The Press Box - What Should The New York Times Do With The Athletic? Plus: No More Hollywood Profiles.

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Bryan and David brainstorm how The New York Times and The Athletic could restructure heading into the new phase of coverage (3:40). Then, amid the ongoing strikes in Hollywood, they discuss a few more media side effects, including the loss of the celebrity profile, actor promos, and more (34:10). 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

I'm Derek Thompson, the host of the podcast, Plain English. We tackle technology, politics, culture, history, everything that's happening in the world and why it matters. New episodes of Plain English drop every Tuesday and Friday on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Yes. I'm here on the East Coast for three weeks, and that has given me the opportunity to catch up with an old friend. Who's that? Well, not you. You and I are also going to catch up.

Yeah, tell me about it. this. But I'm referring to the New York Post, the tabloid newspaper, one of two tabloid newspapers, but be kind of the tabloid newspaper of New York City. And let me tell you something. The Post is just as I left it, or we left. For instance, I don't think you're going to be surprised that the Post was very, very interested in Sunday on this Long Island murder story. Here's a headline, Slay Psycho Remember murder in New York Post Ease is Slay

Slay Psycho in 5 million dollar serial crash scam But Slay Psycho and Crash scam Are both in quotes So the post is telling you no We're not saying That there's a slay psycho

We're saying that somebody said There's a Slay Psycho All right Putting some quotes around it I always enjoyed that New York Post bit of a bit of journalism.

You saw this story about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the whole vaccine or COVID conspiracy thing that was going around the internet over the weekend. Yes. So I'm thinking,

wow, they're going to blow that story out. That's huge. Turns out it was basically just a sidebar on, let's see, page 12 of Sunday's paper. And the main story

on the page was about Cordell West his presidential campaign. Wow. Post playing the hits. And then I turn to the back page of the post, the sports section. Always the best part of the post. They still have a sports section. They still have a sports section.

Yes, they do. And let me tell you something, it's a little different than the approach of the New York Times sports section. You know who they put on the front of the sports section or the back in this case? Aaron Rogers. Oh, yeah. Of the New York Jets. It says training champ.

Not this week's strain pun headline. But there's a big picture of Aaron Rogers. Rogers. And then I page through it. It's like jets, Yankees, Mets, baseball, football, big sports over and over again. There's also Phil Mushnik. So nobody's but it's the hits. It's the big sports. There's nothing in here about the NIL this week. Nothing and none of those brainy New York Times sports articles.

Just funny to see the difference in approach. Coming up on today's podcast, David, now that the Times has liquidated its sports section, what should it do with the athletic? We provide the answers. Plus, hell no, we won't sit for your celebrity profile. What happens to Hollywood content during the actor strike? Ron DeSantis is going to see Jake Tapper

and I join threads. Come see me. You should see what it's like there. All that much more on the press box, a part of the ringer. Podcast Network. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker and producer Erica Servantes here. I forget to thank Carlos Chiroboga,

who offered a big editorial assist last week. Thank you, Carlos. David, on Friday, we talked about the athletic replacing the New York Times sports section. And we asked, what's the Times going to do with the athletic? Doing that media critic thing, just raising questions. Well, it's time for us to offer some answers. Not just post questions.

We need to figure out what the New York work time should do with the athletic. So I'm going to go piece by piece through this sprawling sports website. And I want you to tell me, should we keep things, should we change things around? How should the New York Times think of phase two of the athletic? All right. Let's start with this. What are we going to do about the city-specific coverage?

The athletic you remember started out being a series of, connected city sites essentially. Sports pages, you might say. Athletic Dallas, Athletic Bay Area, et cetera, et cetera. They've mostly moved away from that. Do we care about that in this next phase, or are we a national sports website now? I'm torn on this.

I think that the New York Post example you gave was instructive. I think that you do have to care about it. You have to figure out exactly how you're going to care about it and how you're going to target these things. And certainly there are people who are incredibly talented at covering a team on a sort of granular level. That might not be as talented at, you know, spinning off those ideas into bigger pieces.

And to some extent, that's okay. But I do think that, you know, just like at the post, you can have a team that covers things, you know, covers the teams locally, but so has the ability to spin off, you know, think piece, about those teams that spin off into bigger pieces about the league, about the whatever sport they're in, about sports more broadly.

But it's always going to be hard because there's always going to be teams that don't have the metrics of other teams and those teams, you know, the beat writers on those teams are going to be targets for, you know, whatever the next round of layoffs are. So if you're going to do it, you have to just, you have to just, you have to be all in. You have to figure out what the business model is in terms of staffing and you got you got to pledge

to keep those numbers for five years or something to see if it works because there's really no, I mean, covering local sports is a trust issue. It's like, why did the ratings of this show go down as soon as they announced there wouldn't be a second season? Well, it's like, because nobody was, you know, because

they know you're not invested, so why should we be invested, right? It's a measure of trust and transparency. So if you're going to do it, I think you should do it, but you have to do it in a very open and outward way. It's not, oh, we're covering the, you know, Cavaliers as long as they're a playoff team, and then we'll see, you know, like, whatever. But it's got to be like, no, we're going to have, you know, five people on this beat for

the next five years. Here's their contracts. We promise we'll publish all the content no matter what happens, you know? But, I mean, and I honestly think that's the only way forward. That's how the athletic started. And the funny thing is they pulled back from that even before the times thing kicked in, right? They were starting to say, you know what? We had a writer leave or that just wasn't doing it for us.

