The Press Box - The Year in Media: From Elon Musk to ESPN and Taylor Swift to Michael Lewis

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

For the ‘Press Box’: Final Edition, Bryan and David hand out some year-end awards! They cover many categories, including the Media Company Makeover of the Year (4:20), the Erratic Executive of the Year(15:01), and the Newsroom Intruder of the Year (40:23). Then, they close the show with one final strained pun of 2023 (1:03:09). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up everybody? It's Austin Rivers from Offguard, and I've got some exciting news. Offguard hosted by me and my guy Pasha Gigi is officially moving to our own podcast feed. We are now dropping two shows every week. Me and Pasha go way back and talk so much hoops already that we figured it was time to fire up the mics and let you in on these conversations. Every week, Pasha and myself will hit on the biggest stories happening around the league. Tap into the show twice a week on our new Offguard feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. David? Yes.

As I put together this year-end podcast, I was looking up what we were talking about in January. Do you want to hazard a guess as to what the two big press box topics were in January? January. Let's see. Not Donald Trump. Not Taylor Swift. Probably also Donald Trump? No, the answer turns out to me, Damar Hamlin.

and Prince Harry. Oh, yeah. That was 2023. Hard as it seems to believe. I still stand by my take from then that Prince Harry's book, Spare, or J.R. Mortimer's book Spare, maybe more to the point. It was fantastic. Yeah.

Best book I read this year. Now, folks, that's a short list of things I actually completed that were new and newsworthy. Mm-hmm. But I found the criticism so funny. People are like, well, you know, he comes off as so privileged. He's a prince. Yeah. Kind of part of what you expect in a prince's memoir, but it was so good.

It would seem really disingenuous from to not seem privileged. Yes. Like no, there was no amount of, of therapy or just general self-change that one could go through in a lifetime to make for a prince to stop becoming privileged right yes yes he could go be a monk he'd go live in a monastery for 40 years and come out and he would if he wrote his memoir he would he would still probably sound just shockingly privileged and all the british paparazzi would be sitting there outside the monastery yeah waiting to get the first picture when he emerged coming up on today's show what a year it was from elon musk to ESPN from taylor swift to michael lewis we relive it all

on the press box, a part of the ringer, podcast network. And goodbye, media consumers. Welcome to our last press box episode of 2023. Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Brian Waters here. Before we get going, David, we had a prodigal son update via listener David Hansen. Uh-huh. Sent us a tweet that was comparing a photo of John Morant returning to the Grizzlies with the painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son by Scy.

Simon DeVos, not sure if John Morant qualifies as a true prodigal son in the way media uses the term. Okay, David Chewmaker, official religion correspondent of the press box, will allow it. Thank you, David, for sending that end to us. All right, David, your end media awards. Okay. You might read some of these on other sites. Mm-hmm.

These are not like year-in movie awards, where you can have an argument about, Did you like May December better or Killers of the Flower Moon? I'm sorry. I watch these people all the time. It is impossible to tell whether Joe Buck or Chris Fowler had a better year. Whether Joel Klatte or Dan Orlovsky was the best football pun to the year. I have no idea who was better in that sense of the word.

And of course, people like when they or their friends win those awards. There's a little bit of a conspiracy of silence. So I present to you the only true year-end media awards. Always trust content here at the press box. And I think I have 19 of these for you. What a nice round number that is. Number one, media company makeover of the year. Goes to ESPN.

Oh, okay. Speaking of this happened in 2023, there were ESPN layoffs this summer. Probably easy to forget that the company lost Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson, Susie Colbert, Jalen Rose, Max Kellerman, Todd McShay, Neil Everett, David Pollock, and on and on and on.

Such a fascinating story because it really did mark a moment, I think, for the end of ESPN's ambitions. You could almost draw a line between, the John Skipper era when somewhat surprisingly David Shoemaker and Brian Curtis worked for ESPN when ESPN was

feasting off the cable bundle and could afford to handle hire a couple of hacks like us and this ESPN which is seeing the cable bundle shrinking and not only has cut staff but has what would you say

taking its ambitions and change them in a lot of ways. And I think outside of showing lots of big games, which they still have, and shrunk them in a number of ways. Yeah, I mean, it's a very different company. It looks the same, you know. Sort of like you go to the ESPN.com homepage,

and you're like, yeah, this site looks exactly the same as it did 15 years ago. And yet, it's not exactly the same. The literal corners are a little bit more rounded. The whole thing is a little bit more, kind of tile-based. It has modernized itself sort of sneakily, and while still giving the sheen of being the same old machine

that it's always been. I think that's sort of the direction the company's going, right? I mean, they're trying to figure out their place in this. Now, listen, the layoffs, some of these layouts are just sort of mind-boggling, as we've discussed at the time, and I think financially they're just in an impossible position. You know, they make money but are so fine, impossible to exhibit any real growth because they are,

the whole company overall isn't growing like it used to. You know, I mean, they're, they're tethered to cable television. So, yeah, I mean, it's been, it's, it was a rough start, but they may be moving in the right direction. direction. When you say the website, I still remember the day that the Live PGA story went down. And there was a time where maybe they had a little bit of a newser up there, but mainly they had Stephen A. Smith a video saying, I don't think this is the worst thing in the world.

Like that was ESPN's response to LivePGA. Oh, wow. Different world. All right. Number two, David. and a related award hiring that tells us the most about where a media company is headed. Oh. Goes to ESPN and Pat McAfee.

Yeah. He signed there in May before one of the early rounds of the layoffs. They already had Joe and Troy. They had re-uped and further empowered Woge and Schefter and Stephen A. It was so interesting because if we take people, you would call talent, ESPN was building around fewer of them. But the people they had chosen to build around are now more powerful than any stars in the history of ESPN. Oh, for sure. More money. They can get away with more, let us say. I mean, it's just so funny to look back and think of like

Chris Berman at his NFL prime time apex. Dan Patrick and Keith Oberman in sports so straight. Like the whole complaint from them whenever you read one of those. Who do you think the most famous people in the in the nonmodern era of ESPN were? I mean, those three you mentioned. I guess the PTI guys. Sure. And was there anybody?

