The Press Box - Twitter in a Time of War, Weekend NFL Audio, and More on Paying for Interviews

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

Bryan and David talk through the news that Aaron Rodgers is receiving a paycheck in exchange for his interviews on 'The Pat McAfee Show' (0:36). Then, they further discuss Twitter’s approach to covering the war in the Middle East with actions such as removing moderators and promoting accounts with a blue check mark (15:44). Later, they get into more Weekend Audio, where they highlight a few interviews with MLB player Nick Castellanos and a play-by-play call from Mike Tirico on clock management (27:15). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The ringer gambling feat is your one-stop shop for all things betting throughout the NFL season. From week one all the way through Super Bowl 58 in Las Vegas, we have you covered every which way. We've got our favorite futures. We've got props. We'll discuss the lines. And, of course, we'll throw in a few parlase. That's a given. So whether you're a sharp or square better, we'll be breaking it down in terms.

Hopefully, everybody can understand. We'll try to win some money along the way. and be sure to subscribe to the ring of gambling feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. David? Yes. On Friday, you texted me and you said you had some thoughts you'd like to share

on the news that came out last week from the New York Post's Andrew Marshion, which is that ESPN's Pat McAfee is paying Aaron Rogers, paying him upwards of seven figures for the interviews that he does on Tuesday. Mm-hmm. Where do you come down?

Well, I understand that there's some journalistic ethics questions involved here. I'll leave that to you, though. I think I'm, my first reaction was I'm more offended that they're not, I'll just say, put it this way. I'm less offended at whatever journalistic ethics guidelines they may be breaking, and more offended that they're not like just actually best friends that just like the, to just like to, you know, chop it up once a week. Isn't that the real contrivance here? Isn't that the real lie?

So I totally agree. And when somebody said, well, it's no surprise that he's paying Aaron Rogers, I said it is actually kind of a surprise to me. Because Aaron Rogers seems like the kind of person who would do this. One, because he likes a platform. He likes attention. He wants a place to air his views. And two, that he likes Pat Mackey.

Yeah. He likes this specific platform. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And I think despite what came out last week, that that is pretty much true. Because if you saw McAfee's defense or explanation of what was going on, he said that he had to force Rogers to take the money initial. That Rogers was like, no, no, no, you don't have to pay me. That's not why I was doing this. Yeah. McAfee's answer to that question was, well, do you realize how much my media company and my show is worth now that you have started doing this? Yeah. You took a popular show and made it the most aggregatable thing in sports.

So I think it's fair to say that it was the friendship. So the friendship's still intact. So, okay. Well, that's that's that's that. That redeems it some in my eyes. I don't, I don't, I don't think they have called it off friend wise. because money changed hands. Do you mind if I saddle up one of my favorite hobby horses and ride it around the corral?

Please go right ahead. You know how I feel when radio hosts and podcast hosts. Get an interview with an athlete in exchange for a product plug. Of course. Which leads us to the immortal sports radio question. Tell me about what you're doing with. And then you insert the name of the energy drink or the fast food restaurant. Or the charity.

Come on, let's give them some. What a charity, perhaps. I want you to listen to how this first take interview and first take airs on ESPN with Micah Parsons began last year. Micah Parsons. Joining us now thanks to Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut is the official pizza of the NFL,

Ian Super Bowl, and they're rolling out their spiciest pizza ever. The new spicy lover's pizza, you can get it today. And speaking of spicy, I have no doubt this interview is going to be nothing less than that. Wait, a spite, not a spice lover's pizza, but it was a spicy lover's pizza? I guess I understand the distinction, not all that on the grammar, but go on. We might have had to take a look at the ad copy there that needed to be read before Micah got on the screen. But my takeaway there is ESPN didn't give money to Micah Parsons to do that interview,

but they gave him an ad on one of their popular shows. Yeah, presumably he got that spicy lover's money on the other side. Exactly, which you could say they paid for an interview. Oh, yeah. It might be the barter system that ancient civilizations favored over actual currency, but they paid for an interview. This is a question that you might not know the answer to. But, you know, in local sports radio, I was listening to, I was listening to one of the New York stations the other day, and they had one of the Giants players come on after the game.

And he's their weekly correspondent, right? This Giants player comes on every week after the game. They know this, but they kind of get assigned a player. But I presume there's money changing hands in this transaction as well. It's not just a post-game interview. This is, you're our, you are working for us this season. Almost always. Almost always.

