WASHINGTON — Six men sit in a staggered semi-circle, some slouching, dressed anywhere from casual to formal, talking about sports, movies and generally whatever else comes to mind. It feels like it could be the corner booth of a sports bar on a game day. Except there are microphones, a stage and a hundred or so strangers sitting in an audience facing them, soaking in the words and waiting to ask questions.
Last Wednesday, Politics and Prose hosted a half dozen writers and contributors to the ESPN project Grantland at Busboys and Poets in Takoma. Many in the overflow crowd, which was mostly white and mostly male, sported various articles of sports merchandise, some of it clearly meant to attract the attention of the writers present.
There was the young man in the Atlanta Hawks sweatshirt, an appeal to Rembert Browne, the Atlanta native and unabashed hometown fan. And there was the guy in the Expos hat and old branding Washington Nationals Jose Vidro jersey, a player Jonah Keri once called “the best second baseman in Expos history by a wide margin.”
Keri was, effectively, the star of the show — which also included Browne, Joe House, Ben Lindbergh, Wesley Morris and Andrew Sharp — there to promote his book “Up, Up, & Away,” a history of the Expos franchise. The group was also selling and signing copies of Grantland Quarterly, the printed collection of some of the site’s best content.
Instead of a reading, the loose, roundtable style with the open Q&A session replicated the conversational style of much of the site’s writing. Grantland publishes plenty of interviews and analysis pieces, but it is classified, and even self-identifies, as a blog.
Grantland, which launched June 8, 2011, has a home base in Los Angeles, but it is highly decentralized and relies upon writers scattered all over the country to work almost entirely independently. In this group, House and Sharp are local. Browne, Lindbergh and Morris all came in on the train from New York, while Keri calls Denver home.
“The way the staff works is the only central place is in L.A.,” says Keri. “That’s where the editors are all based…it’s the heart and soul of the company.”
And as scattered as the writers are geographically, they also bring very different styles, not just from one another, but from The Sports Guy himself, site founder and editor-in-chief, Bill Simmons.
“At first, was tough to know what to make of the site from the outside,” says Keri. “Bill had accomplished so much. It was like, are we going to feel like a bunch of Simmons’? But we’re not. It’s a totally mixed group, and that’s fun.”
In fact, many writers sound nothing at all like Simmons. Zack Lowe and Kirk Goldsberry break down basketball in far more technical terms, detailing many of the finer points of strategy and the ever-advancing field of analytics within the sport. And there’s the whole pop culture side of the site, which attracted such writers as the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Morris, who came from the Boston Globe.
“I think the assumption was that it was going to be a very sports-oriented site,” says Morris. “Without really feeling any pressure to do it, we can leave the box where, at the paper, that would be your beat. That’s not a knock against newspapers, but it’s the way the structure works. “
For instance, Browne traveled to Ferguson, Missouri following Michael Brown’s death and found himself in the middle of the fray when tensions between protesters and the police boiled over. Robert Mays, who is mostly a football writer for the site, went to Coachella to write about the electronic music scene, something he is passionate about.
“Anybody operating a blog, there’s pressure to have daily content,” says Morris. “It’s a luxury to be able to sort of follow your bliss and your brain instead of chasing stories and chasing the culture. A lot of what we do, in a weird way, is letting the culture come to us.”
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a strong editorial structure, though. Behind the scenes, there’s plenty of thought put into planning what the site will look like in the days, weeks, and even months to come.
“This is a well-oiled newsroom,” says Keri. “I’ve worked in newsrooms my whole life. It has adults running this thing.”
He relates a story about an email he received from his editors in January. They wanted to pick his brain for the best baseball ideas he had, but not for the offseason, or Spring Training, or Opening Day.
“They said, ‘we’re going to blow up baseball in July.’”
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“When the great scorer comes to write against your name, he marks not that you won or lost, but how you played the game.” – Grantland Rice
The future of Grantland is uncertain. ESPN and Simmons have found themselves publicly at odds several times over the past year, and his contract is up later in 2015. Whether he will stay or what the site might continue to look like in his absence is cloudy future, one which he is not publicly discussing. But one thing is clear — despite its antithetical approach to the Buzzfeed or Upworthy models of new media, with the backing of a giant like ESPN, the experiment has worked.
At the same time that its creator’s future is in the air, the foundation of the platform — its extensive group of writers — continues to expand both its ranks and its breadth of coverage. In all, there are nearly 20 employees with “editor” in their title and nearly 60 contributors, meaning that content is coming from a profusion of different voices. And as the number of those voices increases, the less the collective whole sounds like the old Page 2 that used to be Simmons’ corner of ESPN.com.
“I’m surprised at just how capacious whatever Grantland is has become,” says Morris. “It’s not just us writing about sports and pop culture. The popularity and the warm, enthusiastic reception of those stories suggest there isn’t just one thing the people think the site is.”
It seems to matter less how the writers fit into any particular professional mold, as much as how they fit a personal one. Keri shared at Wednesday’s event that he was recruited by Dan Fierman, Grantland’s editorial director, based on his prior writing. Keri felt the site was a match, but Fierman gave him one hard, steadfast rule.
“No a–holes,” Keri recalls.
That mantra is spelled out more eloquently in Fierman’s last written contribution to the site, something he has done only a handful of times over the past few years. While eulogizing comedian Harris Wittels in February, Fierman opened his obituary thusly:
“There are few people in this life who are decent. There are even fewer that are flat-out talented.”
It appears to be Grantland’s mission to find those that are both, and give them the freedom to work both within and beyond the space they’ve carved for themselves. They are hardly the first entity to attempt such an approach, but they might be unique in the backing and reach of their parent company, ESPN.
If Simmons remains at ESPN, it will be interesting to see how his creation continues to expand into new spaces. If he does not, it will be interesting to see if the operation will survive and continue to thrive on its own. Whether or not Grantland can live without ESPN, has it grown into enough of its own entity to live without Simmons?