Dick Vital's probably on that list somewhere. Sure. Yeah. Stu Scott. Mm-hmm. But almost to a man, maybe Dickie V didn't suffer from quite as much, but you look, and whenever there's a history of it, they're complaining that they couldn't do what they wanted to do. But somebody was like, please say fewer those funny catchphrases

on SportsCenter. Now that's just unimaginable. Stephen A tweets about Chris Christie and the tweet's still up. Donate to this campaign. What? That's okay. I think I jokingly called this the announcer empowerment era at one point. It's really true. It really is true. Now, with McAfee specifically, and I always love talking McAfee with you because it's one place where our worlds

completely merge. Sure. You get a lot of stuff, right? You get Aaron Rogers' public health decrees. You get McAfee going to Twitter X one day and saying, you know, I haven't decided whether I'm coming back to college game day next year. Yeah.

It would have been an interesting day in the ESPN executive offices. But at the same time, I think a lot of people get hung up on his affect where the fact that he is not wearing sleeves when he was on the air and they miss the massive and maybe purposefully hidden intelligence

that that show has. I mean, think of the clips you see online every day from that show and from the Dan Lebitard gang. What are you going to click on? what do you think is going to just take off as a Twitter clip when you see those offerings

put out on Twitter all the time. Again, I don't think Dan Lepard trying to be back for you. I'm not saying that, but just take a look at that sometime on social media. No, everything's very deliberate. I mean, the sleeves.

Everything's very well considered. And not that anybody in this business, not that most people who achieved a lot were really handed anything. McAfee obviously started at some sort of head start coming out of the NFL.

But, you know, he built all this and got to give him credit for everything that he's done. You know, listen, we all thank our lucky stars every day that we're able to make money talking about stuff that we like and love, right? I mean, he's doing it on a whole other level.

Award number three, corporate deal it tells you most about where a media company is headed and where we're all headed. It was that August deal ESPN made with Penn Entertainment. Penn had been in business with Barstool. And then they traded that for ESPN. And their sports book became ESPN bet. Yep. That was really, okay.

Oh, now it really is all about gambling or will soon every inch of it will all be. about gambling in every form. ESPN, which had to be so coy about those little references. They're going to win big. They're going to win big. Lee Corso used to say, now point spread runs right up there

and you know exactly where to bet inside the same company. All right, award number four for you. This is kind of a weird one. It's the SportsCaster profile anecdote of the year. Oh, great. You're writing about a sportscaster, David,

and you can point this out truthfully. You should point out that a man on TV has a funny diet. Which one are we talking about? Well, there's a couple. Matthew Roberson just wrote a profile of Dan Orlovsky for GQ. I'll read you some of this. I love dinner, Orlovsky admits, but when he does, as with most other public aspects of his life, he does it in a manner all his own. I usually eat just grilled chicken with ketchup or something he reveals. My thing is, if I know I like this, why would I get something I don't like? I don't know I like. Excuse me.

This follows several news cycles about Al Michaels not eating vegetables. Oh, my God. I don't know if you're watching that Black Friday game, but David Chang, friend of the ringer sent up these just beautiful looking sandwiches to the booth for Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstree and this was Al's response on the air.

That's another thing. I worked seven years with John Madden and we had through ducking. Oh, yeah. I might have to duck this. I don't know. You tell me what's in here. I don't know. I don't know if there's any green in there for you. Yeah, there's a lot of green in there. Oh, come on. Get out of, get out of town. David, thank you, sort of. Oh, my gosh. Did you see the Michael Kay, New York area sports radio, Demi God ate his first egg on his vacation? So that's another one. So we got, he said he never had

eggs his entire life. So we got Dan Orlovsky. His first experience was eating an egg white and bacon omelet at at whatever hotel that he was at. And he said it was gross. And it confirmed that he had been right to skip eggs all these years. He didn't like it. He didn't like eggs. Not allergic eggs, but I don't like eggs. I've never tried. No, he's never had an egg. Yeah. It's great. So we got Orlovsky. We got Al Michaels. We got Michael Kay. And I believe the late great Dan Jenkins was the original one of these. He said, I only eat the brown and white. meaning only brown or white food. I don't eat anything green.

Like rice, potatoes, meats. Gravy. Cream gravy, chicken fried steak. Weirdly, a lot of people from that generation just opted out of vegetables. Maybe that's why your parents were so adamant that we eat our vegetables. They just didn't want us to turn out like one of these.

We only hear about a really successful dudes. I don't know. Don't wind up like that sportscaster doing Thursday on football. Maybe no vegetables is the way to go. I don't know. Maybe. I have to change. I'm going to rethink my parenting style.

And if you're profiling one of these people, David, it's definitely the way to go. Right up top. Right. You can. Award number five, erratic media executive of the year, I inform one to inform you that Elon Musk has won this one in a runaway. Oh, man. They have to name it after him now.

A retire his jersey. He won't wear the other. It's going to be like the in-season tournament award where we do put up a banner. for this over at X headquarters in San Francisco. Here's a small and incomplete list of things Elon Musk has done in the last calendar year. Suspended journalists for quote-unquote doxing him. Remember that one? He took away our news headlines.

He throttled a verb I learned, at least in its tech context in 2023. Access to media outlets like the New York Times. Put a label on NPR's account that briefly called it U.S. state affiliated media. Yeah. Screwed with substack links, brought Trump and Alex Jones back to Twitter, tweeted many offensive things himself,

and treated America to the deadpan comedy of Twitter CEO Linda Yakorino. There was an old story predating Elon about whether Twitter was going to sustain journalism for very much longer, in fact, or maybe it had, it wasn't already. There was a newer story, I think, this year, about whether Twitter would continue

to be the place that journalists would hang out. yeah to which we would say kind of sort of sure right but i was the other day i was trying to retweet somebody as something somebody did and i realized oh they're not on here anymore i can repost this on threads yeah but they like a lot of people have vacated the scene largely because of elin musk you know we just hang out at the local soda shop now Happy Day style. Just go get a, get a malted. See all of our friends and the fry cook we know and love.