And I saw a sports radio consultant say that he spent $100,000 to $200,000 a year at a San Francisco station every year to get baseball, football, basketball players to do those weekly hits. Yeah. So it's significant money. not Aaron Rogers money maybe, but that Giants player, I'm guessing, wasn't on for an hour and talking about public health and pop culture and whatever the host wanted to ask him about. Probably a pretty narrow interview.

Yeah. But the point being that ESPN is already in a form of this business. Sure. And this doesn't even count Tom Brady and the man in the arena doc and all that other stuff. They are in a relationship. So the question is, well, you know, what does this mean for ESPN? I'd say, I don't know that that is the question because I think we've already crossed this Rubicon in various ways. I think the question is, where do you draw the line at ESPN, which has always been partly a journalistic outfit and partly not.

Clearly, the line is not drawn where they make sports documentaries. Clearly, now it's not drawn for talk shows. So does the moat get carved out around like Sports Center? and then we safely assume that most of the people who do printwork for ESPN.com are on the other side of that. Is that where the mode is? I mean, does there need to be a moat? I mean, there does seem to be a distinction here. One, you know, it's to what degree are you misleading the audience, right?

I mean, I don't think that there's probably, I think the vast majority of people listen to the McAfee show are not shocked to learn that this weekly guest is getting paid. And the second thing is to what degree is the content being altered, contaminated by whatever the financial arrangement is. This isn't, I mean, this presumably is not Aaron Rogers coming on and saying some stuff he wouldn't say if he were doing it for free, right? He might feel a little bit more comfort. He might feel a little bit more obligation towards going viral, you know, because he's a financial partner. you know, he has a stake in this as well. But if what you're paying for at the end of the day is access, as opposed to actually dictating the content,

there does seem to be a distinction there, and I don't quite know where that, how to draw that line, right? If someone's just going to say, if someone's like, I'm, me no matter, it doesn't change what they say, but I'm not going to get out of bed for less than $100,000. dollars. That's just

Or you know there's a lot I mean listen people get paid in other ways too people get paid in plane tickets and you know

black car rentals and whatever you know free food when they get there and everything they get there so yeah

I mean listen it doesn't I mean if it's going to shock you that someone gets paid it might also shock you

that you know they had a limo pick the dude up and bring them to the station so I mean But if it does, but if it's a question of access, you know, I have to hire a babysitter if I'm going to do this. So can you just pay the babysitter? You know, that's what I mean by access. It's a, you know, it gets kind of blurry.

Sports radio, to answer your question in a roundabout way, clearly is not shocked by this. That doesn't care about this at all. They say, we've just been doing this forever. And I would guess that sports radio hosts around the country look at this and be like, dude, My station paid these athletes, and I got some desultory interviews that the athletes absolutely did not want to do and sort of regarded it as the worst 20 minutes of their week. Yeah. Pat McAfee actually got an information-rich interview and got Aaron Rogers like right after absolute soul-killing playoff losses a couple of times. Got him in seasons when he was winning the NFL MVP. So he just got a lot higher quality.

Yeah, and you, by the way, if you want to wonder why Pat McAfee's probably partly motivated in making sure Aaron Rogers takes the money, so you show up on a bad day, right? That's part of it. If you're doing this as a buddy, you don't sign any papers and you're just like, you know, good friend, today is not the day. You know? Yeah, no. And again, Rogers might be the kind of guy who just shows up because he's Aaron Rogers and he's different. But those guys on local stations, after the Cowboys get stomped by the 49ers, I'm betting that guy needs a,

financial incentive. Yeah. To show up on Tuesday. I will say, though, couldn't you just use the reasoning you gave for print reporters to pay an athlete for an interview? Because what you're saying essentially is if you're just paying for the access and they're not going to say, what they say, you're paying for an hour of their time or whatever unit of their time you want to throw down for.

You could say the same thing about print reporters, but we're not paying people for interviews. and aren't going to pay people for interviews. That scene is like crossing a line that is pretty much uncrossable unless I'm really missing something. No, no, no, no, you're totally right. And I think that there is a history there that justifies that. I mean, that makes that all make sense.

I mean, it's not clear. But there's still money being spent. You know, somebody's paying to fly you out to get the interview for the most part. You'll do some of them over the phone. whatever, you have to work your sources. You have to... Well, that's, but that's being paid on your behalf. No, sure, sure.

I just don't think for the vast... To go back to the... Are the readers being sold a bill of goods here? I'm not sure that that makes a ton of difference to your average consumer. But it does keep the story clean. You know, I mean, it does... You know, one's show business and one's actual journalism, you know?