And so they stopped covering certain things. And sometimes it would turn out to be news. So let's say you have an even smaller staff or less. expansive ambitions than you did at the beginning at the founding moment of the athletic. Are you going to cover like the Cowboys and the Lakers and the Patriots and the Yankees and then try to cover the rest of the league with league writers or people you can put somewhere when a team gets interesting? Well, I mean, ESPN did that for a long time.

I'm sure they're still doing that, but kind of moving writers around, you know, they'd have like NBA writer that sort of covered divisions, but would then sort of say like, you know, XT, when your division is down, put all your energy towards Y. Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I just don't, I mean, I think if you're the athletic, if you're, I'm, if you're,

I'm, you know, if you're the athletic. Is he writing for them too? It's like, it really is, it doesn't have to be an all or nothing strategy. I don't think that there's a lot of, I don't, I just don't feel like there's a lot of middle ground. I think that if you're, if you're coming to the,

athletic because of because they're comprehensive, then you have to make a, you have to make a pledge towards being comprehensive, you know, I mean, and if you want to hire a bunch of big names or create a bunch of big personalities and, and, and then sort of shrink the overall staff size, well, that's a different model. That's fine. But as it stands now, it's like people are listening to their podcasts and reading their content because they are, you know, have from the start. And like you said, they've, they've pulled back themselves. but the idea is that they cover everything comprehensively. You know, and if that, and like, what are you, even if you're only going for cowboy stuff,

there is a measure of confidence in subscribing to an outlet that covers everything, you know, and is not just a specialist site or not just a headline site. Feels like when you have something that started out as intensely local, here is your new sports page. and now is facing a proposition where it may be intensely national. You're right. You're getting into this Bermuda triangle that exists between those two things. We're not either one.

And again, you're asking people to pay for this website or pay for it if they don't already pay for the New York Times. So you're saying, what are you paying for here? And I think as we go down this list of elements to the athletic, that's going to be a recurring question. What are people going to pay for? Because you know people will complain if they're, what they're getting paid for, what they're paying for is scaled back, even if it doesn't affect what they see on a day-to-day basis regardless, right?

Oh, totally. I mean, again, with some fairness, right, that's what they were promised. I mean, when I signed up for the athletic the very first time, it was because I wanted to read about their Dallas sports coverage. I'm like, hey, there's another voice in the Metroplex. This is great. We need more voices.

We need more paid sports. writers in Dallas Fort Worth. Let's do it. I have an athletic Dallas t-shirt somewhere that I got for doing that. But so, you know, and then all of a sudden it was like, okay, now the editor is leaving and it's not really a Dallas site anymore, though we're still covering the Mavericks and the Cowboys, and then we got rid of one of the Cowboys riders. And then it's like, okay. Now it's just an athletic Dallas tank top. It's missing, maybe exposed midriff. It's not all that it was when it started. Semi-related question. Which sports? should they cover.

Because again, they started out pretty broadly. We heard they made a good living with stuff like hockey coverage because hockey was neglected. Yeah. So when they were doing like hockey prospects and all these underserved parts of it, that was where they were making a lot of hay. They later added soccer, which has been this hugely successful part of the athletic because they went and said,

hey, you know what we're going to do? It's almost like what we're talking about that they abandoned. If you like Arsenal, we're going to go get three of the athletic. the best arsenal writers. Yeah. So you're going to want to read this. You're going to almost have to subscribe to the athletic and read this.

Because we're going to cover, we're going to have the people writing about the clubs you follow. So how do you think about sports? Everything. Some of the sports. Everything. Well, you obviously have to draw the line somewhere, right? Did you see that viral clip of the guy?

What was the game where the guy was like rolling the not quite ball? It was like a boccey ball, but it wasn't. It was like a rolling component to it. Did you see this? Or the guy like, no. Just did this like high arcing roll that went right, that did like a 90 degree turn and went right between his opponent's two balls and hit the whatever ball,

the main ball where he's, where you're supposed to get near and fell over, knocked it into it. Anyway, it was a beautiful thing. I'm guessing they don't cover that sport, whatever the hell that's what's called. I don't know.

