The Press Box - The Latest Death of ‘Sports Illustrated,’ Playoff Audio and Observations, and Pitchfork and the Plight of the Midsized Publication

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

Bryan and David kick off the show by discussing the latest news regarding ‘Sports Illustrated’ and its many deaths. (0:37). Then they get into the NFL divisional round and some of the observations from the games, such as the Texans special teams coaches’ reactions (13:20) and Jason Kelce’s reaction to his brother Travis’s touchdown (27:40). Later, talk of Ron DeSantis ending his presidential campaign with a “quote” and some only-in-journalism words from an unlikely source: Donald Trump (41:46). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline.Read Bryan’s column on the Ringer dot com regarding Sports Illustrated. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Galaxy lights, Coachella, Lightning Bolt necklaces. Did you catch all the Scandival clues? Last March, one cheating scandal launched a reality TV investigation that generated hundreds of conspiracy theories, thousands of podcast episodes, and millions of dollars in revenue. I'm Jody Walker, host of an American Scandival. Ahead of the Vanderpump Rules premiere, relive the pop culture phenomenon that rocked a reality Nation starting January 23rd on Ringer Dish. David?

Yes. I regret to inform you that Sports Illustrated has died again. Yeah. How many deaths is this? Well, when I sat down to write on Friday, I realized it was the third obituary for Sports Illustrated that I have written at the ringer. Mm-hmm. ringer is only seven years old the details are this

Sports Illustrated is owned by a brand company Yes which is a bad start from from Go the brand company manages the brands of everything from Elvis Presley to Billabong All right That is

Then another company licenses the right to publish SI from the brand company and this second company, which is called the Arena Group, missed a licensing payment. So some employees of SI were laid off on Friday, and some others were told you're going to be laid off at this date in the future unless something happens to

correct to save the day. Exactly right. So I wrote about this in a piece called Sports Illustrated's Death by a Thousand Cuts, which you can check out at the ring. If interested. Couple thoughts for you. I was really struck by the intensity of the Twitter X funeral for S.I.

Yeah, because like you said, it was death by thousand cuts, but, you know, if you weren't paying attention to all of those cuts, this really felt like the obituary. Well, yeah, and some of you and I both know, some media funerals are performative in nature, perhaps all media funerals are.

where you know, you're making a point, you're doing this because it's a tweet that will be liked. And maybe to some extent, there's so much death by thousand cuts in the media culture, including Sports Illustrated prior to this, that, you know, what you hear is it comes out as a slow trickle, right? By the time that it gets to the death, you feel like you've already processed the grief, right? Because you hear about the first round of layoffs and then you hear the story about financial difficulties. and there's more rounds of layoffs. This was just like kind of all at once. It went from a semi-functional media publication to,

hey, this seems to be over right now. It was the big one, as the LA Times Guild told us, right? Like, maybe this is an extinction level event where the whole staff is going to go out the door at one time. I am, though, when I see all those tweets about SI, I'm always like, oh my gosh, there is and was a lot of people in the world who really love the name of Sports Illustrated.

Yeah, and not just in like, you know, the branding opportunities at airport stores and whatever else at the ownership group sees the value in. Yeah, people love SI. Everybody seemed to have a Sports Illustrated cover or two that meant a lot to them. They were tweeting out after this announcement.

Of course, everybody, I mean, the vast, vast, vast majority of people in our line of work, I mean, for most of those people, Sports Illustrated, it was a, like, a formative periodical. You know, it taught us what, like, good sports writing could be for the most part, especially for those who weren't blessed with, to be in a major city with a, you know, major sports team and a huge staff of incredible writers.

So it's, yeah, I mean, it's incredibly significant. Not to mention, it was the goal that you wanted to get to if you were getting into sports writing. I think Dan Jenkins was one and called it the Yankees. He was in Dallas. Sports Illustrated was in New York and it was symbolically the Yankees of sports writing. But all of that love, dude, just reminds me how much goodwill that Sports Illustrated and the people that ran it squandered. And I'm not just talking about this last Maven Arena Group era of Sports Illustrated.

we can date this back 10 or 20 years. To, you know, and again, every magazine has had trouble navigating the internet age. Maybe the New Yorker is the one exception that proves the rule. But name your favorite magazine, Esquire, GQ, whatever it is. It's had trouble becoming essentially a website that maybe publishes a magazine once a month or whatever, in whatever unspecified frequency published. They've had trouble becoming the internet era version of themselves, right? I mean, there's competition for the corners at the run and all that stuff. But yeah, just in terms of even replicating something resembling the significance they had in the offline world online, it's just been impossible.

