a lot more personalities in journalism in the Trump era, right? People have interactions with Trump and they get famous, you know, they get more notoriety from that. So, you know, the average media consumer cares, you know, positively or negatively

about so-and-so reporter because of their connection to political figures. Could we also say to your point that more people have become, quote unquote media people in the Trump era. Since he's not only having interactions with Maggie Haberman, he's having interactions with this podcast guy. Or this guy who has a Twitter show.

So the whole category is much bigger and there's more people to cover than there ever has been before, which was happening anyway with the way the world was changing. reason number three for you startup publications like Semaphore and Puck have put a big emphasis on media news when you're starting something

that's a really good way to get attention because you get other journalists reading you you get other journalists tweeting about the stuff they read on your website that's really smart some might call it cheap heat but it's the stuff we read the stuff we enjoy

and then reason number four for me is I think the media beat has undergone the same very strange transformation that the NBA and NFL beats have gone undergone. There you go. You know where I'm going with this. Yeah. The transaction has become the main course. And this has always been the case. You go back to Bill Carter and, you know, Kenaletta and guys who were doing this back in the 80s.

They were always interested in the comings and goings of Star Wars. reporters and network executives and people like that. But dude, when I read stories and I'm like, wow, I'm reading about ABC News president Kim Godwin over and over and over. But I'm not actually reading about anything that's happening on ABC News. Yes.

So the same trick has happened that happened in the NBA, which is like, I'm not actually talking about what these people are doing on the court as much as I'm talking about whether they're up or down, whether they're about to be kicked out, whether they're in, whether they're going for another job. Sure.

And that's what the, you know, consumers can read an article by somebody or whatever and not think about that person. But then they see an article where it's like Brian Curtis is fired and they're like, yeah, that guy, that guy deserves it. They don't care about having it. Brian Curtis, they don't even notice your byline when they

click on your columns on Twitter or whatever, you know, but that's, they still care in terms of just comings and going. The Chris Licked thing seemed to be an early version of that, but that was at least about the values of CNN. Mm-hmm.

And the values of media more broadly during Trump and then post-Trump eras. Mm-hmm. But some of these, I'm just like, what was the one the other day? Was it James Brown had re-signed his contract to host the NFL today for CBS? I'm like, can you show me your James Brown content

that happened between the signing of this contract and the signing of the last contract? Mm-hmm. You show me the story you've written about just the special way that he has to host the NFL today? Yeah. Or do we just care when he resigns his contract?

Is that when we're engaging? No offense to James Brown, of course, but funny how that works. That's true. All right, David. Coming up on today's transaction-free show, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein is using his platform to try to muscle Biden off the Democratic ticket

what it means for the potus and the columnist. Plus, David and I wish a happy farewell to Peter King, an unhappy farewell to the employees of vice, and we pondered the return of the I can't look away from it first person essay or why we like to read about someone handing $50,000 to a stranger in a car. all that and much more on the press box, a part of the ringer, podcast network.

Well, hello again, media consumers. Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker and producer Brian Waters here. I want to talk to you, David, first about Ezra Klein. Yeah. What I am contractually obligated to call the Ezra Klein heat check. I was looking through my employment contract. It says you must call this a heat check. if someone is feeling their oats,

and Ezra Klein is absolutely feeling his oats in the New York Times these days. For the uninitiated, Ezra Klein was part of the bloggers who were invading the media sphere and the aughts and came to be known as the juice box mafia. And am I correct in remembering that that was one of those terms that was used as a pejorative by the writers who were clinging to power, clinging to their columns,

became kind of a term that was embraced by the Jews boxers themselves. I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. This was Ezra. This was Matthew Iglesias. And within the mafia, Ezra was the smart, respectable and respectful explainer of liberal issues, right? Mm-hmm.

He was the guy you could look at and be like, that guy is going to be. in a big role at a big publication one day. Yeah, I mean, certainly he had the profile of somebody with the giant future. I would say if anything, he was, you know, if you're just prognosticating, you would say maybe he's a little bit, he's going to be a little bit held back

by the fact that he's not following like a super traditional path. And I don't, I mean that he had the temperament of almost of like an editor or an ombudsman, You know, instead of being a partisan, instead of being a talking head, instead of being an opinion columnist, not certainly he wrote his fair share of op-eds, but they were more explanatory, right? I mean, he wasn't following a path that seemed like a conventional path right in that moment. But, of course, as we know, it became a huge piece of the way we consume news, just kind of the explainer culture.

If we had a model of a columnist who was a bomb thrower, that was a glacius. He would probably, he would disagree, but yes. Yeah, I mean, certainly. Would he really disagree? Would he really disagree that he's being provocative and trying to pull people in different ways? I'd say provocateur more than a flamethrower, but sure. You think X, but let me convince you, not in a first take kind of way, but in a here of my values about politics kind of way, why Y is really a better idea.