If there were a restaurant slash bar where that were, where all the journalists hung out. Okay. How often would you go? Say, say every day, a couple times a month or never, are your three options?

let me answer this by saying by talking about my experience on threads i got on i wasn't following anybody i think it auto followed some people that i followed on instagram and i got on there was like wow brand new world start from scratch and then i started reading threads puzzle like uh him again i think my answer for the uh journalist restaurants probably once a year you know on special occasions yeah the christmas party yeah journalists are the most wonderful and annoying people in world to hang out with. I mean, this is, this is what it is, right? I love them. It's like hanging out with yourself, you know?

It is in many ways. Kind of like being on a media podcast. Award number six, David, interview of the year that tells you about the possibilities of sideline reporting. Talks a lot about Carissa Thompson about what she admitted and then retracted about her

adventures on the sidelines. This was this week on Monday night football. Seahawks against the Eagles, Drew Locke's quarterback through to extremely improbable passes on the Seahawks game winning drive. It's raining out there in Seattle. He puts on his post-game baseball cap like the quarterbacks like to do and listen to him talking to Lisa Salt.

It takes a special group to rally around a guy that, you know, it's coming into a second game of the year, right? used to the same thing all year long, same cadence, same spin of the ball, everything. A team like that, not just the offense, the defense to rally around me tonight, man, that was amazing. I hear some emotion in your voice. It's been a long time. It's been a long time. I'm just blessed.

I'm just blessed. Bless with a great group of guys, a great city, great coaching staff. It's just, it's awesome. it's a while. Drew, when did you even know you were going to be playing tonight?

It's a terrific interview and it went on from there and you've seen that little clip we have Lisa Salter's just being like this guy in front of me unlike 99% of the football players the interview

is actually emotional right now. This is a huge deal to him. Yeah. So I'm going to listen to him and rather than go to the prescripted question number three, I'm just going to stop on this emotional moment for a second.

Yep. Mm-hmm. Like if you did a transcript of the question she asked that would not appear in the Columbia journalism school How to ask a sideline question, but it was the right question It was You just stopped and got another beat out of that, right? Just let him tell you what he's feeling in this moment

It was so good Yeah, really good When you find when you're in the place You just either back off or find a way to stay in that place You know and she did a great job of that. Yeah, it also, it also just made me think that, you know, sideline reporting, part of it is absolutely the skill of the reporter, the person asking the questions. You know, this is why when I'm, you know, making those snarky tweets two minutes after a football game ends, because I'm like, really, you had all this time to prepare and this is the question you asked. And there is, you can really, when you see Lisa Salders, when you see Aaron Andrews, when you see some of Tracy Wolves and some of the real pros who do it, you can see.

see how much work they put into it. You can see how much they care about making those moments count. But the other huge part of it is sometimes in this business, you can be really, really good. And if the athlete doesn't want to meet you at the 50 yard line, metaphorically speaking, because I think they kind of have to meet you at the 50 yard lane after the game. But if they don't want to go there emotionally, the interview is what it is, right? You've had people, on the podcast and they're like, I am going to be on the David Shoemaker podcast. But this is what you're going to get today. You know?

And you could be at your absolute best. That is way. So a lot of times it just is a matter of getting that athlete who wants to make that moment really cool. Oh, yeah. No, you definitely have to, I mean, definitely have to have their buy-in, right? Otherwise, most of these, I mean, you'd rather see stuttering John out there than most of the folks, right?

Somebody with free package gimmick questions could probably get, if the effort is to get a real reaction, right? You'd probably have, without some buy-in and without some real mastery of the sideline journalism techniques. He'd probably be better off just going,

this is Brian Curtis with NBC Sports. Hey, what the fuck's your problem? Just start every question that way. One way or the other, you get a real reaction one way or the other. What's sad is from time to time we actually get the stuttering John aesthetic, though, not on purpose. Yeah, yeah. You're right.

After that game. Award number seven for you, a story of the year that became depressingly apparent to the people who cover it, we are almost certainly, David, going to get a Donald Trump Joe Biden rematch in 2024. Mm-hmm. That a couple of interesting New Hampshire polls over the last week, which is really the first time in nine months, we've had a horse race. Yeah. I've been interested in this just purely through the lens of the ambition of political

reporters. They only get so many of these in their lifetime. And sometimes the hand of fate tells you, oh, you're not going to get 2016 or maybe 2008 because it had a really great and fascinating primary season. you're going to get an election where the polls just don't move for a long time. It's true. It's true. I mean, from the very beginning, this whole thing felt like a foregone conclusion.

And yet, it also seemed just so improbable at the same time, you know, in the abstract. So I think people were open to the, that anything's possible mindset. I mean, there's also so much that played against our sort of norm. right? I mean, the candidate not being on the debate stage, not, you know, whatever, just very basic things. And so it was, you know, kind of hard to conceptualize or hard to rationalize the thing that was so plainly inevitable. But, you know, now here we are. Of course, if we see what Nikki Haley can do out there, Anne. See if she can win New Hampshire, no. And then boy, if she does do, the content gates will just

be opened and will we all go into South Carolina can Nikki Haley win in her home state? Yeah. Can she stop the dollar? No, she cannot. No, she cannot. But we don't think. Guaranteed predictions here by David and Brian.

I was too interested in how the whole idea of a non-horse race covered the effect of the coverage of the election. Semaphores Ben Smith posted this on threads as it, as it happened the other day. He said, the shift away from horse race reporting, which I've encouraged, has actually helped contribute to this idea that Trump is inevitable, and the primary isn't worth covering.