What's so funny about SI in particular is if you go back, Peter King, who was one of the big stars of the magazine, the NFL reporter, and that was always one of the big jobs over at SI. he's like, I've got so many thoughts in my head and so many words I want to give to the world that I'm going to create this online column called MMQB that will come out every Monday. It will have all of my NFL stuff in it, some scoops, all that kind of stuff. But it will also be an online sports writing product. Yeah. It will be different than what I would write in the magazine. I'm going to tell you about my coffee experiences.

I'm going to tell you about those craft beers I'm drinking while I'm on the eternal road trip across America. I'm going to put things in numbered lists so that you can read it, you know, in that, what do we call that snackable, whatever the internet term is for the way to consume a long piece of writing like that. And by the way, it will also be long, much like our bosses work back at ESPN. It's not going to be a big deal if this is thousands and thousands of words landing on your web browser on a Monday morning. Yeah. Like somebody figured it out at SI. Yeah. And then you had other people like Richard Deich and Dr. Z,

who was basically the opposite of a guy you thought would figure it out in the internet era. Grant Wall, Stuart Mandel, who's now at the athletic. Lots of people wanted to do that. But somehow that did not turn into a flourishing online publication. No, and they had the opportunity. I mean, I will date myself, but I remember back in the sort of early days of, not the early days of the internet. I don't claim to really participate in that. You spent more time in those AOL chat rooms than I did, but I remember, you know, checking when it would be the NBA trade deadline.

I would go to ESPN.gov.com and then toggle over to s.i.com just because they're like, where else did you look for national sports news, right? I mean, there was an opening. And, you know, they didn't grab it and run with it. So looking back at some of the moments from SI history that we now look at and just, you know, put your head down on the desk. One was firing Grant Wall, the late great soccer writer Grant Wall in 2020. And the guy who was running Maven at the time sent an email to SI staff explaining that part of the reason Wall had fallen out of favor there was that he didn't file enough copy. Yeah, which is like saying Zach Lowe and Ben Solac, don't file enough copy and make enough podcasts. This is Grant Wall we're talking about.

Yeah. That was the thing you put your finger on. We're not getting enough juice from this guy. As a writer, like, what the hell are you talking about? Also, the whole Maven plan, you remember this and came in in 2019. We're like, we're going to have SI classic, which is to say good SI. And then we're going to create this whole site of cheap pieces around it that are mostly geared toward particular teams. So we'll have like Cowboys Maven and Patriots Maven and Detroit Tigers Maven, I guess.

And that's going to be what saves us. Yeah. We're just going to have stuff. And people are going to come for the stuff. And then I'm not sure how this is going to happen, but then they're going to subscribe to the good S.I. Pay us for the good S.I. Yeah. and that will help us win the internet.

Not so much. No. The ultimate sliding doors moment for SI, and I found this in Michael McCamberge's book, The Franchise, which is a really great history of the magazine, 1983, David. SI has a chance to buy ESPN,

and this is 1983 ESPN. So the price of ESPN was $10.99 or something close to that. It was nothing. And they could have branded it as SI the cable network. Yeah. Before there actually was CNNSI, but it could have been

SI the cable network way back in 1983. And then their biggest problem this week would be something Pat McAfee said on television. Not the changing economics of print and internet sports writing. They didn't do it.

Yeah. Chose to take a pass on ESPN. Magazines are where it's at in 20. Anyway, I would like to say this because I've been thinking about this and, you know, talking to people over the last day or two reading notes and stuff like this. I think you and I sometimes when we're going through all the bad news that's happening, both in sports writing and generally in journalism right now, it's easy to talk about these publications and the strategy behind them and not just take a moment to say, by the way, the people working at these publications didn't do anything wrong. No. You're not the reason.