I think that explains him fairly well. Sure. Whereas as you say, Klein was more interested in explanation. Yeah. Reaching out to people, doing those kind of podcasting interviews, which he goes from blogged him to the Washington Post.

He co-founds Vox, which is very much in his friendly, wonky image. And then he finally goes to the New York Times, the ultimate real estate for any columnist. Mm-hmm. And it was so interesting last week to hear him when he writes this column slash podcast. It appeared in both forums.

Say this about people he knew would be listening to his show. I want to say this clearly. I like Biden. I think he's been a good president. I think he is a good president. I don't like having this conversation. And I know a lot of liberals, a lot of Democrats are going to be furious at me for this show. And that was so revealing to me, David.

again, to go to that mindset we were just talking about, I know people will be mad when they hear this. And what they'll be mad about was that Klein was arguing in this podcast slash column that Joe Biden should step aside. Yeah. That he should not run for president in 2024, I guess stop running for president in 2024. Fascinating move for a guy who has never pushed his journalistic chips to the center

of the table in quite that way. And you had to know before he wrote that, as that clip indicates, that he's like, this isn't just going to be a, hey, I got an opinion about the election. Here's an idea I'm floating out there. He knows that's going to be perceived as New York Times columnist podcaster, Ezra Klein's opinion, the journalistic establishment's opinion, and the opinion of a columnist that the White House clearly reads and talks to. Yeah.

I mean, think about the mindset of that, dude, pushing it all in for really the first time, at least at that level, to say Biden should step aside. What did you make of that? I mean, I think there's a part of me that thinks, why is this so hard, right? Like, why isn't this your job? Like, why would this be so hard? But actually reading the piece and listening to part of it, you do understand it, right? I mean, it's not just the personal, I think it's easy to focus on the personal aspect of it

and just be like, well, so what, that's your job. But it is, I mean, but it, but there, it isn't a really loaded decision. It is a very, I mean, to, to, even people who don't deal with things of this magnitude have to decide, you know, if you're a tech columnist or a video game columnist or something, you're like, well, is now the time to push up, so-and-so button, even if it's not a, you know, a world-altering thing. Well, this column might have

more relevance in three months if I wait for something to happen. You know, whatever. There's a lot of, there's a lot of conditionals that go into these kind of decisions. This is a pretty big one. And I think it's, I think that it's, you know, a conversation that a lot of liberals are having, even if they don't want someone of Everclay, Ezra Klein's stature to be making this case out loud, this is a conversation that a lot of people are having. And I think his sort of equivocation,

the fact that he admits to that thought process, I think makes the argument even more powerful. He's not, as we said, the bomb thrower. This is a, this is, I mean, in some ways, this is very much an explainer, right? I mean, this is a very measured argument, and that's kind of what gives it its power. I was thinking about people

in the media establishment who whose call for Biden to step aside would have more impact than this. You know, most people on TV really aren't in the position to do it. And somebody like David Axelrod,

the Biden people are already pissed off at him anyway for various things he said about their campaign skills and their campaign strategies over the year. So he's out. And I was just trying to think of, you know, somebody who could be it like Jonathan Chait has,

again, there's somebody who 100% the White House reads. He's flirted with this idea about Biden before and the coronation of Biden without a real primary. But I can't come up with a name, you know, David Brooks, right? We know it's a Biden favorite. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, it seems like that it's, it does feel like that there is, there is not always a neat intersection between people with, that have the ear of a White House or a campaign and the pertinent. parts of their voting base, right?

A lot of times that, I mean, for various reasons, the campaigns will give internally, give outsized influence to, you know, whichever New York Times columnists or going back in the day to the New Republic columnists or rewriters and stuff, you know, and that's not, that's not necessarily a reflection of the big parts of their voting book. But, um, Ezra Klein is kind of as, as much of a crossover as you could kind of imagine. I don't think there's anybody else unless you define it started to define media really loosely

you know I mean there's certainly been calmness with that kind of power I can't think specifically the Joe Biden administration who on earth who else that would be but in the past there were writers like Tana hasy Coats or Andrew Sullivan

or someone that just would have like a whole lot of power if they made some sort of like incredible stand like that but even then I mean those were people who wrote in different ways than Ezra Klein does. And I think that his sort of generally measured approach is what makes this carry so much weight.

What was funny, too, about reading the podcast and the column was you say, okay, he's making the case that Biden step aside. Then you think, well, okay, well, who is, what is his solution here? Who is the person who should pick up the baton for the Democrats? And then Ezra said this. But let's say Biden ultimately agrees and steps aside. Then what? Well, the Democrats do something that used to be common in politics but hasn't been in decades.