That's always the frontrunner's line, but reporters should take the primary seriously. You don't want to be tricked into making someone inevitable. So two cheers for the horse race. This is the idea he was throwing out. So which my response was, there's a little chicken and the egg thing here, right? because is it reporters running away from horse race journalism or are they looking at the polls

and saying one guy is clobbering everybody else? Yeah. And so why are we covering this like a horse race if there is in fact nothing for us? There's not even like, there weren't even that many shock polls again until the last couple of weeks where you could be like, uh-oh, Trump vulnerable? Yeah. I mean, listen, Ben Smith doesn't necessarily say that they've successfully turned the corner on horse race journalism. It's just he wishes there was less of it and there is less of it.

I think you're right. I think it's more of a matter of practicality. And it's also, like I said, I mean, it does kind of feel like anything could happen, right? If it's not, if Trump is not the nominee, then there's a giant story waiting to be written that we cannot predict at this point, right? So you're sort of, on some level, you go through the motions, right? You cover the other candidates because there's, you know, no one knows what plan B is. But, you know, I think that once this thing gets back to Biden and Trump, I think, you know, my old Kentucky home is going to start playing all over again, right?

The horses will be shooting out of the panic. Especially if Trump is adided, which is also, or excuse me, convicted, he's already been indicted. That's another one. right like before we have cried too many tears for the campaign reporters who drew 2024 out of the you know lottery lottery ball the former president of the united states is going to be on trial next year we think and that could be an absolute spectacle of a story and create what you're talking about that unpredictability

and also i mean if he gets convicted of anything he will if he's not already he will definitely be the all to have be the all time leader in and descriptor after the first comma in every lead you know former president Donald Donald j trump comma former president who is indicted on multiple charges of of inciting an insurrection stemming back to january 6th during the waning days of his presidency comma you're right here be a lot of comma phrases not just in battle, but actually convicted in that case. No.

All right, three related awards for you. Number eight is our media come up into the year. Love it. We'd love to give it to Fox News. Back in April, settled the lawsuit with Dominion voting systems, which their personalities had, shall we say, tweaked on the air. For $787 million, this was just as a... trial was about to begin.

But of course, in the media, we have gotten all this discovery telling us about how Fox News really works, perhaps confirming things we thought, and then in many cases, even going further than what we thought.

And speaking of which, David, the word number nine is specific media personality come up into the year, which goes to Tucker Carlson. Who? Whose work you might have read and some of those news stories

that came out before the trial. Then he was fired in April shortly after the settlement went down. When he got ousted, I feel everybody was doing the Obi-Kinobi or Obi-1-Kinobi thing, excuse me. Is he about to become more powerful

than you can possibly imagine being outside of Fox News even though we'd seen the Bill O'Reilly's of the world and people like that kind of you know, vanish into the ether after being unplugged for Fox? Where do we stand on that question now that we've had five months of Tucker outside of Fox?

I think, well, this is an interesting time to ask, right? Because he's just announced his new network. Is that correct? Is that the right word? I think that's what it is. I mean, it's interesting. I think that you can tell almost all you need to know by the name of the network,

which is the Tucker Carlson Network, I believe that's correct, right? But like we're in a, I feel like if this had been, I mean, look, how long ago was it that Glenn Beck left Fox News? Is that 15 years ago now, 10 years ago now?

Sure. The point, he's on this list, but the point being, he founded his own thing called The Blaze. It was a TV show, I mean, TV network, sort of. It was a website, whatever, but this isn't about branding something

that could simply live on past the person. This shows the power of, not just tuck across it, but the power of the of the high-que rated pundit in this era, right? I mean, that you can just build an entire network off of your name. And it's not just right wing and it's not just politics. We see this over and over and over again. And I think for him, it was, I'm sure that he's can, has told himself probably justifiably that this is a blessing in disguise, right?

Because he's got, now he has all this opportunity. And he's got, and he's, and he's, rather than being. the sort of guy pushing the boundaries at Fox News, you know, trying to come off as a reactionary guy, but pretending that he's not for the sake of keeping his job or just the hilarity of the wink, wink. Now he can still be all that, but he's defined as being the guy who is, you know, too raw for Fox News, right? Too much for Fox to handle. And that is more valuable than any political stance. I think that we're going to see a lot more

people staking their own claim even as much as it's been going on. I think we're going to see a lot more of that next year. It's interesting to me because I believe he can go make money doing that. He will have a living for the rest of his life in whatever form that Tucker Carlson show takes. I do wonder if he can be influential

in the way he was when he was part of Fox's prime time lineup. I think that's a huge question, obviously. And maybe the arc for him and the arc for other people like in the future is more of the MacAfee arc, right? You go out, you start your own thing, you become successful enough that some major media entity wants to bring you in, in his case, bring you back in, right? And then you take their giant check just for the security and the whatever that it brings.

And then, you cycle out five years later. Semi-related, David. we have apparent media chieftain retirement of the year. It goes to Rupert Murdoch. Back in September, he stepped down as the chairman of Fox and News Corp. And speaking of comma phrases, every time you see this being written about, even now, people say that he has apparently relinquished control

that Lachlan Murdoch is in control. What does it apparently mean? Well, he formally did it, but we don't know behind the scenes. But isn't that the opposite of apparently? Oh. Like if we have an indication that he is not actually relinquish control, isn't that what's apparent?

Not the... It's a good question. We have to untangle that one in 2024. Okay. We can push pause on that. Number 11, is story of the year we should have covered more on the press box. A little bit of self-criticism.

Here it is. The story of Wall Street Journal Reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been in custody in Russia now for more than 250 days for the crime of practicing independent journalism in a country run by a regime that does not want independent journalism. We will do more about that. You have my word on it in 2024, and the Wall Street Journal does such a wonderful job of keeping

Evans' story and what's going on and his career and who he is at the top of everybody's social media feeds. Evan's a Princeton high school grad. My son and his soccer team dedicated their season to him.

We definitely should have talked about him more. And I look forward to talking about it. I saw somebody today suggest that Russia on Twitter and somebody, you know, some Twitter personality of note. So apologies for not saying who it is. But somebody suggested that Russia is going to hold them until they have the opportunity to swap him for Julia and Assange. That that's just what they're just sort of building up like hostage swap equity. Okay.