We're, we if we can speak for the industry, we're not bad at our jobs. That's why everything bad is happening. We are caught in this, yeah, and caught in this machine that people don't understand how to fix, not to mention some obviously ridiculous management errors,

which again go. Oh, I joked when it happened that they would have been better off using, having AI, AI generated management instead of AI generated stories on that side. And they just really, seems like an all-time bag fumble that they couldn't, I mean, think of all the media

startups, not that it's like a huge success rate, there's a million, million of them we don't know about, but think of all the sports media startups that have succeeded in the span of time that you're talking about. And the idea that Sports Illustrated couldn't figure it out, you know, how many times could they have just torn it down and started over and made it work? How many people, how many hedge funds got that opportunity and they just couldn't make it work? At least not to the level that they deemed appropriate. I mean, that's really with the kind of the sad refrain of so many of these things, is that the folks who are shelling out the money have,

have, you know, growth models that are, that are, you know, basically unattainable. But, I mean, Sports Illustrated. I mean, what an iconic brand, what an iconic institution. What a place that continues to put out really incredible. a work. And you know, you can't figure out how to justify its continued existence. That's, that's just wild. Coming up on today's show, some observations sound and lots of last from this weekend's NFL playoff games. Ron DeSantis, David, did not make it to tomorrow's New Hampshire primary. He's his media strategy to blame. Plus, a few thoughts about pitchfork, the LA Times,

and the shrinking of all those publications that are in the middle of the media world. All that much more on the press box. A part of the ringer podcast network media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Schumaker and producer Brian Waters here. David, I had the laptop back on my lap. Yeah. I was on the couch this weekend. I've got tons of playoff TV notes for you. Great. From a weekend of NFL consumption. Let's start with Ravens 34 Texans 10 first game on Saturday. it was on ESPN and ABC. Our producer, who is a Baltimoreian and a Ravens guy,

his Twitter was absolutely lit up during that game. He was tweeting. He was retweeting. We haven't had Baltimore football happiness in a while. True. Not quite as long as we haven't had Detroit football happiness, but it has been a while for Baltimore. Looking forward to that.

Did you notice how many times on television, this was referred to explicitly as the divisional round of the playoffs. Was it a lot? It was a lot. And last week, it was a lot of wild card round of the playoffs. And both times I had to kind of like stop myself and go, oh, right, the second round of the NFL playoffs. We think a memo came down from Goodell's office that said, we need to brand this stuff because

it's just very funny to me. Also, we were doing a lot of but actually weather again. Oh, no. It was 27 degrees in Baltimore, but actually it feels like 13. Yeah. We just need to put a worldwide ban on this. I mean, just gives us one temperature. Feels like 13.

Okay, we got it. We understand the difference between those two. Second quarter, the Ravens appear to have the game in hand. The Texans ran at punt back. Here is Joe Buck and Troy Aitman with that play. Here's Sims. Right up the middle. Still going.

Steven Sims. He is gone. No flags. Touchdown Texans. What I love about that play other than Troy's Good Night is that we got one of the favorite shots of sports television, which is the pumped up special teams coach on the sidelines. Uh-huh. I love that.

The Texans guys named Frank Ross. You never hear about the special teams coach unless something amazing happens. Sure. Or something terrible happens. He's also never stationary. He always seems to be moving up and down the sidelines. And the other thing about the special teams coach is he always has crazy smile.

Uh-huh. He never has like offensive coordinator look. We're like, I called a brilliant play and yes, it succeeded. It's like, do you see that? Yeah. You see that thing that just happened on the football field? Yeah. I think the defensive coordinators are like sternly clapping, you know,

slapping their players on the back or backside or whatever. Offensive coordinators are often like onto the next play, you know, or like, or you're right, like a reserved fist pump. But special teams, I mean, if you're the special teams coach and something big happens, you know, you got the next 20 minutes off or whatever. You just go nuts, man. It's just, you can just do a keg stand out there. After the game, reporters discovered something fun.

It happened at a halftime. there was a fiery half-time speech from Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson. None of the pieces I read seemed to figure out what Lamar actually said, but Jackson himself admitted there was, quote, a lot of cursing. It worked. Ravens outscored the Texans 24-0 in the second half. There was a halftime act, David, of the first game, Jimmy Eat World. Oh, yeah.

Does that meet the minimum level of band you need for a playoff halftime performance? Oh. I mean, they have that one really big hit. Listen, I would, if you told me Jimmy World, we're playing at a nearby arena, and you get to see a football game too, I'd be excited. Because you only get a couple of songs, you don't have the whole set. Sure, you don't have to sit on waiting for the song you, you know, to be in the encore or whatever. You just, that's, you should, you just hear the good one. So the one hit wonder is actually

kind of the perfect or near one hit wonder is kind of the perfect half-time act. Yeah. So when my son and I saw Dolly Part and that was actually the worst because there's like 20 Dolly songs you want to sing. You actually give me a lot of time

with Dolly to really get the full Dolly vibe. Have her sitting on a stool. But Jimmy World, you know, I mean, come on. Let's go. Yeah, I mean, the Super Bowl is different. They get a lot of time to put on a big show or whatever, but, you know, if you told me that the, whatever,

that the next round of the playoffs at like seven mary three we're going to be performing i'd be like yeah i'm there by the way we're now in the thing where we see that usher commercial for the super bowl halftime show presented by apple music like 9000 times you're like okay okay i got it i know what's happening there will be something at the super ball another general observation any sad quarterback looks sadder when they're wearing a huge winter hat found myself thinking that uh when I saw C.J. Stroud on the bench. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Also, very generic announcer sentiment about a young team like the Texans. They have nothing to be ashamed of and they will be back next year. Yeah. We sure that always pays off? No. No. Nothing to be ashamed. Like, what should they be ashamed of?

What would be? Where does it? I like, I mean, aside of like, you know, just overreactions to once upon a time touchdown dances. Like, is there? a lot of shame in the NFL? I don't think shame is something that we really measure very often.

No, and I feel like one out of two times that team never does anything ever again. This was actually going to be the Apex Mountain's like, yeah, they maybe did have a little bit to be a shame. They'd be great if like the Browns lost a game and the announcer was just like, well, as a matter of fact, they do have something to be ashamed of. So, you know,

this loss is, uh, this loss, you know, we'll just let this one go. I was watching 49ers Packers on Saturday night. Final score was 49ers 24 Packers 21. And I could not help but think about the narrative wars that we draft players for times like this. Dag Prescott, Cowboys quarterback, had the best season of his career. We can finally have a conversation about that Matt Prescott that's not,

is he really a top 10 quarterback? Sure. Can you really win with Dak Prescott? then he goes out and has a terrible game in the playoffs and he's back in the narrative. Welcome back. You are once again, the A block on every single ESPN show. Brock Purdy had that moment during the game on Saturday night. Again, near MVP season.

Yeah. It's really, really good. And all of a sudden he gets out there. He can't throw a wet football. By the way, fantastic shot from the Fox guys of showing him wiping his hands. on his pants while he is dropping back to pass. Yeah. What a moment that was.

He plays like crap the whole game. Then he has a great final drive. And so he goes into the narrative wars and then out of the narrative wars at least until next week. Yeah. Or potentially until Vegas where he could be back in them again. Mm-hmm. And I see people say, well, you know, it's such a small sample size.

I mean, he had one good drive. And, you know, Jordan Love had a great game, great playoffs. And he throws one bad pass at the end. It's like, you know what? that's the cool part about the playoffs. The sample size shrinks. And even people like you and me, David, can be like, you know, they just, I don't know if you can win with him anymore.

And guess what? We're right. Yeah. We're right. It's it's where the whole, the two fields of NFL analysis, like the smart guy, Soak Ruiz field and the dumb guy, Curtis and Shoemaker fields, they just collapse on each other. Yep. My McCarthy.

I don't know, man. Dak Prescott. I don't know if you can win with this guy. No, and that tethered himself to McCarthy. So it's like the double impact of narrative wars. Yeah, I love it. I feel like the, you know, it's the playing field is even, everybody's zero and zero as the cliche goes.

I'm zero and zero when it comes to playoff analysis because I can be right. Just like the smart football people. Yeah, production of that game. Even the bozos are smart. Even the bozos like us. Production of that game was unbelievable. I know people glaze over when you say that. But if you just think of the stuff we saw, Purdy wiping his hand,

Debo limping off and then Fox had the shot like three seconds later that, in fact, his shoe had come off. He had hurt himself. He would hurt himself later. They had Christian McCaffrey working himself over on the sideline with a massage gun. That looked like the shake weight in the commercial that everybody used to make fun of. Oh, yeah. It's funny. I always think, like, how do you explain a game is well produced? I would say, okay, the things that, that I want to see on TV, I see them instantly.

And then the things I didn't know I wanted to see on TV, I also see them instantly. Yep. That was Fox on Saturday night. Do you think they used to, that'd be great they did use a shake weight, though. Would that be the most, that would be the real tell tell sign of a great production. You see somebody using just like a shocking workout tool

from the 80s or 90s. Thymaster. Remember the Nolan Ryan? You know, the Nolan Ryan forearm grip machine? that like every kid in Texas had for a while. And are they actually getting the product placement here? Is it like the Microsoft tablets that we see on the sidelines in the NFL games? That would be so perfect.

Yeah, the tablets, they don't actually use Microsoft tablets. They're using something, or they use the tablets. It's the headphones. They're like whoever's brand on them is not actually the brand, this type of headphones they need. That would be it. It's like these like these like incredible athletes are just always shown to be using like,

you know, they just, you see them holding like a Billy Blanks Tybo DVD or something. thing as they were like walking out of the workout room. Does anybody have a DVD player I can play this on? Big bucket of orange Julius thrown on the coach.

Early game Sunday, David, Lions 31 bucks 23. I felt I have heard this bit of psychology during the playoffs over and over. A team like the bucks, they're the underdog. But that might actually be an advantage because they're

playing with house money. I heard that about the Packers. I heard that about the Bucks. I think I also heard that about the Texans. The team that is favored, the home team, the pressure is actually all on them during this game. And maybe psychologically I buy that. At least we've seen some results other than the Texans that have borne that out.

But that just became everybody's go-to bit of looking into the brains of the two teams on the field. field. Also notable from Bucks Lions, Mike Tariko began the game by throwing it to Melissa Stark and saying, Melissa, does every sideline reporter need a nickname? So we got Aaron Andrews as EA. Is Melissa Stark now, Melissa? We must just figure out something to say if we're going to throw it to these people every week. I'm just going to show some, you know, familiarity. Make it seem like you really know these people beyond just what we see on the screen. Also things announcers say all the time now, there's a lot of theory. I feel, especially over the last five years, about taking the ball first,

scoring right before the half and then getting the ball right after the half with the second half kick. Phil announcers did not talk about that at all until the last five years, and now they talk about it all the time. Is this like the old Doug Collins, like get two possessions, double possessions at the end of the, at the end of that routine? Finishing your quarters. well that he used to love on NBC.

Yeah, it's like that that somehow got put into the announcer's handbook that if we're talking about anything, it is talking about getting the ball, scoring at the end of the first half and then score again at the beginning of the second half. Lion celebrities are back, which is kind of fun. I love all of the lion celebrities. So great. Jeff Daniels on the sidelines of the game. Pete Seeger was on there.

Raise your hand if you knew Pete Seeger was. a lion celebrity and are still on the sidelines of NFL games saying that delicately speaking to celebrities Rick Flair. Oh great. America's favorite Buccaneers fan had a line after the game or he said on Twitter you played your heart out. This is to Baker Mayfield. You're a badass.

I live in Tampa. I don't have your number. Was that the end? well it kind of kept going i i clipped out the good parts but he does not have baker mayfield's number yeah but he does now is that a stay away if you're baker mayfield is that a what a stay away away uh i mean i think you should you can reach out probably a stay away may you can still you know see that the man gets your number gets the number sure is the best move to just reply to the tweet and be like hey sorry i missed you about to leave town for a couple months yeah

Hey, Nate, I don't know if I still live here. I'm going to still live here next season, but look forward to getting together down the road. Yeah. Also during that game, by the way, we had some good bumper music. Mm-hmm. A lot of times bumper music is a little off. We had dancing in the street played by NBC,

which is both Motown. So check for that. And Craig Reynolds, the Lions running back, was dancing in the end zone in the replay as they went to commercial. Double bonus points For that bumping music All right and finally David

Bill's Chiefs on Sunday night turned out to be a great game Chiefs 27 Bill's 24 It was on CBS And CBS started with Will Arnett narration Yeah Which followed the Jeff Daniels opening narration

Of Lions Bucks Mm-hmm Are you into celebrity stunt narration Of your playoff games? Will Arnette's one A little bit weird because he's like, has kind of an ironic announcer voice,

you know, but, you know, I'm a vibes guy. I think it strikes the right tone. Speaking of vibes, did you notice that Tony Romo had less five o'clock shadow than normal?