They picked their nominee at the convention. I smiled, David, when I heard that. Because now we've gone from this somewhat heretical act to the ultimate fantasy of everyone who has ever written about politics. Yeah. A brokered convention. We're going to go to Chicago. In August, we're going to get J.B. Pritzker. We're going to get Gavin Newsom. We're going to get Kamala Harris.

I'm going to finally get the term smoke-filled backroom into my copy. Oh, yeah. And really have it be a smoke-filled back room or maybe a vape-filled back room where these decisions are being made. So we went from something that is unconventional, at least unconventional in the Klein universe, to the most conventional fantasy you could absolutely imagine. We're finally going to do it, dude, that broker convention. The most conventional fantasy. Like, you had those two things have to be conjoint, right?

And by the way, pun firmly intended in conventional fantasy, but go ahead. Yeah, absolutely true. No, this is the sort of thing that you, I mean, every time the brokered convention comes up, I just sort of roll my eyes. Because it is. It's just a thing that politics nerds glum on to. it very rarely is promoted in any sort of real

rational way. And I think at the end of the day, maybe more than anything else, just the political component of it just totally ill-conceived. Right? Just because you're so interested in something like this doesn't mean that it wouldn't just confuse the hell out of every voter and almost necessarily tank the election.

Yes. He has reasons for this, right? Well, like, this is the Democrats making their best choice, putting their best foot forward as happened at brokered conventions of your. Mm-hmm. But you can feel it in there and you can feel it for everybody who has ever wished for one of these. Like, the reason people want it is because it's exciting. Yeah. It would be fascinating to cover. And it feels like something that was denied to you by being a political reporter in recent times rather than the olden times.

Mm-hmm. We weren't riding on the bus. with Jack Germant so we didn't get to go to a brokered convention. We had to go to these stage managed conventions, which are just TV shows.

What if we could go to one where everything was really on the line? Before we leave this topic, do you want to talk about the Biden age stuff? Yeah. Which is part of Klein's column. So Klein's, to be clear,

his argument is not that Joe Biden can't do the job of being president of the United States. States. His argument is that Joe Biden is not up to the job of campaigning to be president States or campaigning to be reelected. And that should show to tell you what kind of heresy this is, right? This is not, I'm throwing the president aside because I don't believe in him anymore. This is not, I just want the Democrats to win and have a better chance of winning. Yeah, I'm not sure that there's much of a distinction. Well, I mean, okay, I guess there is a

distinction, right? I mean, if he can, yes, if you are competent at being president, And continue to be competent being president, but for some very, you know, whatever reason can't do the whole campaign. But there's no, I guess what I mean is that what's the point of arguing about his skills as a president if he cannot be elected as president? Right. I mean, it's obviously an incredibly calculated decision that, to decide that I, Joe Biden, and I'm speaking, you know, first person president here. I, Joe Biden and the best hope at defeating Donald Trump. but saving America, whatever the argument is.

Obviously, my age is going to be a huge issue. But the odds are just so significantly better, even despite that for me to win, as opposed to just literally anybody else in the field, that it's worthwhile. Well, at some point, if you're going to be fact, I mean, if you're really measuring it, and I'm not saying that they are,

but if you're really measuring that out, other things have to come into play too. I mean, the narrative is really spun out of control about the age, right? I mean, it is, it is, and honestly, we might even look back and say the Super Bowl, the lack of a Super Bowl interview was a tipping point, which is nuts to think about. I didn't really think twice about it at the time at all.

Is it nuts to think from what we're doing from a media perspective or from Biden just passing up on that and allowing one more data point to creep into that discussion? I think that, well, both, but particularly the second, I think that it's that, that it's a really tangible data point, right? That every, whatever, every, every voter can say to another voter, he didn't even do the Super Bowl interview. And that has very concrete resonance, right?

In a way that's saying, he hasn't been doing that much media, he hasn't been, you know, his number of press avails is down. Like, whatever. Like, this is just a very, even if it's, even if it weren't true, it's a very tangible thing, right? And I mean, listen, I was talking to my wife about this just yesterday. My general feeling about the election hasn't changed. I think this is going to come down to me. I'm going to be proven for so wrong.

But I think this is going to come down to a thousand people in Pennsylvania, no matter, like, we can slice and dice this and cover it a million ways. I think it's going to come down to a thousand people in Pennsylvania. I think that those thousand people can be really swayed by the age issue, you know? And I think that Donald Trump being omnipresent, as kooky as he is, is clearly immune to any questions about his age. And to some extent, justifiably so. And but I think that the bigger issue now, separate from age, is a factor that they, you know, that normally goes. the other way, but it's the issue of incumbency. I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of questions, but now particularly with the war in Palestine that where incumbency is really going to hurt Joe Biden.