It is the athletic. It could be somebody. You got to draw the line somewhere. That, to me, is less of a problem. Right? That's just kind of an internal thing. Maybe we don't cover, maybe we don't cover tennis day in and day out, but, you know, on a granular level. But we have like a national tennis writer, you know, or two. I mean, I guess there's fewer people and that's a little bit more fewer people to cover and that's a little bit more feasible. Same with golf. But, you know, soccer is a growth area for all sports websites. And I imagine they'll keep doing it. I kind of wonder, though, you mentioned this, you know, hiring the best. Arsenal writer is how we're out there. This is obviously what they did at the beginning, right?

When they started up, they hired a bunch of known quantities in the Dallas sports world. They did this market to market. That was sort of what got them off the ground. I do sort of wonder what the sort of return on investment on that stuff is because it does seem like if you're a avid reader of the Dallas Morning News and they hire two of your favorite people, then yeah, maybe that day you just click subscribe. Oh, it's a discounted rate, whatever, I'll do it. But unless they continue the process of building those celebrities,

of building those platforms, which is sort of hard to do behind a paywall, I don't know, I wonder how lasting the results are. Because for everybody that clicked, subscribe, there's somebody who didn't, and they presumably found their content somewhere else. You know, they probably didn't just give up on the sport. And I know that's a struggle for the writers themselves, too, right?

I mean, you feel like you're a little bit quarantined. if you're ever behind a paywall it's not specific to the athletic but it's it's an interesting strategy what are we going to do about features at the athletic it's an interesting one

in it yeah because you're not going full magazine long form shooting my shot features exactly there has been a real newspaper ethic that's

crept into features lately there. I was reading they did a piece on first take. It's a good piece. I was kind of like a history of first take essentially. They had three bylines on it. I'm just like, was this piece so expansive or needed to be done so quickly that three people needed to work on it? Yeah. What?

That just strikes me as very odd, again, unless you're operating under a newspaper set of rules, where you're throwing bylines at things, in this case, not something that's breaking news. What do you think about features? I don't think it's been a particular strength of the athletics. I think it's been way below beatwriting in terms of what I like about it. But are you talking about just like giving someone

the green light to go over 1,500 words? Are you talking about should there be like a rubric, like a publishing plant model for the blowout story with like big art and, you know, a different, like a different reading experience. Isn't everything, by the way, have big art now? Have you noticed that? I click on like a Jonathan Chaik column that's 800 words and it has big art.

I feel like I was lied to here. It felt like a Grantland feature back in its heyday. I'm mainly talking about national features. I'm not talking about somebody who's on the beat who mixes in a feature once or twice a week to go with their notes and analysis and stuff like that. I'm talking about the kind of what we would say is your general as national features. That's the stuff that I'm just not.

And again, I'm sure some of that has done like big audience because I see it promoted again and again on Twitter. Like with promoted tweets. There were like two Mike Leach stories that were both being promoted by the athletic for as far as I could tell a period of years. So they must have really hit.

The Mike Golick piece was just like they kept popping up in my timeline. That was another one. That was that a Richard Deich podcast. I can't remember what exactly what that was. Or maybe a write-through of his podcast. I don't know. So there were clearly things that were hitting the mark traffic-wise.

But I just think as a reader, I'm not totally sure what to do with it. And if I were doing it, I'd probably say, I wouldn't treat it like newspaper features again, where it's like throwing multiple writers at things unless they really needed to. They were also on the whole oral history kick for a while, where anything that could possibly be in oral history was turned into an oral history. Yeah. I mean, you know, you give enough voting power to like the SEO gods and they, you know, those things start happening. I don't know. I mean, I kind of think this is an editorial consideration more than anything else, right?

I mean, if it's like if like every piece. That's what we're here for, bud. We're editing the athletic. I don't know if you heard the concept of this segment. It's ours now. Every piece that you write, every piece that you, well, write, publish whatever. I don't know who you're giving power to in the scenario. But like every piece that you write should have a reason to be written.

You know, like, I'm going to write, whatever, 2,500 words on, on, you know, fall out from the Maverick Summer League, you know, whatever. But, like, you got to have an argument. It's not just, the reason that you write isn't just that, like, my editor gave me a deadline. That may be the practical reason. But, like, what is the argument? What's the, what's the thesis? Yes. And some of the, and think, and even a gamer with a good angle is, could be.

indistinguishable from a quote unquote feature when it's pushed out on social media like that's what you're shooting for right you're shooting for the thought that goes in you know the idea and yeah difficult to do that a hundred times a year right i mean and maybe it's some of it gets it feels a little bit artificial after a certain point when i was writing more regularly that you know a lot of the headlines ended up getting more and more similar even as i was trying to write more and more different things right but it's a you know that's That's part of, that's more of an editorial consideration. I don't know, man.