And I think particularly for show business, you have all these... These expedient, you know, questions of expediency and everything else, you know, you can't be like, well, I got to... bad interview today. Let me try to reconfigure it into something workable for next week. I mean, you got to have someone talking on the air in two minutes, you know? So there are just different factors at play. The difference between show business and journalism to me is in the former, you are in business with people. Journalism, I don't want to be in business with anybody that I'm covered. I don't want to be, I don't want to have a business relationship with it in any

possible way. But then there's this world of show business. where we have clearly decided that that's okay. And by the way, when it comes to the print thing, when I was in the UK a few years ago, whenever, or not whenever, but let's say most of the time that UK publications would get interviews with big soccer stars, there'd be a plug in the piece. Just like that sports radio plug we're talking about. So money didn't change hands, but it was, is here on behalf of whatever watch company or whatever financial broker.

And that was in the written. piece. And by the way, I've seen written pieces in a miracle like this. So I'm not totally convinced that's not the way the world's moving because it's certainly moved a lot. I mean, it does from a really kind of nihilistic standpoint, feel a lot cleaner just to say, you know, yay Diamond Co. And then let's move on to totally unrelated topics. Yeah. I mean, if you have to get it out of the way, right? Like, you have to get it out of the way. We've heard, again, audio versions of this all the time where the host is fired up, fired up, fired up,

let me tell me what you're doing with someone. McAfee tweeted out the segment from his show where he explained his thinking about this. He also in that segment called Andrew Marshan, the reporter, a quote unquote rat. I was interested that the athletics, Diana Rusini, approvingly tweeted out the segment when that ESPN's Adam Schaefter re-upped

Rusini's tweet. So we're signing off not just on the policy, but we're signing off on that characterization of Andrew Marchion? Fellow reporter? Fellow print reporter?

Between that and the Braves locker room thing. It was a... I mean, I think... It was a big week for throwing journalists under the bus. It very much was. I think that's what you see

more and more of and not to totally just derail the conversation. You just see more and more people who are doing the job of journalists who, if you ask them, would just be like, yeah, but I'm doing something different.

I put myself in that category a lot of the time, too, you know? And that's sort of the template of what a lot of new media is. And it makes sense that people sort of, you know, who represent the establishment, the old guard, I don't mean any of those in derogatory ways are sort of offended. They don't get to do those things or they're not, that's not what they were taught was the right thing to do. But what do you do? Or they don't want to do those things.

Yeah, exactly. I don't, like, I'm doing my thing without having that privilege. Sure. But what are you going to, but, you know, what do you do when, you know, Pat McAfee's on ESPN. He gets the spot. It's not really him. I mean, if they want to give him a guidebook and tell him you have to do this or you can't take your,

or you're fired, that's one thing. But if not, you know, it's, it's, it's, if he says, I'm just doing a show and that's the way they do it, then, you know, that's hard to kind of like slap him on the wrist for doing a thing that he doesn't feel bound to do. I want to be in the room when Norby Williamson hands Pat McAfee and AP style book. Yeah. Or when you're in just like the 11th hour of contract negotiations and they're like, by the way, we know, just going, just dot in some eyes and cross the tease. We didn't see your J school diploma.

Did you want to fax that over? Oh, you don't have one? That's cool. We'll just get you on night school. We'll get you on track. Don't worry. You can make it up as you go. Turn to be real interested in that.

Like, no, no, don't ruin my show by turning me into that. Coming up on today's pod, David. if you think Twitter's a hell site, wait till you see it during a time of war. We've got weekend audio from the baseball diamond in Philadelphia and the lectern of Mike Pence, plus the coach Prime beat writer, the return of the magazine guest editor, only in George F. Will journalism and the old legal thriller writers still got it? All that and much more on the press box. A part of the ringer podcast network.

Oh, media consumers. Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Erica Servantis here. It is the most generic form of media criticism, David, to say, Twitter, I can't stand this hell site. Meanwhile, none of the media members actually leave. But Twitter has, in a time of terrorism and war, actually gotten worse, if that is humanly possible. Scott Nover has a piece up in slate, explaining why. And he says that Twitter slash X,

which I will call Twitter here for simplicity's sake, quote, fundamentally incentivizes the spread of misinformation during times of mass panic and confusion, in part because X is now a platform that pays for viral content. Dot, dot, dot, dot, Twitter, more so than any other platform right now, is fertile ground for a new kind of war profiteering. So in other words,

me, the Twitter slash X user, I didn't just put up this bogus thing. I might actually get paid for this, even if only in the long run. Yeah. And Nova has a few examples from last week.