And the thousand people who are going to make this decision on this election are either going to stay home or, you know, be swayed in another direction. So I think that, I don't know. I mean, I can understand going back to Ezra Klein, how difficult this argument is to make, how, how how difficult the calculus is for him, because knowing how many people are going to be upset with them. But I don't think he's the only one having the thought with this level of theory of gravity at this moment. I'm fascinated to see on the question of age

how two mindsets are conflicting at once. There is a mindset that tells you, look, this is a binary election, right? It's democracy continues or democracy is in peril. Those are the two outcomes. after November here. So that merely by talking about age, by trying to get but her emails part two,

by letting this float to the top of the New York Times page, turn your Times homepage, even for a second, you are doing it wrong, right? You are doing a disservice to your readers, the media is misleading people, et cetera, et cetera. Then there's this journalist mindset that says, and you heard a Sted Herndon talking about this on the podcast a week ago, saying, of course we're going to talk about this.

Of course we're going to investigate. this. Like, no, it is not the same as January 6th. No, it's not. It's our job to put everything in context. But of course, this is a valid thing to talk about, right? Use your eye. You and I've talked about on this podcast before. As soon as you stop using your eyes and ears as a journalist, you're really screwed, right? So you are watching Joe Biden talk at a press conference. You're watching Joe Biden give a stump speech. That doesn't mean he can't discharge his duties. That doesn't mean he's incapable of being president. But it is certainly something. that is worth talking about.

Yeah. I think that there's a real tension, and this is what we keep coming back to, between talking about, about, you know, you mentioned January 6th. I mean, there are political conversations about ideology,

about the way that someone will govern, about whatever else, that shouldn't be in the same, necessarily in the same conversation as electability arguments, right? I think that that line has been increasingly blurred over the past couple of decades in terms of the way,

we talk about it. And I certainly think that the Trump years have done nothing but just, just turn the blur into a full-on, you know, goulash. But, um, but, um, but yeah, I mean, that, but, uh, said is right. I mean, of course we're going to talk about it. Of course we're going to talk about it. And, and, and I think that the way that it becomes more of a legitimate, I guess if that's the word line of argument, a more concrete line of questioning is the way that it reflects on the decision making of the campaign in the White House in a broader way, right? I mean, do we, like, why are we making the decisions like this? Do we really not, are we really going to, like, insult the public into thinking, by insisting

that this is not an issue, you know, and if it's not, and if we really believe it's not an issue, why are we not addressing it? Like it just seems it, you just, if you're not actually worried about his age, you still have to be worried about the response. Yeah.

And this came up in Klein's column. Joe Biden has done fewer than 100 interviews, Klein Wright, since being president. That's less than a fourth as many as Barack Obama did and a third as many as Donald Trump did in their first administrations. Okay.

What is the liberal case for not doing interviews? This is where I feel like we can make some common ground even between these mindsets, right, that are both valid but are very different, right? Journalist mindset person who just wants Joe Biden to win the presidency and doesn't want Donald Trump to win again. This is the mindset. What is the liberal case for not talking to the press? Because there are certainly questions that Democrats want to hear from Joe Biden about, right?

There are questions about the war in Gaza, which you mentioned. There are questions about immigration. There are questions about his second term. about defeating Trump, about all these kinds of thing. What's the case for that, right? It doesn't make a very compelling case for saving America from the end of democracy when you're not willing to get out there and make the case. Right?

I mean, you make it to Conan O'Brien, you know, and not a journalist. So, okay. But anyway, that's all I have to say. I know now we're going to get everybody angry at us. But that's what I would say, like, if we want to make common cause here, do interviews. This is a value that I will extend to every politician no matter what their party is. We want you to talk to the press more. We want you to talk more.

All right, coming up in 30 seconds, David, and a due haiku for Peter King and for the employees of vice. But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box spot where they are always, always gratefully received. Did you catch the gold Donald Trump high tops? Yeah, of course. That the former president unveiled.

Was it at SneakerCon? Saw somebody paid $9,000 for a pair. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write. I tried hooping in these, but all I could do was draw charges. Thanks to Brad and Mark Mascalino for that one. If you want to consign these shoes to the footlocker of history, congrats.

You made the overwork Twitter joke. of the week. All right, David, in the notebook dump, I want to do two farewells with you. One happy, one not so happy. The happy one is to NFL writer Peter King. Yeah. He announced this morning that he is retiring,

or at least retiring from his column, which is now called Football Morning in America, but which you and I knew for years at SI as Monday morning quarterback. Yeah. Peter King, the sports writer who was writing deep into the night to give us not only nuggets about NFL games that had just been played, but his craft beer recommendations.