I feel like if so, I guess, my mind, when he asked the question, immediately went to features in terms of like, like, if someone, like, offers you a feature. Hey, guy who's been covering the bucks for the past 10 years,

do you want three hours with the honest? I mean, yes. Sure. Yes. The answer, of course, is yes to that. But depending on what product you have to plug, I guess. But the answer is yes. But,

and I don't mean to sound like too, like, cruel here. But if this is just a writer coming to you and they're just like, I got this idea, I'm going to write the definitive piece on Bobby Portis. I'm just stuck in Milwaukee for this entire thought experiment. Okay. Going to talk to all everybody that's ever known Bobby, you know, whatever. I'm going to do all this stuff. And by the way, I just need like three weeks off work to make it happen or whatever. Off of my normal beat. Maybe the answer is no to that, right? Like we don't need some, we don't need writing long form for the sake of writing long form. Well, I think you said it perfectly, which is,

a lot of these feel like they need a more honed angle. Like, I'll read anything. I will read along Bobby Portis piece. Yeah. But you're going to have to tell me up front and you're going to have to show me in the writing that this is really a meaningful thing. This is really something interesting and different. Rather

than here is a long form piece because we needed a long form piece and we'd run out of people or the other people told us no. I think that's absolutely it. It's almost just like a little more top spin, a little more crafting, a little more angle, a little just more of a sharpness in the execution of it, if not in the pitching of it.

Yeah. Why are we doing this? What's the nut graph here? And I have to be too magaziney about it, but that helps. Yeah. I mean, you, listen, I mean, you're a great writer. You've written a million things. I mean, you know the, you get to a certain point when you've been in some place for a while

where you feel like you could just like DM your boss or your editor or Slack them or whatever and just be like, got a great idea about X, Y, and Z. and you send it and you kind of don't get much of a response. Sometimes they're just like, yeah, go for it. And sometimes you just get like there's kind of like, yeah, let's workshop that. And you're like, that was not different than the past five DMs I've sent you. But then, you know, you give it a little time and get over your bout of depression or whatever. You're just like, you know what they're right.

You know, like that's like that was a better idea. Paragraph. Yeah. In an email and that sharpens the piece. Yeah. And sometimes the paragraph goes right into the piece. Here's another thing I was thinking about columnists. the athletic has columnists

Marcus Thompson they just hired Jim Trotter a number of others but I think that they should borrow the template from the Times opinion section and if I were them I'd have about 30 columnists

to throw out a number I think some of these people already work for the athletic by the way some of these people may be writing features or maybe writing notesy things or things that are somewhere between features and columns and I would just say I want a big bullpen

that every day is ready to dive on stories that are interesting to you or that enter your zone of expertise. We know how much the New York Times has just feasted on traffic from opinion. And again, I'm not talking about hot takes here.

I'm not talking about anything forced. If you look at the Times' opinion section, you'll just find all kinds of varied takes from all kinds of different people. I'm not sure why you can't do that in sports. and they don't all have to be like an 800 word op-ed God forbid or a 2,000 word piece or whatever

I think they can take all kinds of forms but I just want more of that and I think that should be driving the site or at least co-driving the site along with the army of beat writers I totally agree I totally agree I think that's easy they're already there all you got to do is just kind of

prod them and push them and change their job a little bit Yeah, the direction question becomes a little bit difficult at times. You know, I mean, you don't want to get into a situation where people are, you know, waiting for that inspiration to strike and never end up writing. We've paid them a bunch of money, you know, like whatever. You don't, and the other end of the spectrum is you don't want to be doing like with Bleach Report and many others would do back in the day, which is just like have like an SEO ranking, you know, just like you like shoot out 50 stories of the day according to Google,

searches or whatever, and you're just like, who wants to write about each of these and everybody must take one, you know, or maybe you do do some iteration of that. I guess that that's an editorial job, though, you know, to keep everybody working to their strengths and in the right direction for the site. Yeah, and it's not all they have to do, right? I probably want those people doing other things too, writing features, going out, talking to people, writing off games, all that stuff, but I just think there's something there. Podcasts, it has some, including one hosted by our old pal Robert Mays. I think they should probably have more of them.

I think fewer of them should be interview shows and more of them should be trying to find pairings or three-person podcasts that work in terms of personality. When I was on the athletics homepage today, I could not find any button that said podcasts. I think I would want a button that says podcast there to talk about the way we're thinking about sports in 2023. Newsletters, I like their podcast. Pulse newsletter, which I get in my inbox every day. It's written by Chris Branch. I like it because it's exactly the right length for me. Some newsletters have gotten to the point where they're trying

to put the entire newspaper in my inbox every morning, like every word of the newspaper, not just links to every story. And I'm like, if I wanted to read the whole newspaper, I would go read the whole newspaper. I'm all good. Yeah. You don't need 200 bullet points in here. I feel like That newsletter is nicely voicy for a daily newsletter, has the right top spin on it, has links to stories if I want to read them at the bottom. I like it. Probably more like that. Yeah. The other thing I want to ask you about is aggregation.

