A blog and nothing but since 2003. Some tech, lots of music, and if rambling was money, drinks are on me.
Everybody is right and wrong
If you didn’t watch the video that Christian shared yesterday in which Buzz Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights goes at it against Deadspin editor Will Leitch over sports blogs, it’s worth a watch. If you don’t have the 18 minutes to watch it, the summary goes something like this: Buzz Bissinger is pissed as all hell that sports blogs are pretty much evil, Bob Costas mostly agrees with Buzz but is a lot more calm about it, Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards kind of agrees with Costas and Bissinger, but makes the other guys look pretty dumb with his calm diplomacy, and Leitch makes some good points, but has a pretty hard argument to make.
The thing is, I’ve always really liked Will Leitch. I read (mostly past tense) Deadspin because of him. He’s smart and funny and, in spite of his skewering some of the public antics of athletes (many of whom probably deserve it), has shown a lot of heart. I mean, this is a guy whose emotional writeups when his beloved Cardinals winning the World Series actually brought tears to my eyes, and I hate the Cardinals. The guy is good.
But he’s turned a lot of the writing on Deadspin over to other writers, and they’re awful; everything that Bissinger and Costas and Edwards have a problem with. They’re cruel and immature and take far more delight in bringing people down than talking about sports. The site used to be a frequent stop for me. I rarely look at it any more.
During the conversation (which I had to take in 2-3 minute intervals because I found it a little intense and shrill for a single sitting), I thought as much about blogs in general as sports blogs specifically. Where is the line? Does being clever make up for being cruel? That would explain why I love Wonkette and loathe Perez Hilton.* All of these blogs have a common thread, though: operating in isolation, they treat celebrities, athletes and politicians as though they’re completely outside the world of the blogs’ writers. I understand the fascination with the famous and I think it’s similar to the fascination with reality TV: it’s the interest in others’ lives.
Ultimately, the take-away from Costas’s show is that the internet has muddied a lot of waters. It’s a lot more complex than just “internet killed the newspaper star” or that Big Brother exists but is ultimate democracy and freedom instead of totalitarianism. It’s a new world that’s actually pretty hard to wrap your head around. I guess I’m just glad that conversations like this are taking place. It’s not a matter of Deadspin, etc being immoral or wrong, but I’m glad that people with blogs (ahem) are actually being called on defend themselves and think of their actions.
I think Will Leitch is a smart guy, and I really only have any interest in Deadspin when it’s him writing. I don’t think that interview will change anything for him, but I do hope that maybe it’ll make him rethink the “________ is a shithead/douchebag” tone that the site’s taken on a little more of.
* Seriously, this guy has zero redeeming value. He’s shallow (empty, really) and endlessly mean, and writes at about a second-grade level.
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May 2nd, 2008 at 12:47 am
I totally recommend trying to catch a repeat viewing of the entire show on HBO. It was basically a Town Hall on sports and media; the segment on blogs was only one portion of the show. It was certainly the most heated and entertaining portion, but I also enjoyed the more level-headed bits on sports talk radio, TV, the evolving relationship b/t athletes and the journalists who cover them and race issues. Check it out if you can. It really was a great show.
But yeah…like you I don’t really read Deadspin anymore. Still, I kind of consider myself a fan of Will Leitch and I think I like him even more after this. (I’m kind of curious to read his recent book, actually.) Anyways, it was obvious that he was totally set up and railroaded and I think he did himself all kinds of favor by remaining cool and just kinda taking it. He wasn’t ever really given the proper opportunity to defend himself. I found it ironic that in order to make the (rather sweeping) point that he thinks blogs are cruel and needlessly vulgar, Bissinger had to resort to being cruel and vulgar himself. Anyways…he misses the point. Bloggers aren’t trying to take jobs away from newspaper writers or journalists. They have no interest in supplanting anything; they’re just providing a new kind of forum that can and should easily co-exist with whatever form so-called legitimate journalism takes on. It’s the responsibility of newspapers themselves to find a way to survive and remain relevant.
I mean, no one reads Deadspin because they want last night’s scores; they read it for the snark, humor and attitude. It’d be like saying Wonkette is trying to supplant the New York Times. Totally stupid. These snarky blogs are obviously not for everyone. And yes, there is lots of stuff that isn’t appropriate for younger audiences, but can’t the same be said for the tv version of Friday Night Lights?!
Buzz needs to chill. And Bob needs to learn the difference between a post (ie, written by a blogger/author) and its subsequent comments/commenters.
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:00 am
Oh…and the bit where Bob Costas read from the comments of people sounding off on Sean Salisbury’s firing? Bob missed the point that those were comments, not Deadspin writers…but the point wasn’t made but the venom spewed Salisbury’s way was done for a reason: this is a man who mercilessly insulted his co-host on air and once emailed photos he took of his penis to female co-workers. So yeah, Sean Salisbury *is* a douchebag.
I’m sure there’s a lot of needless negative energy over at Deadspin (and Wonkette, etc). But sometimes people in the public eye are skewered as result of their own douchebaggary!
May 3rd, 2008 at 11:57 am
Great post, Reid.
The thing that bothers me about internet journalism is that for some reason, nobody expects the bar to remain as high as it’s set in any other kind of journalism. I guess inherently that has to do with the very nature of it: you have to go through a lot less to get something published on the internet. You can think of something and have it ready for the world to read within seconds, as opposed to print journalism where every piece of writing has to go through certain channels before it goes to the press (although the volume of copyediting involved in all journalism has dropped significantly in reason years, and it shows).
So I think, quite simply, people get lazy. Reactions are immediate: Deadspin commenters put up an insane volume of geek sports boyclub one-liners within an hour of every posting, and if you can get that much reaction that fast no matter what you post, ie. that many hits on the site, what reason do you have to make quality posts all the time? You go for the jugular, which is to go for all the things you talked about. There’s no reason to consistently push for the best quality. It is damn, damn hard for even the best writers to consistently produce creative, original, well-thought-out pieces of integrity, which is why there are so few truly good journalists in the world. But on the internet, it seems that even the goal of doing that has fallen by the wayside. These guys have no reason to push themselves, and the work starts to suffer fast. This is also the reason that Bill Simmons — without whom there would be no deadspin — got so bad and stale. I just believe he kept to what had been successful for him before. He didn’t push himself. I don’t read deadspin anymore either, and I too love Will Leitch — I think he has a real talent; he was also once engaged to a girl I grew up with and from what little interaction I’ve had with him he’s an unbelievably nice guy — but I think he got caught up in this machine and was either too overwhelmed or too comfortable to fight for quality.
It’s a real shame, because the internet is the present and the future and I believe that it has the potential to produce journalistic outlets of high quality that are continually relevant and ground-breaking. But I really can’t think of a single website that has managed to do that well. The best news site on the web is still the New York Times. And they don’t know from quality because of no computers.
May 4th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Christian and Annie…always great to get both of your views.
This is a difficult issue for me in that I can’t quite put into words what bothers me about it. I do agree that journalistic quality has really declined and I do think that it has a lot to do with blogs.
I think that blogs are fantastic (obviously), but I think that while the quick delivery of blogs has given a great deal of good value to the world of journalism, that very same quick delivery is being used as an excuse for everything from poor writing to paparazzi-style cruelty. It’s like someone making a political statement as a joke, but then responding to any counter argument with, “Calm down! It’s only a joke!”
Christian, while I think that Bob Costas needs to be a little more familiar with the difference between blog creators and commenters, I also think that he makes a good point in that creators provide the forum and steer the tone of it. I don’t think that it’s any mistake that some blogs (like, say, Comics Curmudgeon) have much wittier comments than other blogs. The writers set the tone, and the tone of Deadspin is definitely that you’re free to write “I’d hit that” and “what a douchebag” (no matter how appropriate it is).
Ultimately, I think that blogs have a lot of potential to be the new media instead of just a complement to it. But like with everything else in society, it needs people to complain and hold it to a standard. As shrill as Bissinger was, as old timey as Costas was, as self-serving (let’s be honest) as Braylon Edwards was, I really like that they’re taking Deadspin and other sports blogs to task. They need it.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:37 am
good interview with will leitch that i’m surprised hasn’t been passed around in light of the controversy…
http://www.edrants.com/segundo/will-leitch-bss-189/