Who knows where that's going to go. But I think this will continue to be a bigger and bigger story regardless into the beginning of next year. All right. Next up, David, is number 12 best-selling journalists that got scuffed up of the year. It goes to Michael Lewis. Oh, yeah. And like the Dune movie, the scuffing up happened in two parts. First happened when Michael Orr, who was the subject of Lewis's book, The Blindside, came out with some information about the Tui family, or at least some allegations about the Tui family.

I felt at the time and still feel now that nobody really cinched that case home for me because they were talking about the blind side the movie as much as they were talking about the blind side the book as Lewis wrote it. Then came Lewis's book about Sam Bankman Free which did get some reviews

because there were a lot of people who had written about SBF who felt that Lewis was too easy on him or was looking for something that was looking for kind of a profile of somebody who was you know, a typical Lewis apostate troublemaker type.

Yeah. Rather than somebody who was now a convicted, do your own comma phrase here, right? So what did you make of the whole Michael Lewis dialogue? That's the word for it over this year. Well, there's, these two things are not on their face. They don't really go together, right? I mean, the Sam Bingman-Free thing is, I think, but most journalists,

most journalists commentators spent the most time on and justifiably so, although there's a sort of unknowable aspect to that, to this conversation, debate, whatever.

I think that that there is a, inside the media, and in the public, a real allure to the sort of counter history, and I think that's what he was presenting counter history

in real time, right? Right as this guy was, you know, as the government was filing charges, he was being brought into custody. It seemed like the entire world was just like, you know, see you later, dude. No one's going to miss you. Here comes Michael Lewis to be like,

but what if everything's not as it seems? And everybody was just like, oh, wait, okay. And I think that people inside the media were very interesting. It is to let him tell that story. Also, it's Michael Lewis, so you're very interested to have him tell any story in front of you, right?

I mean, these, that's such great, success. You know, there's a period where it would be just like, you know, 60 minutes would be happy to have like Seymour Hirsch come on and talk about his fishing game or whatever. You know, it's just like, this is a journalist of some renown unless he wants to talk. Okay. But it sort of ended with the fizzle, right? I mean, I don't even think anybody was interviewing him by the time that the verdict actually

came down. The trial really swung into motion. I just think, I don't think there was any real appetite despite the counter history aspect of it. I think that the cycle was, you know, he was out there and people were paying attention and stuff. But I think that like, you know, a month later, it just feels like it was all, it just sort of a flash in the pan. Yeah. I mean, there was definitely a, I think in a way, SBF, it was considered a settled issue, right?

Mm-hmm. So that probably took some of it. I just remember going, I went to the Burbank airport here, which is, you know, they're the only place to fly when you're in Los Angeles is through the Burbank Airport. So you avoid L-A-X. And it was just at the beginning. when Going Infinite had come out and Lewis was starting to get some tough reviews and tough profiles

and I walked into the airport bookstore and this is not like one of those oh wow it's a secretly great airport bookstore this is just an airport bookstore and they had an entire shelf up of Michael Lewis books nine different titles

including Going Infinite and it said spend $25 on Michael Lewis books and get a free tote bag really purchase it separately, the toadbag apparently, for $14.95. Huh. What did you choose? I chose the tote bag that said, I'm laughing all the way to the bank. Well, you write nasty reviews to me.

By the way, I think if we gave Michael Lewis truth serum, we said, would you want to write a book that got 100% great reviews? Like some of his recent ones have that have not been quite as big, you know, that were really, really well reviewed. You know, nobody had a thing bad to say about it. Or would you rather write Going Infinite, which became a little bit of a, you know, target for everybody, but was right in the middle of the news cycle

and put you right on the top of everyone's minds? I think Michael Lewis would take door to number two. Yeah. I think the combination of that, by the way. I mean, do you think that the combination, though, of those two things, very different circumstances or whatever, but do you think that they,

combine to tarnish Lewis's reputation in any significant lasting way? No, not really. I mean, I think I think there are people who are like us who work in journalism who either really loved Michael Lewis who had maybe a less complicated view of him or just, you know, thought something like this all along and we'll point, you know, we'll bring out that data point whenever he writes another book. Uh-huh. But I don't, think for the general book buying public, I don't think the name Michael Lewis means anything different to them. Yeah. Then it did six or eight months ago. I really don't. It's like, oh, that's a guy wrote Moneyball. I can't wait to read his next book. Award number 13, David,

Newsroom Intruder of the Year. It's an Elon-style runaway. I give it to AI. Oh, God, yeah. Yes, artificial intelligence. We had the absolutely awful and comical examples with AI writing that terrible high school football article from the Midwest. Remember the close encounter of the athletic kind? Yep. When it kept going to the joke, we also had AI apparently writing a obituary for a basketball player. And the headline was Brandon Hunter useless at 42. That was the touch they decided to add.

had to an obituary of somebody who had died young. My God. I saw the other day that Zach Seward became the New York Times' editorial director of AI initiatives. Uh-huh. So this is not a matter of AI is going to be pushed out of the newsroom and, you know, it's gone. Thank goodness we won.

No, no, no. It's even in the best and most ethical examples, it's how can we use AI? Sure. Well, I mean, that's rational, that's realist, though. I think so, yeah. To go, you know, but the question, of course, then becomes, what are you doing with it, you know? And it will be fascinating, I think,

as we stand on this, at this moment in journalism, where we're like, is journalism going to keep existing as we know it in five to 10 years? Mm-hmm. How much of what would be our labor, even if it often feels very cut and paste, will actually become AI generated. especially for quick news stories, right?

Newser type things. Then even again, and let's take the ethical example here, a human comes in and then, you know, changes up, edits, rewrites, whatever it is. It just feels like that is, even if we're drawing a line right now, that's the future, that's the ethical future here. That's going to happen, you know.