Have you noticed that they're making their writers do a lot of aggregation of just or just sort of write-throughs of news that comes up? You'll often see a byline that says David Shoemaker and the athletic staff. and then it's basically like a version of a wire story about a thing that just happened and not a huge, huge important sports thing, but a kind of eighth tier important sports thing. Yeah. Why are we doing that again? We don't have an AP subscription somewhere that we can just do that if we want

something on the athletic. Are we getting anything about having our writers work on stuff like that? Listen, this is part of the process that I don't. I mean, I totally understand on a very base level why this happens, but I don't, I, I, I completely agree with you. I don't really understand practically why anybody's wasting any resources doing that. The messenger, which we've talked about, shockingly little on this show, that was sort of the whole rap coming out of is there was a, there was a, there was a, you know, this, this huge new website launch and kind of all I had to show for it was a bunch of, you know, AP story writearounds. like Reddit article right around so like whatever, Reddit posts, sorry.

Yeah, it's weird. I mean, it's weird. And again, that's something that like, I think they could invest more, if you invest more in a broad strategy, covering the beat and also the podcast that you talked about, that can be, you can invest more in self-aggregation, right?

All those stories can be something you discuss on your, on whatever podcast, and then have somebody create a post out of that. Sure. But I don't know. I don't know what the philosophy is about like AP, you know, wire stories and so it, it seems ridiculous that you wouldn't do that. But I guess I do think that there's probably a philosophy that we pay so much to be comprehensive or spending so much money to be comprehensive. Why do we need to be pay someone else more money to be more comprehensive? I don't know. It goes back to this whole danger of trying to be everything to everybody at the same

time. And I think the cautionary tale here, as you mentioned earlier, is probably ESPN.com back when ESPN really cared about its website, where we can cover lots of stuff. We can hire lots of writers. That's all good. But then you get in a problem where you're just trying to do everything at the same time. So that is we're doing this? So the idea today is that every bit of sports news, no matter what it is must be written up on the athletic. And not, as you say, talked about on a podcast, you know, before the end of the day or within 24 hours or in a notesy column,

which some of their beat writers were doing for a while. I thought they were doing some really cool like numbered lists instead of traditional gamers, which was always smart. It has to actually just be written through. It does.

Like, why? You know, why is that? And who wants that? I see newspapers chasing those right through kind of things all the time. I'm just like, nobody's paying for this.

Nobody wants this. It's funny you say everything to everyone. I'm sure there's probably, people in-house, or at least in the New York Times, who are asking that same question. Why are we trying to be everything to everyone without realizing that they're really, ideally trying to be one thing to a rather narrow group of people. It's just like a manpower-heavy operation, right? You're not trying to be everything to everyone by just saying, we're covering all the local

sports teams on the beat, you know? I mean, that's just old school newspaper. Yeah. And I just think you still have to solve that national, local thing. that's going to be the hardest thing to do. Because on the one hand, it doesn't really make sense, or they've decided it doesn't really make sense

to cover every single protein with a full-time beat writer. That's just really, really hard to sustain. On the other hand, I think it's really, really hard to do a national website with tons and tons of people, with that many people, that you're going to be able to find

that many things to put them on. The craziest thing about the athletic from the start has been that the business model, while in some ways respectable and much needed, it's just totally counter to everything in the modern finance and tech world. And the fact that they got so much venture capital behind them just sort of beggars belief, I mean, they came around in exactly the right time. But the idea, like, it's not hard to imagine a future in which the athletic is like sustainably profitable. But it is really hard.

I mean, but it's harder to imagine a world in which the athletic has like 40x growth, you know, over whatever period of time, you know? I mean, it is, it's going to grow at a probably pretty reasonable rate.

If they put the right resources into it and commit to the beats over the next several years, but like you can't have this such an expansive, such a huge staff and grow at the same level as you could with a staff of 10 people. If like, you know, and five of them turn out to be super, multimedia superstars, right? But the New York Times, theoretically,

could be a good shepherd for that sort of operation, that sort of like reasonable slow growth operation. And I think that's the real future of it. It's also the right thing to do. It's also the biggest hole. You're not going to, regardless of how, of how, you know, the athletic was founded and what the motives were,

it was actually addressing a real problem, a real gap in modern sports media. and there is a way to do that really. There's a way to do what the athletics set out to do at the beginning, at least in the press releases, and do it respectfully, and respectably and respectfully. And there's a real future in it. But I think that there's, if you try to pivot too hard in any direction,

well, again, like we said this last week, you're just making up something new. Like, what are the odds of success? You know, you might as well just start, in scratch because you can't just pivot into something else and try and try to be some sort of different operation that we don't need. There's already a bunch of those. But that's why they would do it if they did. They pointed something else and say, look, that works and that works and that works. Look at the traction that these people are getting. It's like, well, you don't, you know, you're doing

something else. And if you stick to that, you could do something else really well. Last one I had for you, last element of the athletic I've seen is flooding the zone. This is something we've seen from the New York Times recently. So when Trump gets indicted. It happens every few months in the United States. You'll see one of these Times articles where it has all the stars of the times, like weighing in minute by minute during his court appearance. You click on it.