Oh, yeah. Did he, what, he hit the barbershop? I don't know. I always thought it was playoff beard, but he apparently went the other way,

playoff clean shave, but cleaner shave. Also, it's funny, Buffalo has, I guess they turn out the lights when they do the starting lineups in Buffalo. So Tracy Wolfson when she was doing her opening hit on the sidelines was just standing in pitch black with like a big light interface.

Same energy as your 11 o'clock news. I'm at the scene of the crash. Yeah. It's just a really, really funny visual. Bizarre. Also, Jason Kelsey found in the luxury box there, cheering on his brother, Travis. So we didn't just have Taylor Swift.

we had Jason Kelsey. Sure. Were you into additional celebrities watching? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, watch, celebrate. I mean, listen, I always thought there was like too much of a thing made of it when the Manning brothers would occasionally attend each other's playoff games. And there was like some sort of delicacy that was necessary because they were on opposing teams.

I mean, and then I said somebody tweet like, you know, name another player who would get that kind of reaction. they played for an opposing team. It's just like, dude, I feel like everybody. I mean, for jumping out shirtless and chugging a beer or whatever in the crowd is like a great, you know, it's a great way to get the crowd going no matter what. But I mean, who wouldn't want to see somebody's, like hilarious burly brother there celebrating alongside him?

And that seems that feels like a very human thing to do. It's something we should all be celebrating. Let's just imagine it was somebody connected with the chiefs that was jumping out of the box and drinking beers with the fans where they not be cheered? You're going to really boo that? Like this famous person is having fun with us in the stands? Yeah.

I'm going to boo. That's awesome. Also, funny line from Rich Eisen here. Wondering if a cutaway of a shirtless Jason Kelsey screaming and holding a beer to celebrate his brother's touchdown is ruining anyone's entertainment value

of this game out there. Has this just been a nonstop question about the chiefs all season? Wonder if the celebrity guest box is ruining everybody's appreciation of the game. Well, it seems like we've all adjusted to it pretty well. It is. It's a little bit of a safe corner to be on as a commentator.

Like you and I, I believe, are pro Swifty and pro Taylor Swift as part of the entertainment package that is NFL football. But I do like people standing up for it and be like, yeah, those brads and chads who are no doubt really upset right now. I think that's probably a fairly small number of people out in the universe. Yeah. A final point for you. I got an Andy Reed mustache update. Last week I was really confused why Reed had permanent frozen mustache. Oh, yeah.

Even if there was no snow falling in Kansas City. Listener Keith Curry Pochi writes this to us. As someone who lives in Minnesota, I can confirm that ice on facial hair comes from the moisture in your breath. As a native of Florida, I was blissfully unaware of the many ways water can freeze. It was bigger than the culture shock of leaving the South. Some clarity for the science challenge,

David Shoemaker and Brian Curtis. Thank you for that. Just come to your breath. Coming up in 30 seconds, David, Ron DeSantis didn't make it to tomorrow's New Hampshire primary and he regrets not talking to us. But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious

that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always, always gratefully received. the Twitter account of Insurgent Biden is too old Democratic candidate Dean Phillips posted a picture last week it was a picture of Dean Phillips

and Andrew Yang with the tagline name a more iconic duo it was an overwork Twitter joke to write literally any other duo thanks to EJ for that one but this week's winner David comes from the aforementioned DeSantis campaign.

DeSantis ended his run on Sunday during the Lions Bucks game. It was a very overworked Twitter joke to write Ron DeSantis should be forced to carry his presidential campaign to term. Thanks to a whole bunch of people, including Brian Johnson, Ann Arbor, Hoosier, Micah, D.B. and J.C., if you want to make that joke,

after every Republican drops out, we'll go ahead and congrats. You've made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, a couple quick things in the notebook dump. All right. Ron DeSantis ain't running for president anymore. No. He ended his campaign by giving us a quote from Winston Churchill that did not turn out to be a legit quote from Winston Churchill.

What was that? Quote is, success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts. Sounds kind of like Winston Churchill, but not so, apparently. there was an interesting media subplot to his candidacy. We probably should have known things were not going to go well when he opened his campaign,

not in front of a state house, but on Twitter. And the audio quality sounded like Winston Churchill during World War II. Yeah. Talking to the people of England and they needed to buck up and come together. And this was part of his strategy to avoid corporate media.

to Sanis and saying, no, no, I'm just going to talk to the world's richest man, not to any of you corporate media types. And as he got into the desperate final stretch of his campaign, he actually came around a little bit. He told radio host Hugh Hewitt he had made a whoopsie. I got to do it. I came in not really doing as much media. I should have just been blanketing.

I should have gone on all the corporate shows. I should have gone on everything. I started doing that as we got into the end of the summer and we did it. But we had an opportunity, I think, to come out of the gate and do that and reach a much broader folk. Now I'm everywhere. I mean, I'll show up wherever. Reach a much broader folk is kind of a funny phrase. Yeah.

A lot of odd turns of phrase in this campaign. I mean, obviously he just got interested in that when he was behind and needed more exposure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, he was a niche candidate who by virtue of being Republican governor of a big swing state or a big state in general. got this sort of ridiculous platform. It was a mainstream candidate in the sense that mainstream media took him seriously because they'd been covering him as a potential candidate,

you know, for so long even before he got in. And because, you know, we're accustomed to treating big state governors as candidates, I mean, as, you know, potential candidates. And he got in and he wasn't much of one, you know. we can weigh him against the whatever Scott Walker or whoever else in the past that just like came out Yeah Rick Perry

Guy guys from big states He came out with a A bunch of noise And and just fell absolutely flat on their face But uh I'll leave that the historians This guy was I mean I think what was most frightening about him

Well there's a lot of frightening things But one of the things that was the most frightening about him Was that he was so clearly not qualified for the job It seemed implausible that anybody would possibly vote for him. And the, you know, the scary part was it felt like after, you know, we just don't know anything. We don't know which way is up after Trump. So maybe they might, you know, he was trying to out Trump Trump. And we saw exactly how far that got him. Maybe the lesson here is that Trump's one of one, you know, and no one's going to gain a lot

by trying to be the next 10. I would say that he is the ultimate victim of the media in another way, a very much more basic way, which is that when people saw him speaking on TV, they didn't like him. Yeah. We, we do not like you. You do not connect with us. And, you know, you and I can talk about all the theories about, you know, is it possible to run to Trump's right? After Trump's indictments, was it possible for, you know, for a candidate to really hook on anything and win a Republican nomination? Probably not. But people didn't like Ron DeSantis when they saw it. Also, interestingly, he was the candidate of conservative media. Yeah. Remember there a rally around Ron DeSantis over at Fox News?

in late 2022 when it looked like Trump was really on the ropes. One more report for you, which is that Max Tanny over at Semaphore

reports that there is no Trump bump for media. Remember the Trump bump is what filled everyone's coffers to use an only in journalism word.

Traffic to political coverage on digital news sites is down compared to 2020 and 2016 Taney reports. Television ratings for the Iowa caucuses were terrible.

So we will keep an eye on that. I wanted to talk to you quickly about Pitchfork. Please, yeah. Founded in 1996, Kande Nast now says it is going to exist under the ages of GQ. Pitchfork's editor-in-chief Poush, Patel, is out, according to reports. Any thoughts on Pitchfork? Well, I mean, it wasn't the biggest pitchfork connoisseur, at least especially compared to a lot of our contemporaries.

