To which I agree with you. I don't blame ESPN for closing Grantland down because it was losing money on the venture because, like you stated, the project to find an alternate revenue stream ultimately failed. I think the problem is that it was hard, pre-Grantland, to find a mixture of writers that provide great articles over all sports and not just one specific sector (e.g. Hardwood Paroxysm). And, of course, in order for that to happen there needs to be a huge financial backer (e.g. ESPN). I don't think we'll see another "Grantland" for a long while. I just hope that its writers (including Lowe) will find great landing spots where their articles won't get lost.
There's a lot less intermediate reporting now, not just in sports but in journalism in general. A few sites are very good, while most are crappy, i.e. on the one hand you have prestige sites like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal (not all would agree with their editorial opinions, but both have news and feature divisions that are just plain better than most other places), and at the other end you have a mass of trivia and news aggregators. The prestige sites are struggling to make money, but it's pretty obvious they are valuable. The aggregator sites likely have no value at all, but are savvy enough to trick people into surfing there. The sports reporting business is so out of whack that w/o Grantland we'll be left with only the trivia.
Grantland is the only in-depth venue from ESPN. That says a lot about the biggest sports outlet in the US. A lot of large publishers and news outlets keep a money-losing "academic" division or something like that to maintain respectability. I guess ESPN figured no in-depth sports fans respect the ESPN brand anyway, so they say, "Shuck it!"
Ya, I agree - ESPN mainland had no idea how to run a site like Grantland if there wasn't a guy with some vision/plan in place to drive it and clearly they don't have the talent in the company outside of Simmons to pick it up and run with it(the Chris Connolley replacement was laughable) so it just made sense for them to shut it down. I think there were really two issues with Grantland. Simmons had a goofy vision of an "internet famous" sports site and I think he had some success in pulling that off BUT there was never the help from ESPN in finding advertisers to fund the project because mainland ESPN didn't have a strong enough knowledge of the market it was trying to play in - you have to grow those advertising revenue streams, and this was an old business revenue model trying to apply it's old business connections to something entirely different and new. Imagine the old ESPN guy with a rolodex of advertising contacts on his desk that he has been keeping since the 70s - it's not going to do him a lot of good trying to find revenue streams for sites like Grantland because he doesn't know how to sell it to people who generally fund far more traditional models. The other point of failure was that ESPN just didn't know how to drive people to Grantland - they didn't get the "bump" of having the the most well known big brother in the world. I can only remember a few times ever getting to Grantland from ESPN - in short there was no synergy. I think Simmons did a good job curating the site but obviously he would have been more successful if he had access to more new school business guys to connect a revenue stream to the content(like the guys at Vice for instance). ESPN ultimately takes the blame though for green lighting the project, cutting it's leader after failing to have a plan to support the site, and ultimately having no backup plan in place when it's leader was gone.
...seems to me that the internet has proven that if your not hip to the new game, you'll get left in the dust and leave the door open for new competitors. To that end, if your successful you HAVE to continue exploring new business paths in the age where how we consume media is changing very quickly.
they messed up in negotiating contracts with nba, nfl etc. http://www.businessinsider.com/espn-mistakes-led-to-layoffs-2015-10
I'm guessing just cost-cutting coming from Disney. Iger already said a few months ago that ESPN's business model would face challenges in the short-term. These layoffs around ESPN are them probably getting ready for those challenges via cost-cutting.
When did Lowe day Houston sucks? I swear the second someone says ANYTHING about the rockets he's dismissed as an idiot by a lot of you guys. Lowe is a great writer
What a shame. Grantland was a great site that actually produced quality content. Now ESPN is no better than some garbage site like Fansided.
If grantland wasn't making money then its hard to be mad at ESPN for shutting it down. I hate ESPN for lots of reasons. this aint one.
It's fair game to criticize them if you believe they didn't invest enough into GL's continued success and viability.
It's a shame that Bill Simmons valued his own petty, childish gripes with ESPN over the livelihood of dozens and dozens of people underneath him. That site died last April the moment that Simmons decided that his team's future wasn't worth him acting like a grownup.
I find this a hilarious deflection of blame here. Apparently ESPN did not value the livelihood of all those writers either.
They're both awful, but had Simmons acted like a leader as his editor title demanded, ESPN would have found plenty of room for his site's pieces on the front page of the site, and would have kept Grantland around even if it broke even at best. ESPN's capitulation to Goodell and the ****show that is the NFL is embarrassing and transparent, but it's to be expected. If you piss off a brand partner, you're doing dozens and dozens underneath you a career-changing disservice. I was almost fired once for doing as much, and would have completely understood why my bosses followed through on pulling my plug. The Simmons as Martyr bull**** is embarrassing. Maybe feel sorry for the 40-50 unseen editors, producers, and fringe writers (to say nothing of the big names on the site) whose lives were altered because he continued to act like a prissy little prep school boy.
There's something to be said about a company who's already absurdly profitable sacrificing the lone source of credible journalism they provide.