It's not a proper article. It's like Maggie Haberman, two sentences, and then Michael S. Schmidt, two sentences, and then somebody else two sentences and all, and it just kind of keeps going. People sort of lobbing thoughts about the state of the union address or an indictment, whatever it is. I noticed the Athletic did this last night with Leonel Messi when he was debuting in Miami. A couple of writers

on site and it seemed like a couple of writers doing it from afar. But basically you're taking your resources, you're saying this is a big moment and we're going to take all the resources we have. We have numbers like our newspaper that owns us. We have big numbers. We have lots of people.

We'll give you this kind of you know, mosaic of voices on a big story. So I guess that's something else. And so again, I think it's a little different for news

maybe than it is for sports. I'm kind of interested to see how the sports version of that would work. I could see it working for sports. You know,

is somebody going to read that during a game? I don't know. In the same way, they'd read that during an hours-long Trump arrival at a courthouse. I don't know.

But it's interesting. And it's certainly a way that the athletic would sort of resemble the times itself. I think it's a good idea. I mean, you're right. Maybe it won't have any traction. But I think that's a sort of, it's a flex, you know, in some ways. And that's, and you can do it.

And it shows that, you know, what you were able to do. And sometimes that's a worthwhile exhibition. Yeah. I mean, if you can do something that no one else can do, then you should, that you should lead. It's worth a shot. Coming up in 30 seconds, David, the end of. carpet coverage and a lot of other Hollywood coverage.

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 tweets to at the press box pod where there will always be gratefully received. Today's winner, David, comes from Andrew Poppice. On Sunday, you might have seen on the athletic or elsewhere that Carlos Alcaraz beat Novag Djokovic to win the Wimbledon men's title. it was once again an overworked Twitter joke to write

you could say that Djokovic couldn't escape from Alcaraz you think it's time to pick a new Don Siegel movie to riff on congrats. You've made the overword Twitter joke of the week. Now that Alcaraz is going to win like 20 titles, 20 major titles. We might just need to move on

from that joke. Yeah. All right, David, but in the notebook dump, Hollywood. We usually outsource our Hollywood takes to Matt Bellany and his excellent The Town podcast. Oh, yeah. But there is a side effect of the actor strike, which started last week. And it's not just that actors can't act. Actors are barred from promoting their projects in the press.

Right, Joe Pompeo and Natalie Jarvie in Vanity Fair. They continue Q&A's, Dunzo. Breezy Gab sessions on the Today Show or Good Morning America? Nope. Cover stories? Forget it. This is basically like the celebrity factory has shut down, says Janice Min, CEO of the Anchler. Of course, late night shows where actors also go when their movies come out are already shut down thanks to the writer's strike.

Actors will not be able to go to festivals this fall. Even Comic-Con apparently is at least mostly a no-fly zone for actors. So here's my question for you. What are we going to miss? from the red carpet movie is about to come out journalistic complex. Oh, man. Well, this is a tough one because a lot of the stuff you mentioned. Well, I think we're spoiled in terms of long form podcast interviews that come out of

promo tours and stuff. A lot of those, the sit downs with local reporters have basically just become, you know, meme filler at this point, you know? I mean, we watch it. If you watch your local news, you'll see some. some of that stuff, your local entertainment, regional entertainment show or whatever. But so much of that stuff now, at least, you know, I only see the, you know, hilarious bloopers or, you know, the really bad interviews. A lot of it won't be missed.

And I'm sure a lot of actors are, you know, going to be happy to skip out on some of that stuff. I don't know. What do you think? So, funny, I was going to say the LA Times the other day had a, what they bill is an exclusive, with Christopher Nolan about Oppenheimer and I was like I don't think

this is an exclusive given that he's talking to everybody and I found in fact found one of those local news interviews he had just given I'm not sure the meme has come out of that quite yet

but you know what I mean no it's funny I mean I find on the one hand a lot of it does feel very obligatory the red carpet stuff which you and I probably consume only when we see

tweets with the celebrity saying a mildly funny thing. The celebrity profiles and the Q&A's, which can be fun, but also seem very seaball, hitball to me. We're talking about the Times art section on Friday, and I open that up, and I'm like, so many of these articles boil down to, here's the person who just made a thing. Yeah. And again, there's not enough top spin on it.

there's not enough, there's not a nut graph on it where I'm like, you're making me think about this person or this thing in a different way. It's just the machine is churning along. Yeah. Then you hear one of those blockbuster celebrity interviews or director interviews this time of year, like when Bill does one, and you're like, oh, that was great. That makes me love this thing. Yeah, it's true. We've also, though, I mean, like I said, we're sort of spoiled for those big interview with those big interviews that like, you know, there's a lot of people that have already done, you know, they remember the first time I heard like a long form podcast with Tom Hanks. I think it was like a nerdist interview or something. He's done Bill's podcast since then.