His coffee order at Starbucks. Peter King seemed to be consuming an inordinate amount of coffee as he wrote these columns for us. Got thousands of words to churn out. This isn't going to, you need something to keep you sharp at the computer. Yeah. Who among us is not consuming

insane amounts of coffee? Said in his column today that he started writing MMQB or at least a similar substance back in 1997 when Steve Robinson

and editor at SI suggested he empty his notebook on Mondays. Which is a very internety thing to do, right? Old media says, no, what we want is a crafted piece about the game of the week where you give us the quarterback after the game

and give us some details that you've hoovered up over the course of the week. Internet journalism ethic says, just give us everything. Yeah. Toss it all into the box because we will glom onto certain things and skip other things and that'll be great. It's interesting because Peter King was Sports Illustrated's big NFL writer in SI the magazine. and I feel he added this whole other layer to his career that is probably even bigger than the first layer by writing for the internet. Oh, for sure.

I mean, dude, we talk about this. I too, I feel all the time, if I brought you some magazines from the 90s, you and I who care about this stuff and read old pieces like this. And I just showed you the TOC from a 1997 issue of SI. You'd be like, who's that? Yeah. Who's that? Mm-hmm. Because as big as a lot of those people were,

they're kind of consigned to this corner of journalism history. Peter King comes to the internet and says, I got it, man. I figured it out. Monday morning, I'm going to give you a column to read. It's going to be incredibly long. I mean, we should, we should say this as we wish him goodbye.

That column was freaking huge. Yeah. But it was very smartly for the medium, chopped up into all these little bits so you could scan it. Yeah, and length was not, length was an asset at that point in time. Our boss Bill did that too. I mean, who amongst us, I say again,

did not use our work copier to print out these like 25 page columns and go read them on the toilet? I mean, this was before the era of iPhones, this was having your, as close as you could have to come to, you know, having your computer with you all the time. You print out these long columns and bring them. with you everywhere. Fold the pages, fold the print out in half, stick it in your back pocket, take it on the subway. You know, that was, that's, that's, it was, it was a, it was a,

the linked was a real asset. And a show of force in a way in the industry at that time. Sure. I get to write long because remember we're coming out of the print here where word count is a big deal. Mm-hmm. Pages are finite. Space is finite. We got other people to appease here, but oh, no, I'm going to come over the internet and I'm going to go long. Yeah. And that feels like, you know, a big, big deal and very, very different from what we've been reading at that point. Yeah. He chopped up the column of the bits, as I mentioned. There was lots of non-football stuff in there where it was threaded through, which felt very different than something you'd read the pages of Sports Illustrated, especially during that period.

Obviously, nowhere near Bill in terms of literary quality in terms of turning a phrase. Mm-hmm. Peter even says this when he got to Sports Illustrated, which was in 1989, that he felt like he was outclassed by the Capital W writers who were at the magazine. So he was going to work harder. He was going to put stuff in, hoover up notes, break news in a way that maybe those writery people weren't doing. And Monday morning quarterback was kind of the ultimate expression.

that. Here it all is, right? You wrote your perfectly crafted feature that's 2679 words, but look at this, baby. This is a big old thing that I got coming out and it's creating an audience. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, certainly Sports Illustrated had more writer writers that you're referring to than some outlets did at that point in time. But yeah, I mean, this is sort of the two ways the internet has gone too. I mean, and Peter King really, I think it really foresaw that. I don't think he's The intelligent, you know, he intellectually knew it. But that was, you know, just the, we all get to, get to decide every time we click on something between information download and, you know, the, the, the experience of a wonderful read. And, yeah, I mean, he did his own thing.

I think of this sometimes, too, there are these sports writers who have come along in history who have so much that they can't be contained by normal space constraints. in the 70s, Peter Gammon's and Bob Ryan and, you know, others at the Boston Globe were like this. Like, oh my God, Will McDonagh's pride in this category too. Like, we just got to give them a whole page on Sunday. Yeah. Because they've just got so much. Bill is like this a couple of decades later. Peter King was like this.

Whether he's seeing the opportunity of the internet, as you say, or whether he's just like, I just got all this stuff. Yeah. Here you go. I always remember the top of Monday morning quarterback, starting with Peter King being on the phone with a quarterback who's just won a game and is now on the team bus headed to the airport. That was a big deal.

And it kind of tracked with how insider culture had changed football writing. Yeah. Adam Schaefter was going to get the scoop increasingly. That's something Peter King would have competed for back in the old days. So Peter King would give you the guy. Yeah. Here is the quarterback five minutes after he wins a huge game. Yes.