But an incredible list of great writers got their starts there. careers there. And more importantly, we're an even bigger number were influenced by the writing that was done there. Contra, the Sports Illustrated discussion we had before, is pitchfork was a creation of the internet,

you know, and was some, but similarly, she could have had a really long life and could have had a life forever on the internet. It felt like, you know, music reviews seems like a pretty straightforward path. but just incredibly sad to see that one go. I mean, now I guess they're being absorbed into GQ,

which is not, you know, definitionally not a death, but certainly will mean a different form of life. We really need to have a new word to talk about media death now because on the one hand, we have what I was talking about, the L.A. Times, the whole extinction event kind of talk. You know, this is it. this is the big one. And then we have all these changes,

moves, semi-deaths that result in something being called pitchfork, something being called Sports Illustrated, limping along. Yeah. It's really hard to get your mind around it. Totally true. Good piece by Casey Newton and Platformer about pitchfork.

He talks about, too, that a lot of what pitchfork was hurt by was changes in not just the way we pay for news and the way, you know, and internet ad rates and those kind of things, but the way the sort of media change in a broader sense. He talks about Spotify, right? He said before Spotify came along, a lot of what the way you interfaced with music was,

should I buy this album or should I not buy this album? Yep. All of a sudden you have a subscription and you say, guess what? I can listen to all the albums. Yep. so a site like pitchfork becomes less essential maybe he also says you know the power of personalized playlists some of which are powered by AI same kind of thing right it's not that there is no role for a

curator or historian of music and then pitchfork certainly you know perform some of those duties but you've got an AI that's really really good saying i think you'll like this song i also think you like this song. And guess what? I've got a million of these, right? I can keep going as deep as you want. Yeah, you're right. I think the first point is really salient. I mean, it used to be relied on people to tell you what you thought, you know, to give you advice on what to buy, and now you can make your own decisions, you know, I can listen to 15 seconds of every song that comes on my radar, and I can figure out if I like it or not. Ezra Klein also has a good column in the New York Times, talking about something he calls winner take more theory of media, which is that right now. Right

we've got the New York Times at the top of the heap, right? They keep getting bigger. They somehow keep getting more successful. They keep adding subscribers. Then at the bottom end, you've got substack. It is easier than ever to be, as Klein explains, a blogger, what we used to know as a blogger, you become a newsletter writer, and you can figure out a way to make a living of that. But in the middle of those things, you just wipe out a whole category of media, which includes

almost every other newspaper or most other newspapers, right? medium-sized websites it's just very very hard to live in that middle right now which is a real strange part of the age we find ourselves living in got some only in journalism for you david from the unlikely source of donald trump nice he was talking about nicky haley and why he wasn't going to pick her as his running mate here is donald trump with some words you usually hear an old-timey political call now you can go you can go and you can say certain things, you know, I don't like them and blah, blah, but when you say certain things, it sort of takes them out of play, right? I can't say, she's not of the timber to be

and then say, ladies and gentlemen, I'm proud to her now, so I pick, do you understand? But that's the way it is, okay. Presidential timber, definitely on our only in journalism list. I also saw this in semifor. any hotel in an early primary or caucus state is inevitably the quote-unquote nerve center of the media. We never talk about actual nerve centers. We only talk about hotels or cities or buildings that could be the nerve center of media. Yes, absolutely true.

All right. Speaking of nerve centers, it's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline. Yeah. Last week's headline, atop an old review of the extraterrestrial sitcom Alf, was Alien Laugh Form. Alien Laugh Form. Today's headline comes to us from alert listener Michael Romero. Thank you, Michael.

It's from the New York Times, David. It is about a new memoir by Crystal Hefner. Oh, yeah. She is a former Playboy model. And according to the headline, the third and last wife, of Hugh Hefner. Mm-hmm. Okay?

This is a more serious memoir than perhaps you would expect, or more serious than, you know, you could imagine from this particular genre. I'll leave you with that. What was the New York Times 's strained pun headline?

Like a deeper, thoughtful, it's got to be something with Bunny, right? Yeah, Bunny is definitely the phrase that pays here. It's deeper, it's more, it's more introspective. No more, no more bunny business. No more bunny business.

All right, there we go. No more bunny business. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Brian Waters. Come back here Thursday for Pressbox's final edition, where we will be discussing some of the stuff we saw on cable television Tuesday night with our guest.

He's your friend, David. He's my friend. He is Chris Sullentrop. Yeah. The politics editor for opinions at the Washington Post and also a Kansas City Chiefs fan. He might be insufferable on Thursday, but we will love him all the same. And then Shoemaker and I return Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then, David. See you later, Brian.