Check these out. There was a blue checkmark account that showed footage of what it said was a Hamas rocket. It was not, David. it was footage from a video game. And Nover notes that the blue check market account is still a verified account, and please add air quotes there on Twitter slash X.

There was another blue check market account that distributed a faked BBC video saying journalists were reporting that Ukraine, yes, Ukraine, was selling weapons to Hamas. Now listen to the epilogue of that episode via Scott Nover. quote, the account owner deleted the post and called it in, quote, honest mistake, simultaneously posting a meme caption, quote, we are going to be famous. Honest mistake, we are going to be famous. Which I would like to submit for a new motto to post on the headquarters there in San Francisco. So we know what happened here under Elon Musk's watch.

They took out the moderators. or disempowered the moderators. They brought back accounts that had been suspended in the name of quote unquote free speech. And now there's a blue checkmark problem. Remember those innocent days during the NBA draft when we were like, I don't know, I don't know who to believe tonight.

Yeah. Because the blue checkmarks are all different. Well, now it's an actually important version of that because blue checkmark doesn't mean trustworthy source anymore. sometimes it means the opposite. Yeah. If you buy that checkmark, your tweets get seen more.

I'm sure you've done this, gone into the tweets from popular people, and notice that the replies, the blue checkmark replies are all there toward the top. Oh, yeah. So if you're actually looking for something, it takes you a while to paddle your way through there. Uh-huh. And then in certain cases, Twitter is paying the blue check marks for their engagement. And Nover says the content about. war is not eligible for this,

at least in the written rules. But if you go viral with bogus war stuff, then you can build up your following and then get paid for other stuff. Yeah, if it's bogus war stuff, is it not eligible? I think it's any war stuff.

Well, I think the idea is that like, we're just not, we don't want to pay you for this because this is serious stuff. Yeah, but you're right. You can build up your follower account. I mean, this is the project that old Twitter had been dealing with for a long time. I mean, when Twitter,

anytime a platform like Twitter, anything broadly defined becomes a force in the way that Twitter did, in the way that a million things have before, one of the most difficult parts of building the business is to pivot from whatever ephemera got you to, from A to B, and then figure out how to entrench yourself, how to legitimize yourself,

how to make yourself as functional from B to C as you were from A to B. and we saw Twitter. We talked on the show about Twitter trying to figure out the right path forward to actually becoming useful and truthful and a good source of information at moments such as this.

And for Elon Musk in the new X days, and to be honest, anybody that bought Twitter, if their sole interest was making money or pivoting to something else or just whatever Craven Enterprise, would have done something along those lines, possibly. But they just, that's a difficult and relatively expensive part of the company, that he just jettisoned, right?

Being serious, being newsworthy, being correct is much more difficult than going viral, you know, and that's obviously not in the interest of anything. I mean, and it's not that. that different than so many of these other kind of existential questions we have about media now too. I mean, if CNN had pivoted hard to like only having comedians as hosts of their shows,

and they'd be up a creek right now trying to cover this conflict, right? Totally. So, you know, but in the tech world, it's easier, as we've seen in Elon Musk's tenure at Twitter, just to set everything on fire and just still, but to

still have the pretense of sameness, you know, Twitter's So it kind of looks the same, even though everything behind the scenes is totally different. Have you noticed when you run into a bogus tweet, they'll have those community notes attached to the bottom that correct it? But then the tweet is still up. Yeah. So the free speech, and please add the air quotes there, solution for Elon Musk was to have community members correct the wrong tweet, but then we leave the wrong tweet up. Yeah.

So that misinformation is still out in the world and we just hope people notice. that it's misinformation. Okay. There's the generalized Elon's Twitter problem, David, and then there's the localized Elon problem. I found this from the account of Justin Barragona. There was a post last week, again, from a blue checkmark saying that CNN's Clarissa Ward

had faked an attack on camera. It's unclear if it was a parody video or what it was. but Elon, with his tens of millions of followers, replied with a laughing emoji, taking a moment to have a good chuckle about that. It's worth spending a few moments here at the end maybe, talking about a good way to sort through the news during a time like this. What I've stumbled into here on the West Coast is like 10 o'clock, I will turn on CNN,

and all the personality-based shows from CNN will have ended by that point. and we've gone to a very old school, here are some headlines vision of CNN. It may be CNN international because the host has a British accent, or the presenter, if you will. And it's kind of a roundup, wrap up of the day. They're definitely on-scene reports, but it's less correspondence in the field than it is academics and other things.

I find that to be very useful. Yeah. And then the other one I keep coming back to is the, threaded story that's on the front of the New York Times website. Is that like the most useful thing ever? Because you get like news, you get explainers, you get here is what Anthony Blinken said today. And in what do you think, 10 minutes, 20 minutes a day,

you get a very, very good briefing. Yeah. On what's happened from people that have at least tried to check out things that's on online. Totally agree. I find myself, you know, I'll read the Twitter timeline, try to be discerning about who I'm reading, whatever, but it's usually kind of later in the day when I'm really trying to digest. I'll, whatever the specific, like, you know, whatever specific piece of this story or whatever story I want to focus in on, I'll, you know, find the reporter, the journalist that's, that kind of really in it that day, or permanently or whatever else, and go back and just read their entire timeline, you know, and you just get like five. thousand tweets at once. But I, but and it's, you know, that's the easiest way to do a deep dive on a subject like that in a lot of instances. But it's funny because it's like me, then I find, I realize I'm reading tweets from the previous day. It's like I'm actually just, I'm still on

the newspaper schedule, even though I'm like reading this, I'm like reading things that are being tweeted in real time, but to really swallow, to really absorb something, it takes that sort of depth and that sort of, you know, investment that only, you know, a 24 hour, new cycle can really give you. There are moments when it's okay to go back to the analog era. Yeah. And just think about news in a much, much slower way. Coming up in 30 seconds, David, we got weekend audio.

And what happens when a field reporter forgets to ask a baseball player question? 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 add the press box pod where they, are always, always gratefully received. This week's runner-up comes to us from our friend Matthew Zitland, referring to the House of Representatives's inability to elect a speaker, a comedy series, which is still going on as we record this podcast. It was a very overworked Twitter joke to write in the future, every Republican member of Congress will be the speaker designee for 15 minutes. thanks to Matt for that one.

But this week's winner, David, comes from the world of entertainment. I don't know if you've seen the revelations from Jada Pinkett Smith that have been coming out this week. Yeah. She has a new bookout. Is that what's happening here? I was not aware of it.

That makes a lot of sense. This is my timeline. Jada Pinkett Smith revelations that I was not necessarily looking for. But one of them, I believe this came from an interview with the Today Show was that she and Will Smith have been separated since 2016. So that whole thing at the Oscars

separated since 2016, it was an overwork Twitter joke to write, keep my friend's name out of your goddamn mouth. You know, everybody got mad at Maggie Haberman when she had stuff in her book that she should have reported at the time. Should we be mad at Jada for giving this end? just waiting for the book

waiting for the book publicity tour to Coulogne. It couldn't have stood up in the Kodak Theater and be like, excuse me, just one second. Just for the record here. It's still an important moment. If your Twitter timeline is as interesting as mine is, congrats.

You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, in the notebook dump, David, I got some weekend audio for you. Great. First up, Dateline Philadelphia. Last Thursday, a very exciting 3-1 win by the Phillies

to finish off the Braves in the division series and simultaneously put an end to that weird Jake Mince media subplot. After the game, Turner's Matt Weiner got the first interview with the hero, the Phillies Nick Castellanos. There was just one problem. Weiner did not have a question for Castellanos. All right, B.A. Nick, nobody in Major League history has hit two home runs on back-to-back postseason games,

but you just did, and you guys. you're headed to the NLCS. Where's the question in that? There's no question. Thank you for telling me. I thought you'd be happy with that. I am, man, but we got eight more wins. Thank you for telling me.

Oh, that's tough. It's so funny because baseball players and all athletes, I feel they've been doing that a little more recently, or maybe we just see those post-game and locker room interactions more frequently. Yeah. But they call out the, reporter who just gave them a prompt. Oh yeah, he was really, he was like,

he was on point there. He was, he was eager to call that out. And this is the thing, they're not media critics. They just don't really want to talk to us. Yeah. So if you give them an opening,

they're going to drive the old fashioned 1980s bullpen cart right through it. Mm-hmm. Just be like, aha, that's not a question. I don't have to answer that. My,

my technique is always just to, when I, when I realize I'm going down that path, you just make the hard turn towards just a different thing. Just get a question in there. You tee the whole thing up. Oh, all this stuff happened. All this stuff happened.

All this stuff happened. So I was just wondering how it felt out there. How does it feel out there with the sun shining on your face? You know? Totally. You hear that on podcast all the time. The guy realizes they've just started monologuing and don't know where it's going to end.

And it's always the hard turn into news. Yeah. So speaking of which, what did you think when the manager got fired right in front? in the locker room. Oh, okay. If we needed further evidence that Nick Castellanos was not too eager to talk to the media after the game,

here's an interview he did the same night, and I'll remind you, David, he was the hero of this game. An interview he did the same night from the field with MLB networks, Greg Amsinger. I don't know why you in Philadelphia works. It's the best fit. Would you agree with me?

You're asking me? Yeah. You in Philly. is the best fit. Nick Castiano's, we always needed to play for the Philadelphia Phillies. Am I on to something? I mean, yeah, I fuck with Philly. Nick, I enjoy you, man. You are one of the great personalities in the sport. You're an awesome baseball player. Congratulations on your achievements tonight. We really appreciate it, man. Thank you. There you have. The great Nick Castiano's. So instead of, where's the question, are you asking me?

Yeah. Because you seem to have made a non-question-based statement about me and Philly being perfect for each other. Yeah. We did give him a great soundbite there. Too hot for MLB Network. Thanks to awful announcing for both of those clips. Can I take you to Dateline Orchard Park, New York, David, and give you disappointed Mike Tariko? Oh, please.

This was the end of the first half of Sunday night football, Bill's Giants. The Giants, to set the scene for you, have first and goal at the Bill's one-yard line. 14 seconds left in the half, no timeouts. So you've got to be careful about running the ball. And here is Mike Dorico. They're going to hand it up. It's Berkeley. He's trying to run.

I don't think so. They're not going to do it. Five seconds and four. Giants try to get on the ball. They can't. And that's a terrible, terrible clock management into the half. That's awful. We keep going back.

We keep finding ourselves here week after week. The announcers maybe being a little bit more opinionated than they have been. A little bit more, I don't want to say negative, a little bit more pointed than they have been in era's past. Maybe this is just a reflection of the time. This is what everybody's saying on the couch, right? This is maybe a much nicer. version of it. And, you know, clock management is worth pointing out. Terrible is, in some instances, just a statement of fact. It is indeed. And you're right. If you're not talking about what the

person on the couch is thinking, to some extent, you're not doing your job, Greg. We will know that this and the Miami thing from last week were two especially egregious instances of long management. I don't think you get Mike Torrico into that place without it being absolutely off. And that indeed was absolutely off. Let me take you, David, finally, to Dateline Washington, D.C. This was actually back in 2018. Then

Vice President Mike Pence was swearing in an ambassador. And as part of the ceremony for the swearing in, he was recognizing some notable people in the crowd. I want you to see if the fourth of these four names that Pence lists off doesn't catch you a little off balance. Proud to be joined today by Ivanka Trump, a member of the first name. Paley Ann Conway, who is a great admirer. Other noteworthy Americans who are with us include Hugh Hewitt, who is with us today.

Hugh, thank you. And Suzanne Summers is with us, a great, great friend for many years. That would be the late Suzanne Summers now, former star of Three's company who died yesterday at the age of 76. Wow. For some reason was one of the quote, noteworthy Americans. She is noteworthy.

She absolutely is. She's more noteworthy than Hugh Hewitt. That's for sure. That was sort of like when we went to go see Johnny Valiant do his one-man show, the old wrestling manager, and he introduced several notable, wrestlers, like retired

wrestlers, personalities in the audience, the director, Darren Aronofsky, you pointed out, and then he said Slates Brian Curtis and point. I remember Darrenovsky. I did not remember me getting name check there. That's incredible. There were a lot of confusion about that one. Anyway,

rest in power, Suzanne Summers. Got a new job listing for you, David. Oh, okay. Remember the newspaper chained Gannett in their efforts to be more like the ringer was looking for Taylor Swift and Beyonce beatwriters a while back.

Our friend Andy Wittry sends along another Gannett job posting. It is the Coach Prime Beat writer. Or as they put it, the Coach Prime CU Buffalo's football reporter.

You are reporting to the Fort Collins Coloradoan newspaper. But of course, this is Gannett USA Today. So they are looking

for traffic far beyond they sit at limits of Fort Collins. It's a good idea, obviously. I might have filled this position in like week two. Yeah, you might, but doesn't that just go to, doesn't that just sort of speak to how, I mean, listen, these are all just sort of, you know, well,

unsurious in their way. But doesn't that one in particular just seems sort of fickle? I'm sure Coach Prime will continue to be a going concern, but it was much more of a going concern in week one and two than it is now. I mean, isn't it pretty fairly easy to imagine a world in which if you were given the beat, whether or not you were hired newly by whatever company, if you're given the coach prime beat, can't you imagine a world in which you're, you know, transferred to another beat by week eight or something,

you know, like maybe there's just not as much going on. Maybe there's something more important for you to do. Yeah, after they lost to Stanford. Yeah. Then you've got to go to cover the University of Washington or something else. By the way, that's not a bad gig either. I want you to be the beat writer of whatever the huge. college football news story is right now.

But isn't that just called a college football writer? I mean, isn't that the thing? Don't they have some of those? I would think so. I mean, the other thing I'd say about Coach Primers, are we sure he's going to be in Colorado for much longer? No, I mean, I think that's sort of the whole thing. Given the success,

I did read some of the job listing here and was a little taken back by the language. You'll build top of funnel following with smart vertical and social video. help fans navigate TV schedules and conference realignment with quick, snappy writing, and then help them dive deep into the personal and societal stories that you'll find exclusively in Colorado. Help them navigate TV. Is that mean you're in charge of doing the what time is the Buff's game piece that hopefully will come up first in SEO every week? It sure sounds like it, doesn't it? Help them navigate the TV schedule.

So slightly different than the job listing I answered way back when I got my first jobs in journalism. I am always amused, David, as you know, when journalists try to recapture the wonders of the magazine age. Sometimes we do it when we take an 800-word blog post and give it big art, treating it like it's the old fold-out cover of the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue. Last week, another throwback turned up from Sports Illustrated, the celebrity guest editor. Oh, yeah. What an amazing telegram from the age of magazines that is. and it always felt like it was coming late in the magazine era

where you were changing the relationship you had with a celebrity instead of saying, hey, we need a few hours of your time, plus some time to take some awesome pictures and put you on the cover. Instead, you went to their publicist and said, you know what? What if you guessed that at the magazine? Which will, trust me, require even less of your time than sitting for an interview.

Yeah. I have it old. Oh, go ahead. No, wait. Well, I was going to say this will appeal to you as the art director. Then when we have a journalist write about you inside the magazine that you guest edited, we do something really cool, which is have you write longhand your notes on the piece in the margins? Yes.

Seem to remember Esquire actually doing that one time. I guarantee they did. I'm sure I had all those. I have an old issue of not old. I mean, maybe it's 10 years old at this point, but a JJ Abrams guest edited issue of Wired that I just kept on my couch like a, I mean, kept on my bookshelf like a, like an anthology for years and years. It was, it's so, it just so good. It was good. Wait, it was actually good. Jay J.J. was, had an eye for these kind of things. His picture wasn't even on the cover. It was, it was just the content was fantastic. That fantasy like eye for the right story and the right author and the right headline and everything. else? Yeah, it was really well done. New York Magazine's Catherine Ward had a greatest hits piece about guest editors. This goes all the way back to 1971 and when Salvador Dali guest edited Vogue Paris.

I remember that. I don't really remember that. There was a celebrated one or celebrated may not be the right word, but when Tina Brown let Roseanne Barr guest edit the New Yorker in the 90s, one of the many acts of violence, Tina was said to have committed against Eustis Tilly Ricky Jervis, Esquire, Stephen Colbert Newsweek 2009,

but that was a pretty edgy issue of Newsweek. JJ did Wired and also Bill Gates did Wired. Bono, of course, guest edited Vanity Fair. And then this is the only one that actually sounded to me worth reading.

Weird Al Yankovic guest edited Mad Magazine. Oh, yeah. Those sensibilities that come. How much power does he? Can weird owl unilaterally say we're not doing spy versus spy this month or whatever? It is, or is it the infrastructure is still there in place?

I think so. Weird Al's like, you know what? I don't think we should make fun of popular television series this month. Take a month off and be serious. Speaking of the 90s, John Grisham is back, David. Oh, yeah. He has a new novel out tomorrow called The Exchange. And I want to tell you this amazing fact that I learned from Molly Ball's profile in time.

Okay. Since breaking out with a firm in 1991, Ball Rides, Grisham has released 48 consecutive New York Times number one bestsellers. A feat no other writer has matched. So Wise is up here. If you're a famous writer, you will have a New York Times bestseller, quote, unquote. But it's a pretty amazing deal to get to number one with every single book you put out. Oh, yeah. 48 in a row, meaning Stephen King during that same time period was not number one every single time.