Here's the interview with him. That's how I'm competing in this new football writing world. The ultimate was when he went to Montana after the Patriots beat the Falcons in the Super Bowl and hung out with Tom Brady and Giselle. Mm-hmm. And got this interview with Brady who just, and it was just like, I remember reading that and be like, like, whoa. I think it was in two parts because it were just so much material about both the Super Bowl and Brady. And I think, and I don't think I'm imagining this, but the one Super Bowl I went to the locker room back in the Grantland days, it was Patriots Seahawks. And I'm happy to be corrected

on this by Peter King himself, but I swear to God, I was walking out of the Patriots locker room and Peter King was talking to Tom Brady at his locker. Yeah. That would not have happened. Brian Curtis walked up, hey, Tom, can I just get a second with you about the winning the Super? But no, that would have been a hard pass. Peter King can do that. I also think back due to conversations we've had about Sports Illustrated. Peter King figured something out about Sports Illustrated.

He figured out how to do something for the web that was also a product that very much felt like SI. Yeah. Like classic between the covers, SI. Right? This has reporting in it. This is not doodling or whatever the slurs were about internet sports writing back in the early odds.

This has reporting. This has predictions. This has, you know, notebook stuff in it. Still kind of baffled how SI didn't just say, okay, Peter King did this now.

It's everybody's responsibility here to create something like this. Yeah. However you do it, you got to figure out the way you're going to, going to become an internet sports writer. Yep. As opposed to somebody who comes out with a feature about a game that happened four days ago. We need to figure this out collectively, but somehow it just didn't happen for us.

I. All right. Not so great farewell. Not great at all, in fact, is the farewell to Vice. Here's a sentence I didn't want to read. Vice will quote, no longer publish content on Vice.com. It's a new way to say it. Yeah.

Ben Mullen at the New York Times reported that Vice Media was laying off several hundred of its more than 900 employees. As the business environment for digital media became increasingly precarious, Mullen writes. Executives bet on big elaborate content deals for clients like the cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris International and Antenna, a Greek media company. These all sound like copy pay sentences from the end of a media company. How do we think about the legacy? of vice. Oh, God, that's too hard. Let me narrow it down for you. The journalists who were the beating hearts of vice muckraking and reporting in the recent times. There's a lot of things. In a lot of ways, they were, they sort of set the rubric for media startups. I guarantee that

Nobody in our, well, in most of our adult careers, launched a media website, or at least there's a 20-year run where I guarantee nobody launched a media website without the X, Y meets Y meets vice being on the pitch sheet. Yes. They, I think in some ways, really artfully threaded the needle between important substantive reporting, and you can put quotes around that if you want or not.

And just sort of niche reporting, sort of blogger's mindset, a very like open-armed ideology about what counts as news and what counts as. And I guess just sort of the intersection of content and news, right? It has to be said that there's a million people out there, millions of people out there for whom, when they think of vice they think of,

boots on the ground reporting and international war zones and like, you know, wild locales. That early era vice video journalism was incredibly transformative to the way that we viewed. I mean, we've sat on the show and and, you know,

sung the praises of foreign correspondence from, mostly from mainstream outlets time and time again, but But it can't be overstated how much of just a, I mean, how jarring it was to go from the sort of institutional version of that to, you know, a guy saw it a bar in Brooklyn is, you know, has a scarf around his neck and he's doing that on the internet right now. 100%. And, you know, not for nothing, but like, I'll turn it over to you up for this, but not for nothing, but it's, it's, in our lifetimes, there's very, very. I mean, it's almost,

you can't even, you can count on one hand the number of times or anyone use journalism and cool in the same sentence. And four of those were probably all about Vice. You know? And as much as we- And as much as you like to look back

on the glory days of how much fun it would have been drinking with the staff of the New York Herald Tribune or whatever. I mean, there's just not much of that in this day and age. And Vice certainly cracked that code. Yeah, Dick Shapp was cool and Vice was cool.

That's a category I'd like to join as one. I thought a little bit about Vice News Tonight, which employed some of our pals. Yeah. It's also a very interesting experiment in TV news and kind of adapting a very old form of journalism, much like you talk about foreign correspondence to something that will appeal to younger people. then I also think of advice, you know, when they, when they publish pieces and investigations, how far the tentacles of their investigations reached? Yeah.