Yeah, I think it's totally inevitable. I think that's, you know, if we looked at the way the journalism world was when we both got into it or when we graduated college or even some whatever magical point in between

the peak of blogs or something you know I mean like I think in that moment it would feel like a totally totally different world from where we started and in retrospect it feels largely the same and we spend so much time on this podcast talking about newspaper newsrooms

you know, and there's still a lot of old media that we talk about. AI has the ability to make the biggest, to signal the biggest difference, you know, bigger than any, almost just about any change since the internet. And yet, if handled responsibly, maybe it doesn't feel like that big of a shift at all compared to some other ones. Ward number 14, David, the useless talking heads of the year. I've got a tie here.

I was watching the, Michael, if you've seen this, Tom was that Michael Wolf, Tom Wolf documentary that's on Netflix. I've not seen it. Called Radical Wolf.

It's a reasonably good overview of his career. Uh-huh. And of course, they line up people like Gay Talese, so you want to talk about Tom Wolfe. And then you're treated to the talking head of Peter Thiel, who...

Weird. Not the first person I would go to or to tell me about long-form literary journalism. Yeah. But for reasons

other than perhaps he and Tom Wolfe's political affinities, he's in the documentary. Uh-huh. Then I was watching this Albert Brooks documentary on Max.

Uh-huh. It's really good. It's mostly Albert Brooks and Rob Reiner talking to each other, but then they bring in these, all these comedians.

They got Letterman, they got John Stewart, they got John Appetal, all these people they can tell you what it meant to watch Albert Brooks' 70s and 80s. And then Brian Williams somehow got into the lineup

and I'm like, am I interested in what Brian Williams thinks about comedy? Or is Brian Williams telling me? Is Brian Williams telling us that Albert Brooks is funny? Is that going to convince me? Okay, okay. One of the greatest comedic storytellers

of our lifetime. Sure was. It was. an interesting form of storytelling comedy. I'll say that back in Brian Williams's heyday. Award number 15, David, people who own the news cycle of the year. That didn't sound very grammatical,

but I'll plunge forward here. It's a tie. Coach Prime, aka Dion Sanders, who declared that all college football pregame shows would emanate from Boulder. Until it became clear Colorado was going to go four and eight. he tied with Taylor Swift

for obvious reasons. Yeah. And I wrote Time magazine, by the way, to get some, you want to hear some more numbers on the Taylor Swift time person of the year issue? Sure. Time says today we've sold

276,000 single copies with 27% being bundles of all three covers. Mm-hmm. Three different covers. Retailers have ordered 460,000 copies three times more than normal. Barnes and Noble sold more in three days than any issue from any publisher this year and likely, quote, in decades. I'll say new subscriptions sold with a guarantee of receiving the person of the year issue up 10 times over last year.

Well, can I just look at it? Can I just squint my eyes real hard and see some reassuring things inside of this? Sure. One, Barnes & Noble sold however many, how many copies, 500,000 copies or something? or they didn't say, but more than any, more than any issue than anything else. This legitimizes the fact that Barnes & Noble has just donated an eighth of every store to these giant magazine wrecks in an era where they probably weren't turning a huge profit, right? But the reason why Barnes & Noble sold a million copies is because every single person

who's been in a Barnes & Noble, when if they decide they want to buy a Taylor Swift magazine, they say, I know where there's magazines, Barnes & Noble, right? Yes. That thing I don't buy very much, I know where I can get it. Because there's, because there's six giant magazine bays in the front of every store. And I know that. So good for them for, you know, staying in the magazine business for so long, even when so many other people are getting out. Frankly, it doesn't shock me too much that retailers are buying more and more copies of this one because Taylor Swift's incredibly popular. Now everybody's talking about it, but two, I'm sure the magazine is selling really well, not just because of Taylor Swift, but because when you go to the drugstore or the grocery

store, every single magazine on the rack is like a mash tribute compendium. Or like looking back at, you know, madmen 10 years later. Like that's not, it's not a magazine. Of course, at this time a year, you know, we go back in the publication of Jesus Illustrated or whatever it comes out, the nativity explained. go to the CVS and find a magazine. But, and I say there's a, I say this is not as a knock at all,

besides Slam. Like, can you find, yes, you do. No, no, no, not as a knock to Slam, but can you find a magazine? And I don't even think Slam is there anymore. Now it's just like the illustrated NBA, the NBA 2023 season in pictures and graphs. You know, like it's like,

find me a magazine at the drugstore. So part of what time. The Royals, they should put numbers on it. Just to make you, just to give you, the pretense that you're picking up a magazine and not just like a bunch of web pages glued together.

That would be really reassuring, but there's they don't have magazines. Isn't it funny what bands they pick to you, walk in and it's just like, you know, like Leonard Skinnerd. And it's like, well, you have 90 pages. Like that's wild, you know? Or just like,

it's a resignment and garfunkel. And there's like, it's like, oh cool, photos I've never said. I'm sure these aren't in the internet. So weird, man. So Times Genius was A getting Taylor Swift. and be putting someone who is alive on the cover of their magazine. That's what the real accomplishment was here. Well, being a magazine, big a present tense magazine.

Yeah. Here's some news from the last couple of weeks. Our buddy Jason Gay sent this in. I want to ask you this too. Where would bidding go for a Taylor Swift memoir? Yes. Like if she did it now, would she break the all-time records? I think she would be number one ever she'd be.

the Obama's. Where do you think bidding starts for Taylor Swift's memoir, if she writes it right now, or agrees to the deal right now? I mean, obviously there's going to be some questions about what the contents of the book, what kind of book, what,

you know, how many pages is the book? I mean, these are the, like, kind of nuts and bolts things that we- Not a book of poetry. Right,

exactly. Right, eight figures, right? I think not a book of poetry is the real, I mean, that would sell a bunch of copies, too, but I think that's significant.

Eight figures. Easy. Don't you think? Yeah. Ten to $15 million. The Obama's got a combined $65 million. Is that correct? Yeah.