The only other person who probably has written 48 books besides James Patterson in that time frame. I think you just throw in besides James Patterson. It's always a besides James Patterson. John Grisham's writing habits, according to Ball, beginning around 7 a.m., he types on a computer disconnected from the internet, typically writing about a thousand words per day. He begins by going over the previous day's work, and he is usually done by noon. If you want to have a writer's life that we should all envy. Yeah. Well, if you can really stay offline, I guess that's, you know, pretty good workday. We're rebooting everything from the 90s, which is how Dr. Frazier Crane has

come back to the airwaves. Well, John Grisham's doing it too. The Exchange, his new novel, brings back the firm hero Mitch McDeer, or is how Holbrook said it in the movie version. Mitch, Mitch. Oh, yeah. I was a little thrown off by how they handled the fact that this was a sequel

on the cover. They called it the exchange, colon, after the firm. books are always so bad at this. After the firm. It's so, it's so rough. Also, when I went to the Amazon listing, it was listed as the firm series book two. Is that like an Amazon contrivance?

Like, they just have the established. You notice that to help you? Like, if I want to read all the books with like a particular detective or particular hero, they'll often do that now in Perens. Again, it's Amazon how to figure that out because book publishing is like, notoriously bad at it. I don't remember being as a kid, like as a kid going in the bookstore and finding a cool fantasy series or something and then having to like you go to like the, also buy the author page and you can't figure out what order they're in, you know,

and if you don't have the numbers on the spine, you're kind of a drift, but go on. In terms of fantasy, that was actually you when we were kids. Because you were a huge nerd in a different way than I was. We often do an only in journalism segment here where we pull out words that you see in print but never hear in human speech. Today I've got a special edition only in George F. Will journalism. Oh.

The noted conservative columnist wrote a piece this week saying he wanted South Carolina Senator Tim Scott to drop out and endorse Nikki Haley for president. The piece began with a disclaimer that George Will's wife is an advisor to Tim Scott and does not agree with George Will's opinion.

So I guess kudos do George Will for working against interest with that column. But there was a word that hopped out to me, David, in the column, even among the $14 words that George Will usually employs, blatherskite. Blatherskite. Blatherskite. Which is defined as a person who talks at great length without making much sense. A blatherskite. I'm disappointed.

I didn't learn that, you know, when we took the PSAT. hundred years ago. But yeah, blather sky. So listeners will have to believe me that that is not a setup. But dude, I had the bite of Madeline moment when I saw that word because I'm like, where in the world do I know the word blather sky from? I've never seen it since, but I was like, I have a memory of being handed a photocopied George Will column. Oh, no. In the PSAT course with this word on. Well, that's something that would have happened, yeah? So I did a little searching, David, June 28, 1992, George Will on the back page of Newsweek.

Oh, no. A column entitled The Veep and the Blatherskite. Oh, my gosh. They put it in the display. Like, that was the enticement for you to read George Will beyond the serious looking picture of George Will that was next to the column. The Veep and the Blatherskite. about Dan Quayle.

Who is the Blatherskite? Um, doesn't really matter. Can't say that I actually read the column. It looks like it might be Ross Perrault. Okay, that makes sense. Um, we can go with Ross Perot.

It's a good, uh, it's a good 1992 reference. Speaking of bits that stretch back generations is time for David Schumick. Guess is the strained pun headline. Yeah. Last Monday's headline about Drew Holiday landing with a playoff contender was dream come drew today's headline comes to us from josh peterson it's from the

denver post long regarded as one of america's funniest newspapers the broncos were so bad on thursday night david and they're lost to the chiefs that i watched some baseball and the broncos were bad and sloppy with taylor swift in attendance now i want you to think of her recent tour as you ponder the question, what was the Denver Post's strained pun headline? Dude, I have no idea what her tour is called. You don't know what the new, even I know that. No, I'm sure that I know I should feel like I should, but I just, I get nothing, man.

You haven't seen friends online going to the eras tour. Oh, okay, eras. Okay, so they were bad in front of Taylor Swift, who's tour is called eras. The eras tour. Don't think too hard about this. a lot of mistakes very sloppy play oh uh something with error right um just do it as straight as humanly possible here we go trial trial trial an era try uh you're overthinking it just give it to me like what the tour was the no the errors tour the errors tour yeah our pal michael solomon actually sent me a text

when the Chiefs played the Jets and Zach Wilson was playing so badly going into that week and said like New York Post tomorrow the errors to her and in fact the Jets actually had some life that night so they didn't use it. He called this weeks in advance.

Michael Solomon, the greatest headline writer to have ever graced God's green earth. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantis. I'm back later this week and then Shoemaker and I return Monday.

with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.