But at some point, it's like if he had a new movie coming out, what I miss, would I miss the Tom Hanks interviews that would have come out of this? Or could I just go back and find the ones I listened to before and re-listen to them? That's the thing. I think in the, we talked about how the late night shows have really suffered because celebrities are sort of everywhere. And the four-minute celebrity interview that used to be the coolest thing in the world because you just didn't see celebrities between movies became sort of, eh, it's a little bit the same with the podcast interview when they're on the tour. It has to be like a really big actor or a really good interview to make you perk up. Or otherwise, you're like, there's a lot of those out there. This person is

around. I did like this workaround that was suggested by the Vanity Fair article. It says SAG would prefer that no performers attend Comic-Con. And if they do, they'll be able to sign autographs, but be barred from participating in moderated interviews unless the topic is say their entire career. Now, that may be a little bit exciting because I'm like, what do you hate when you see one of these interviews pop up on your favorite podcast? Oh, they spend the whole time talking about the new project. Yeah. Instead of just doing the cool sit down about this person's career.

It's the tad friend rule of celebrity profiles, right? The project turns out to be a stinker, even if the celebrity, the actor, the director is somebody you really like. So can we use this workaround? Say, oh, we're not promoting the project. Just doing a career retrospective. We don't even have to mention this new movie that might suck. Yeah.

Let's just do the whole thing. It's a dream scenario, right? Oh, my God. It's like Bill sitting there with the IMD list just going down. You're like, no, this is the interview I want to hear. Yeah. It's like going to see your favorite band that's been around for 30 years playing a concert. And you find out right before you go in, they're not allowed to play the stuff from the new album.

You're like, hell yeah. Let's get those greatest hits. Don't have to wait for the encore anymore. Do we think those interviews, the red carpet, what's left of the magazine cover pieces, the Q&As, the podcasts. How much do you think they help sell movies? How much do you think they actually propel somebody to go to the theater or to watch succession on HBO at this date?

I mean, I think that no one of those things has some exclusive sort of supernatural power to get you to do it. But I think that every, that all promotion now is just, measured in exposure, right? I mean, we also don't like get the newspaper. Most people don't get the newspaper and open the art section and see the full page ad for the new movie that's coming out, right? A lot of people are watching so much streaming stuff.

They never get a commercial. We don't, I mean, you know, depending on where you live, you might not see billboards for new movies when you're driving down the street. You certainly don't like walk, you know, drive slow down the car when you pass the movie theater to see the big signs to see what's coming up next beginning. So so much of it, so much of the traditional way of, of, you know, advertising and marketing films is going out the window. All you can really do, not all you can really do, but a big thing that you can really do is just, you know, get a hundred articles about Matt Damon in a week. And just so maybe like it'll jog your

memory like, oh yeah, there is a Matt Damon movie I heard something about, you know, and that's what I want to go see right now that I have five minutes, you know, five hours to spare. So I mean, I think that it's actually the volume that ends up being super helpful in a lot of cases, you know, because you might listen to a great two-hour podcast interview and really and come out desperately wanting to see whatever that director or actor, whoever was involved in. But you're not listening to all the podcasts. You know, it's not, you don't necessarily get exposed to everything in the way the traditional marketing campaign might try to expose you. and yeah, I think that I think it's a volume game. My wronger was Christopher Nolan

once upon a time kind of press shy? Didn't he have a little I don't remember you very well maybe right. He didn't want to talk about his films so much. I'm missing remembering that. He always liked to seem like he always like talking about like the IMAX production process.

Yeah. But I don't know if he like to talk about the theory of his film. know, that's a Sean Finnisci question. We'll refer that over to Sean over at the Big Pick. I was hoovering up the last batch, apparently, of celebrity profiles over the weekend, which came in the form of a Q&A with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling in the New York Times about the upcoming Barbie movie. Yeah.

And I really, I was so excited to play this game with you. I guess we'll have to call it off now after one round because there will be no more Barbie profiles. but I was just going to count the number of high culture references made by the actors in every piece about Barbie so as to convince everybody reading it, especially in a place like the New York Times, this is not just like some dumb animated Barbie movie. This is actually a very high concept Barbie movie. And just in that one Q&A, we're mentioned Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can, paintings and Joseph Campbell's

the hero with a thousand faces. Yeah. Just throwing those out there. So you reader will know what we're up to here. Some news from the campaign, David. Oh, that's a turn. Remember that?

Politico on Saturday had a piece by Alex Eisenstadt that got some attention. It was about Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor. The headline was DeSantis campaign shed staff amid cash crunch. Now, everybody knows that DeSantis' campaign is floundering and has been floundering for some time, at least for now. It's early.

But it's very hard, as you know, for straight news reporters to just come out and say, DeSantis is floundering. That's why we've been in this. Donors are getting nervous news cycle for like a month where they go find somebody at the SuperPact to give them a quote to say what they already know is true. Yeah. But here's a data point, right? He's shedding staff. So now we can write what everybody was already thinking.