And that was for several books, though, if I'm not mistaken. Or multiple books from each one of them. I think Michelle's already written two. I mean, it's just incredibly valuable. Because they know, I mean. She gets $20 million for a memoirs? Penguin and Random House. House now being one mega company, obviously they made a lot of promises of not, of, you know,

having some division within. They could bid against themselves internally and so that it wouldn't, to avoid the monopoly charges. But this would definitely be one where, well, they're, you know, they might just, this might just be a check that comes from the, from the corporate office or whatever. you know, when they give out these advances without just getting really boring and in the weeds, most authors don't earn them out, right? Most authors don't ever sell enough copies to earn the amount of advance money they got based on a 12 to 15% royalty rate. But it's still worthwhile to the publisher because every dollar they make pays for a light bulb.

You know, like there's, like making money despite the outlay of cash the front end is still, it's still significant. And because you're making a dollar, even if only 15 of those cents is going to pay off the dollar, you know, the advance that you gave the author. A Taylor Swift, Millmore would buy a lot of light bulbs, man. I mean, it would just, like,

the downside is still so high. It would not shock me. I mean, I think the question is just, like, how much money can a book go for? The Obama thing was shocking at the time. I think we'd be shocked by that. I think if Taylor Swift was really, going to write a memoir.

And, you know, of course, said this was the only memoir I'm going to write, or this is the only memoir I'm going to write for 20 years or something. No, I mean, it could be 25 million, I think would be the starting number. I think it could go higher than that. 25 is where we start. Yeah. It would be, it would be so much money. What if she said, if you're a book, if you're a book publisher and you could just say, imagine,

imagine if you set up a site where people can buy the Taylor Swift thing direct. First of all, you're making a bunch of money. I don't even know if that's legal, but regardless. And every copy of the book just comes with a sheet of paper that recommends five other books for the breeders to buy. Imagine how much, how valuable that would be a loan to the publisher. That would be unbelievable. I mean, that would be, that would true. That's actually, by the way, a brilliant idea after you've paid the 25,

million because we need to you know like you said we're going to sell a bazillion copies of this book but we also want to make sure we're we're doing this and if taylor's what if just taylor can pick five books but taylor's book club your your catalog yeah that she really liked 50 million dollars just take my money now you say if she was going to write one member what if she says no no i'm now scarred or whatever his name was i have like 10 of these in me oh they all like 500 pages I think actually that's the trick. I think you want Taylor Swift to write less pages. I don't think it matters marginally that much,

but it would, I mean, it doesn't matter that much, but it would matter marginally. She wrote like 6188 page memoirs, because you could charge 30 bucks for each one, even no matter how many pages are there, you know? Which Barbara Streisand just did, by the way. This is 900 pages long, that book.

Really? I'm not kidding. There's a ceiling to how much you can charge, right? No one's going to pay $80. for a book, but, you know, you could, you can charge 28, 29, 95 for like a, you know, 280 page memoir, 100, 200 page memoir. If it's Taylor Swift, you know, big emboss type on the front, who's saying, no. Award number 16, David, executive who appeared the most times in Dylan Byers's

puck column. Once again, it's a runaway. Chris Licked is the winner. Chris Lick ran CNN. They didn't want any resistance programming creeping into his cable news network. And then in June he got fired. Truly one of those fascinating media stories,

one because it ended with a magazine profile by Tim Alberta. And just to tell you how action-packed this year has been, Tim Alberta already has a book out about something else, but this was why we were talking about, about Tim Alberta earlier this year, there were so many other strands in the story, you know, the whole idea of we have a cable news network here that profited greatly off resistance program.

Yeah. That was saying, you know, we are the network of truth. We are calling it down the middle. We are calling out Donald Trump's lies, but was clearly grouped like the New York Times and so many other news orgs as being part of the resistance, right? Watching CNN was an act of standing up to Trump. Yeah. Then Donald Trump leaves office, however grudgingly.

And Chris Lick feels what I think a lot of media executives there, which is this sheepishness about what has just happened, even though that was an incredibly profitable and time for a cable news network, which has the same problems we talked about ESPN earlier, right? Feasting off the cable bun. and figuring out how it's going to make money after that. Yeah. Also, the combined problem, we see the New York Times, the Washington Post now that had all those buyouts recently is, what do we do after Trump?

It set these incredible lofty goals, right? We became something other than just a publication. Yeah. So it was also CNN saying, how are we going to hit these numbers in the Biden era without the Trump bump? that so many magazines and or I should say websites and, you know, news channels benefited from. Yeah, I mean, the Housian journalism era of Trump really helped just about every news media outlet.

It also introduced this whole, you know, many generation of executives like Lick to sort of came up in the world. And, you know, no one in his position is ever going to say when offered the job. No, I think we're going to go back down to about 50% of where we are right now, right? You just set your eyes on bigger and better things, and you convince you that everybody around you and yourself that you can pull it off. And then it turns out that there are forces more powerful than hope.

Related, David. Award number 17 is the only in journalism word of the year. The winner for their 2023 is defenestration. Yeah. This became DeRiguer, only in journalism, for Meteorra. reporters, right? An executive may never be fired or forced out. They may only be defenestrated. And I noticed that Dylan Byers over at Puck snucked in one more under the wire when he was talking about that big James Bennett piece. He said, sure, after Hal Raines, I want you to listen to the sentence. after Hal Raines, the obstreperous and pedantic executive editor

was defenestrated in humiliation amid the Jason Blair scandal. It's like it only in journalism golden corral in that sentence. I feel like I'm in an SAT prep course with you in high school again. No sentence should have that many words that somebody needs a look up to read through. Did you like defenestrated in humiliation? Oh, yeah, fantastic.

It's good. It's helpful. It helps to find it in the context of the sentence. But if you're being thrown out a window, is it really relevant that you are also being humiliated at that point? Wouldn't the former kind of overwhelm the latter? I mean, given, I think by the time you hit the ground, you're not going to care anymore,

but you're not going to convince me that being thrown out of a window and being thrown out of a window naked is the same thing. I think that if you had to, if you got to pick, you'd probably pick keeping your pants on. Words to live by here in 2020. All right, award number 18, David, the continuing story of the year

that renders lots of other things we talk about on this podcast, moot. Media layoffs. Mm-hmm. They were at Spotify. They were at ESPN. Mm-hmm. They were just about everywhere.