I was thinking this week just separately from the news about Vice, I was like, man, I read some really good pieces a couple years ago about scandals at the LA Times and the LA Times and the LA Times Sports page. Where did I read that? And that answer turned out to be Vice. Oh, yeah. among investigations carefully edited and researched and reported investigations about many, many other subjects. Also, when this news came down, Vice posted a podcast, a kind of final farewell pirate podcast

in which writers and editors, among them, Anna Merlin and Tim Marchman, reflected on what had just happened. and what their bosses had done and the more recent iterations of vice journalism, they must be, we talk about journalists who are at odds with the behavior of their corporate parents. Vice registered very, very high on the scale, may have been number one on the scale. Sure. As that final act proved.

By the way, we should always have, whenever one of these publications vaporizes itself or lays people off, we should absolutely have a mandatory podcast where the people sit around and swap stories and talk about what just happened. I think increasingly that'll be the norm. I think there was a messenger pod or two. Yeah. And I don't think that we're in a world now where you really do any damage your career by doing something like that.

Right. I mean, especially when we're talking about the corporate parent being some faceless investment firm or something. You know, I mean, you're not, you're not burning somebody who might go on to be executive editor at the LA Times or something. You know, you're just, it's, it's, it's just a sort of faceless villain. So, yeah, I think we'll see more and more of that for sure. Can we talk about the first person essay before we go? Oh, please. Because our week away was dominated by a couple of essays.

Emily Gould was writing about divorce or not divorce. and Charlotte Cowles, who is the personal finance columnist for New York Mag, was writing about a scam which ended with her handing $50,000 in cash to a man in a card. This is an amazing story and involved impersonations of Amazon, the Federal Trade Commission, and the CIA. If you're one of the 14 people on journalism Twitter who has not read this story, I suggest you do immediately because it is fast. What do you think our fascination with stories like this is?

Well, there's a true crime aspect to it, right? I mean, that's where we are in our culture right now. The scam thing is always, it's, it's, it's a personal thing in a lot of ways. We've all, we all encounter this all the time, whether or not we fall victim to it. But there's just a huge voyeuristic aspect to this, too, right? I mean, I think the vast majority of responses that you heard and read about this piece we're like, I can't believe that this is true, but if it's true, I can't believe that she agreed to have to publish this, right? And to see, and part of it, it's a, it's a situation that

if we can't all directly sympathize with, we can, like, understand the bare bones of it, right? I mean, you can sympathize with it in some general way. Um, uh, and to watch it play out in horror. It's, uh, it's, you know, I, I think the connection. is pretty obvious. It's interesting. You mentioned the true crime boomlet we've had now over the last, what is it now, decade plus. This is a particularly interesting kind of true crime because when you read a piece like

this, you know the outcome at the beginning. You know it's a scam. So as you're reading it, it's like reading a mystery from back to front where you can, you look for the clues as you go along. like oh yeah see look look see that seems shady when that person said that you know they knew the last four digits over social security oh yeah see that like you point out the things because you know how the thing ends yes and then there is a just like just like me aspect especially for people in our business you're like oh wait this person is a journalist well i mean you know how it's going

end, but you also kind of don't believe it could possibly go the direction that you think it's going to go. You expect there to be some wild mitigating circumstances or whatever. How the story plays out is really what's intriguing. But you're right. And then also there's the intra-journalism piece of it, too. Got some only in journalism for you. Matt McKenna sent in the word defang. I don't believe we've had defang in this feature before. We must have had defang. Mr. The Fang is DeFang is Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Fame. Mr. Trump has sought to defang Ms. Haley's criticism, The New York Times wrote, speaking of which in the aftermath of the South Carolina primary, over the weekend, we had a lot of

only in journalism in some of the deadline writing. Nikki Haley's most ardent supporters, the New York Times noted, an abulient Mr. Trump took the stage. Boolean is also a great only in journalism word. And I got this one from Matt Jennings on threads.

Send another story from the New York Times. Sorry, New York Times to pick on you in this feature, but you know, you are the only paper left in the United States of America, besides a few others. This is a New York Times sentence. In Sunday's New York Times story about the border between Finland and Russia, Matt Jennings writes,

Belarus is described as a, quote, veritable satrapy of Moscow. What? You remember, satrap was an absolute go-to word at the SAT prep course at Pascal High. Yes, okay, yeah. So can I give you a veritable satrippy? Satripy is what he governs over? That, well, Belarus is the satrapi. in this instruction.

So I looked this up, dude, because I could have given you after our SAT prep course experience that the satrip was a kind of ruler. Yeah. Defined as the governor or of a province in ancient Persia, and Wikipedia tells us modern uses a pejorative and refers to any subordinate or local ruler, usually with unfavorable connotations of corruption.