That's the small point here. Here's the big point. DeSantis is going to talk to CNN's Jake Tapper on Tuesday. You remember Ron DeSantis's attitude toward the quote-unquote corporate media? He didn't need him. I got my boys over there at Fox News.

That's all I need to get me through this campaign. He was giving an interview to Howard on Sunday, which is the sign that you've officially given an interview to every single Fox News host. Now he's going to go and talk to Jake Tapper on Tuesday. Yeah. Which will make for some very interesting watching. And also, by the way, the proof that all the stuff about the media, about the liberal media, about the corporate media, it's not about ideology. It's about polls.

Yeah. If you're in the driver's seat, if you're looking good against the pseudo-incumbent, Donald Trump, I don't need the media. I don't need anything but Fox News. But when you're behind, you turn into Mike Pence. You want to, you want an interview? Let's do 10 of them. Yeah. Let's do the Tom Hanks

style podcast. We're nervous. First of all, you're absolutely right. And you know, it is BS or whatever. But this was also the plan all along. He gets the cred of snubbing the mainstream media until the moment where he

wants to make the turn. And he can, he gets to keep to cred, right? And now he just gets to do whatever interview he wants to. I totally agree. And I think it's tricky for Tapper and CNN because we know what happened last time with Donald Trump in the town hall. And remember, Jake Tapper doesn't have to end this interview by looking Rhonda Santis in the eye and say, sir, you've convinced me over the last hour about your approach to public education in Florida. I now, I now agree with everything you said. He doesn't have to do that.

he just has to survive the interview. He just has to get through it without it being a complete catastrophe. Yeah. And then, as you point out, he says, hey, you know, I kept the corporate media at bay, and then I went in and look what I did. I survived that Jake Tapper interview. I got through it. Politicians do that all the time.

Mm-hmm. You win for not completely losing. Yeah. Well, and sometimes if you're, you know, from the far right now, you can win by, by, you know, if the interviewer goes too far, or is perceived be pushing too hard or to be using, you know,

woke talking points, then you can kind of win on a technicality. Yeah, Shelby Talcott and Semaphore says, in choosing Tapper, who is known to aggressively fact-check subjects,

men interview, and follow up on questions, campaign may be hoping to engineer a confrontation similar to Trump, CNN Town Hall, to generate new interest. We will be watching on Tuesday.

Last one for you, before we do the headline, I finally signed up for threads, are you over there on threads yet? No, I'm not. I just got so amused by seeing all the people who were posting on Twitter and saying, wow,

just got back from threads or blue sky or Mastodon. It really doesn't matter which one. And they sounded like the person in the sci-fi novel who had just gone to an off-world planet and then returned to Earth, or walk through some magic portal and then walk back, you should see what it's like out there.

it's the same as here but different better so I sign up for threads I get on in the first two threads is that what we're calling them sure whatever the tweet thing is that I see are from George to Kai

and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich Chewy we're home these are the tweets I was being served on Twitter for people that I might agree with ideologically but do not fact follow. So why did I go over to

threads again? Also, people were wanting to follow me and I was having to confirm that they could follow me. My privacy setting may be screwed up somehow, but I was like, now this is a lot of work. Somebody wants to follow me and I have to confirm them

to be one of my followers. I understand what we're trying to do here. Might sound good in theory, but dude, can you imagine having to approve every one of your Twitter followers? followers. No way. Says like something you and I have time to do over at Threads.

Anyway, come see us over at Threads. Tons of exclusive press box content will be appearing there. Trust me. Along with George Dekai tweets. All right. It's time for David Chumaker. Guesses the Drain Pun Headline. Yeah.

Friday's headline about an octopus that lost its arms was so long, suckers. A lot of people sent us a New York Times headline about a lovable sea otter. I don't know if you saw this called. headline was she steals surfboards by the seashore. That is indeed funny, but is a rip off of a previous New York Times headline about aquatic life, which was she studies sea snakes on the seafloor. Yeah. So we cannot possibly accept it. Today's headline, David, comes from me. It's from the New York Post, the previously mentioned New York Post. Quinnon Williams, so the New York Jets, you know who Quinn and Williams is, the defensive tackle. Sure. He got what the post calls in true tabloid fashion.

a truck load of cash a truck load of cash in a new contract what was the New York Post strained pun headline it's a truck pun is that

where you're leading? It's a truck pun yes it's a truck pun like making a truck what if I didn't want to buy a truck I wanted to lease something no Rent something. Rent something maybe to take me across country.

Take my stuff across the country. Moving van. Maybe a specific brand. U-Haul. And this is Quinn and William, so it's Q Hall. Q Hall. Q-haul.

That's good. He is David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Cervantes coming up Thursday. More talk about the 2024 election and how Jake Dapper did on Tuesday night. with A. St. Ed Herndon in the New York Times' run-up podcast. That will be great fun. And then Shoemaker and I return one week from today with more lukewarm takes about the media.

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