It looks like the Washington Post has found enough people to take the buyouts to head them off. Though even when you find buyouts, that means you lose people like theater critic Peter Marks, who's leaving the paper. I'm not sure I've ever had a year in this business where I've been more confused about what the future looks like.

Yeah. You know, you know, I've been doing this for 20 years, 20 plus years. There was never a time in journalism or book publishing where people said, we have tons of great jobs. We have more.

than we could ever give away, the pay's fantastic, come on it. That never existed in our lifetime. But it is, I think, hard to explain how many things that were propping up, even that rickety ecosystem, have started to go away. You said, papers, you know, papers are diminished. But look, there's still, you know, sports sections. They still exist. And then you look at the sports, they barely exist.

they exist less than they did five, 10 years ago. Oh, well, there's ESPN.com. They stepped into the breach and hired people like Shoemaker and I. Ooh, ESPN.com, not in the written journalism business as much anymore. The athletic had layoffs this year. They were the thing. They were the arc of sports writers, right? That was going to carry us all out or at least preserve something we knew as sports right.

I don't know where it goes. goes from here. I really don't. And I always used to say when people, young people would ask me, I'm like, you know, I'm getting in this business. I'm terrified. I would say, well, you know, people like me and you, we've basically spent our entire career working full time at places that didn't exist when we were in high school. And in some cases didn't exist when we were in college at all. So the future is somewhat unknowable. Totally unknowable. But now I feel that unknowable quality is also a really terrifying quality. And even somebody like me was like,

of course these things are going to exist. Of course there will be a need and a place where you can find written journalism. I don't know what the answer is. I don't. And I don't say that anymore because I'm not sure there will be, at least in the form, anything like the form that we have it now. And this is in the reduced state from what it was a while back.

You always be able to find written journalism on the Tucker Carlson Network, Brian. The Tucker Carlson Network is our one hope at this point. It's kind of the new athletic if you think about it. Speaking of which, I'll in here, David. Number 19. The publication or television show that was golden-aged the most in 2023. Yeah. It's a three-way tie, I think, between the New York Times sports section,

Sports Illustrated and Real Sports. You know, nothing wrong with any of those publications, nothing wrong with taking a look back at a time when they were different entities than they were in 2023, but we don't have to do that obligatory sentence every time, right? The magazine of Frank DeFour. I have people are tired to be telling you that, But I'm just going to keep saying it until that comma phrase disappears from all media criticism.

Totally agree. Totally co-sign that. Do you want to do one more headline before we hit the road here for the end of the year? Go spend time with a train pun headline? A strain pun headline. Let's do it. It's time for the final edition of David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline of 2023. Yeah.

I almost said final edition there. I think people would have really, really been sad to lose their favorite feature. David, today's headline comes to us from Nell's McLaughlin. It's from the Buffalo News. Okay. Buffalo News.

We had something about otters the other day. This story was about beavers. Okay. Orchard Park grapples with beavers. I only know Orchard Park as the place where the Buffalo Bills play football. but apparently Orchard Park has had a beaver issue and specifically at issue, I want you to think of beavers who are in a no-win situation,

or maybe the town is in a no-win situation when it comes to the beavers. What was the Buffalo News' string pun headline? Is it damned if they do, damned if they don't? Ladies and gentlemen, 2023 has officially come to a close. Yeah. damned if they do, damned if they don't.

Orchard Park grapples with the beavers. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Brian Waters and also a salute to Erica Servantes who produced this show. So much this last year. We appreciate everything she did.

A couple of notes. Thanks to our listeners for hanging with us all year. We may not have any live events here at the press box, David. We may not have any breakout clips on social media, but we had a lot of fun on this podcast. We had a truly wild year of news. Looking back all the way to January, I was like, I cannot believe how many giant stories fell like a comet.

Oh my gosh. And landed on our little media podcast. I'd also like to say, happy birthday to my co-host. It's got a birthday coming up on New Year's Eve. always funny to see you with the New Year's Eve birthday back when we were living together. Yeah. So it'd be like Christmas. Never know what to do with that.

Christmas with our family. Then we'd come back and we reunite a couple of days later. And then it'd be like, oh, wow, these two holidays have joined forces. Well, now my youngest birthday is the next day too. So at least I'm used to all this stuff. He still doesn't understand. He's about turned five and it's the holiday season is still just like basically from Halloween on. It's just is the next thing tomorrow?

and then when Christmas hits, it's like, you know, we have various Christmases around town. Start on Christmas Eve, celebrating with other relatives. My dad's going to come into town by on the 27th. You know, by the time that he gets through that, and all of a sudden it's his birthday, then his birthday parties on the 30th, 29th, then his real birthday, then dad's, then my birthday.

Then he just thinks that the presents never stop coming, right? There's not, it's not about the holiday. It's just the never-ending stream of happy present days. So, you know, he'll probably be maladjusted. That's fine. Some people who have the birthday near Christmas always would complain about getting stiffed a little bit on the gifts. That they would not get too significant gifts. I don't remember you ever suffering from that.

No, because I would try. Very early reckons, I mean, I literally would get, my parents would give me for my birthday, like a Christmas present, they pulled aside at the last minute. They're like, oh, shit, we forgot. And like, that was evident, you know. But then I, but my friends would get me presents. My friends didn't buy me birthday, I mean, Christmas presents, right? Like you, like, you, like, oh yeah, I didn't think about that.

Let me just go frame buys your presents. And then we'd be traveling around, you know, and I would get birthday presents, obligatory birthday presents from aunts and uncles that would never send me something in the mail, you know, but because I was there in front of them around my birthday, I would get some stuff, you know, they'd make a big deal about me. So, they always evened out. That's how you are. Worst case scenario is what?

I mean, what? We really that sad about it? You don't get cupcakes in school on your birthday? birthday. As a kid, yeah, kind of, you know, it's the kind of thing of sticks in your crawl a little bit. David always walked between the drain drops. He really did. All right. We are back January 2nd with more lukewarm takes about the media. Happy New Year, David. See you later, Brian.