Hmm. A veritable satripy. Satripe. Okay. I think that's a crossword word too, but it really not as, considering it has so many common letters, not quite as, not nearly as common as you might think. All right. Let's go to a feature, which is always a veritable satripe. It's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline. Yeah. I mean that, David, in terms of both corruption and ruling a very small local space. Don't start corruption rumors with this. I don't do nearly well enough for people to,

also think that I'm being, that I've corrupted this process somehow. Fair enough. David is as clean as a whistle. There's no scandal here. Last Monday's headline about overpriced airport snacks was a lack of checks and balances. Today's headline comes to us from Ryan Snyder. It's from the Times as well. It's a review of the new J-Lo movie, David. Okay.

Being released in conjunction with a J-Lo album. I'll give you some mild guidance here. imagine that on screen we are encountering J-Lo. Here she is, we might be thinking. What was the New York Times' strained pun headline? Here's Jenny. You want to stick with J-Lo, and in fact, that's how it starts. J-Lo, oh, is it like, hello?

Oh, there. J-L-L- Give you a little more. Introducing her. J-Lo and Oh, J-Lo and behold? J-Lo and Behold. I can get that out.

All right. Our old friend, Wesley Morris, the byline on that one. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Praction Magic. By Brian Waters. Did you do anything fun during your week of rest and recuperation?

No, just rested and recuperated. Nothing at all. I'm trying to I did some stuff did some stuff nothing too exciting though what about you two things

I took my 11 year old son my newly 11 year old son to Legoland for his birthday Like it like the Like the leg Is it like a mall store Sort of Lego land

That place? No the theme park Legoland the theme park So I've been 11 to Lego land In like a giant In like the Whatever it's called mall The Americana Mall over here

in New Jersey. There's a movie theater and a couple of, there's like a train you can ride on, but this is not a theme park. No, that's the Chili's two of Lego lands. This is the theme park with rides and hotels, Lego themed hotels where you walk in and they're just ball pits of Legos everywhere you go. Wow. How was it?

It was amazing, but I got to tell you, and I think you probably had this experience traveling with small kids too. You can go anywhere. You can go to Legoland in Carlsbad, California. You can march the kids across Europe and the thing that they will remember

inevitably. The one thing about any trip is the breakfast buffet. Yeah. The cheapo breakfast buffet and maybe you and I have not been taking our kids

to Golden Corral quite enough to just appreciate what a buffet is. Yeah. But I swear, my wife and I've been on so many vacations with the kids and they're always like, oh, I remember that hotel

that had the buffet. Like Rick Steves himself could have materialized and led us through European capitals, and they would remember the sausage and waffles and pancakes that they could get in any amount. That's number one. Number two, as part two of my son Owen's birthday,

we had a bounce house here. Ah. Now, here, you'll relate to this. Fifth grade, bounce house. You're kind of at the edge of the bounce house era of your life. Sure. Remember when you and I, You relate to this.

Don't act. I mean, we were not, I didn't have bounce houses when I was growing up. As a parent, I relate to this. There's, okay, we didn't have bounce houses. We did like the McDonald's Playland and, you know, the Chuckie cheese thing. Remember, you got to late elementary school and you're like, this is really fun, but you're kind of looking around at the other kids in the ball pit and you're like, I feel like I'm at the end of something.

One of your first mortality moments in life is like, I'm too big for the playland. I'm too big for the bounce house. I could feel that or at least intuit that a little bit for my son and his friends. Also, it just turns out like if you're a fifth grader in your bounce house, things are just way more violent than they were when you were a second grader in a bounce house. Just felt like an injury was seconds away. We got through clean. But you're just like, oh my gosh, we're big kids now.

Oh, yeah. And we're not just like, oh, you first on the slide, please. We're like, oh, 18 of us are going down the slide together. And we are going to have this absolute crash at the bottom. Anyway, maybe just my pangs of mortality. But I was like, God, I remember when I was like, go to the playground at the park or the showbiz, Chuckie cheese style pizza place and be like, you know, I'm just a little old for this. I want to enjoy this.

I want to embrace this, but I can't. Yeah. Something in me is changing. Mm-hmm. That's my rest and recuperation from well this week. As you imagine from those two experiences, not a lot of rest and recuperation was happening. But it was a good time. All right.

Coming Thursday on this podcast, Sean Fennessey's going to be here. Talk about his experiences at Pitchfork. We're going to talk about the 1993 campaign dock, the War Room. And then on Monday, Shoemaker and I return with more lukewarm takes about the media. More bounce castle. More bounce house content. We're not too old. By the way.

How is it? It's like a hundred bucks to get a bounce. castle in your backyard. When we were kids, it would have cost, like, our parents would have had to sell their car to get it as something. Imagine having something like that at your house. It was completely unobtainable. Yeah, absolutely. A magic phone that shows you movies would have been less inconceivable than a bounce castle in your backyard. Yeah. You can just have this? I just gotta beg enough for it. See you later, dude. See you, Brian.