I don't know. While it was an interesting piece, the whole Cult of Charlie Sheen (and that's what SI is glomming onto here) felt a bit played out in May. So I can see why Grantland didn't cover this one. I mean, who celebrates a 22nd anniversary?
(Caveat...its at home, not read it yet, but....)
Come on. Given that the entire piece that follows is an "analysis" of Hollywood movie making, an area in which he has 0 self-professed expertise, we're to believe that he has "no idea" how the spectacle of his dear-and-beloved NBA has evolved the way it has?
One of the many weaknesses of this article was the fact that he took a term with no universal, concrete definition - like "movie star" - listed people whom he though were and were not worthy of the appellation, but then didn't define it? I always thought of a "movie star" as someone who has the lead role in featured movies. If Simmons has a different definition, then he should provide that for us. By my definition, Ryan Reynolds is a movie star because, well, he stars in movies!
Except he does define it:
You can disagree with his definition, but he repeats it several times throughout the article. He just did it in a smoother way than the execrable, "Websters defines movie star..." cliche.
This was my exact reaction, but I was afraid to post it because I was afraid I would sound like a simpleton. And I'll tell you this, if I was Ryan Reynolds your damn right I would consider myself a movie star......and I bet the bevy of hot tail I would score would agree.
Actually, in the actual article, he waffles back and forth between this definition of star, defined as someone who makes moves that do well in the box office, and another implicit definition, defined as someone who makes good movies--juxtapose the definition you present with the key premise of the piece:
So in one definition, Smith is a star because his movies are popular. In another, people only believe he's a star because the movies do well despite not being very good.
That's understandable. His father was an abusive duck and his mother a maid at a Howard Johnson's. I've seen Merlin play Big Buck Hunter at a bar and the loon pulled out a real gun when those dumb bonus ducks starting going across the screen.
And to write longer pieces. I wasn't too familiar with the guy until Grantland launched. I've been reading some of his old stuff for ESPN.com and it's great. He has a sort of primer on SEC football that may not be worth much to college football diehards, but was fantastic for an outsider like myself.
I was feeling nostalgic earlier in the week looking at pictures of my nieces at the same 4th of July picnic and parade my sisters and I used to go to as kids. Then I just read this terrific story today. I'm sure mom & pop type stores disappear all the time all over the world. It's a sad fact of life. This felt however like a particularly American story. It was sad to read, but just the act of reading it gave me a sweet, wonderful taste of Americana that I haven't experienced in a long time. Very wabi-sabi.
I thought it was crap. She's trying to be snarky and clever and she's not. Almost no one named Molly (except Ivins) ever is.
Watchdogging Grantland?
Would it? How many editors, fact checks and proofreaders would you need to do a fairly thorough job given the amount of content they push out and how much would it slow down stories? If you could only write 90% as much material and everything gets pushed pack a day or two would that hurt the site? I honestly don't know but I do know that really editing a piece carefully is time consuming.
Plus do you really think thats what a large majority of the sites traffic even wants? They want content IMO. Certainly over editing as long as the sites writing talent is quality. So far I believe it is.
I think you're overstating the tradeoff. Most of the mistakes could be caught with - literally - 20-30 minutes of proofreading a piece. Which is probably 20-30 minutes more than they do at the moment.
A good proofreader proofs 2500-3000 words an hour; the Bill Simmons draft diary with the Griffin quote is about 5500 words so proofing it one more time and making the corrections is maybe two hours of work. On the shorter articles, half an hour, sure. They do 7-8 articles a day; you're talking 1 or 2 FTEs to do one more careful proofread for everything on the site. I think it's a no brainer but what do I know.
I generally agree with this. Grantland is more good than bad, and Deadspin has many terrible qualities: An utter lack of humanity/empathy, appealing to the lowest common denominator, total viciousness regardless of the object. But Deadspin does have some really smart writers, and does publish some stuff that's worth reading. The bad thing is, Deadspin doesn't give a shit; the good thing is, Deadspin doesn't give a shit.
I agree with this too, but I did think the Shia La Beef thing was an improvement. That said, the Hemingway footnote was a perfect example of how useless Grantland footnotes are in general. Actually, it occurred to me that ML had missed the most obvious point of contrast between Hemingway and Shia: While Hemingway's curated persona was a cartoon of masculinity, his best writing gets to the core of male insecurity and fear as well as any writer every has, while simultaneously identifying the life-affirming aspects of male code and ritual that help broken young men to endure. Shia is all cartoon.
It's not important; nothing written on either site is. It's entertaining, seeing an ego-driven project called on stuff by another self-righteous bunch of pricks.
So there's some holistic good to writing that is independent of, say, factual errors?
Some of those are nit picky but the Kimmel one about Wolf Blitzer was hilarious. Nice story you made up there, Jim.
Really? I admittedly wouldn't know that Blake Griffin didn't have a twin, but most of the egregious errors on there I caught instantly (Patrick Beverly, no Game 7 in 1974 SCF, "OBS" as a stat in that terrible anti-stats piece). If they had someone reading this stuff, even quickly, I bet they catch most of the errors that aren't nit-picky. Hell they could have an intern read it for free and if he or she is smart I bet they catch most stuff. If Kimmel makes up a story that's tougher to verify, but that's also more on him to y'know, not make up shit.
Only a pretty big hockey fan notices the problems with your first two examples without looking them up, and only a fairly big stathead gets the third one. Most SoSH posters could do a great job at picking up these problems but we're a weird bunch. To actually get this stuff consistently right you have to look everything up in the editing process and not just count on the general knowledge of your editors.
According to Scocca, it's important because it gives a voice to Grantland's voiceless and disenfranchised. Really.:
The difference between Deadspin "watchdogging" ESPN in general and Grantland, is in the former Deadspin is the funny guy picking on the big bully, whereas they clearly view Grantland as a competitor and are doing what they can to take it down a peg. Their motivations are understandable, it's just not nearly as funny.
If a person points out sloppy errors in someone's writing, that person shouldn't broadcast his ignorance regarding apostrophies -- twice! -- in his comment:
