Tuesday, August 23, 2011

OMG! Those Deadspin Guys Are TOTES Jelly

Nothing, it seems, about Deadspin or Grantland can be discussed without amateur dramatics. A refrain that grew in intensity over the last month reached a kind of crescendo on message boards and Twitter yesterday when Deadspin printed three pieces about Grantland: "The editors and contributors of Deadspin must be consumed with a mindless, soul-eating jealousy of Bill Simmons, working for ESPN and having footnotes." Or something.

Increasingly, blog and board posters seem to assume that, in sports journalism, Grantland is The One True Gig, and all who do not hold it within their grasp wither to sightless wraiths screaming in the void.

Now, if you're the sort of person who enjoys dismissing an entire argument because you can detect a shred of partiality ("Anthropogenic Climate Change can't be real — scientists are just making stuff up for that biiiiiiiig state school tenure money!"), you might want to bail out here. After all, I wrote a bilious screed about Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman and Malcolm Gladwell, and I did that out of consuming jealousy. Worse, that piece resulted in people from Deadspin noticing me and dropping the occasional link to this site on their "Good Morning, Deadspin" roundups. Bottom line, I can't be trusted.

However, if you're willing to look past my Iago-like malice, let's look instead at the three Deadspin articles that allegedly demonstrated a critical mass of jealousy:

1. A link to Katie Baker's mailbag column, which promotes something written by a former Deadspin writer that everyone there ostensibly still likes. It also features content from another Deadspin contributor. Under normal circumstances, I'm pretty sure that driving pageload traffic (and ad revenue) to your mortal enemies is sort of a bad way to go about their destruction. That said, it's a cool thing to do if you're trying to give a shout-out to your friends. And as far as consuming fixations go, that postful of pimping included 26 whole words.

2. Word counts are fun. For instance, if you include the headline, the second Deadspin piece about Grantland features a whopping 20 words. This doesn't even constitute enough to meet the standards for a jealous text. Your high-school-aged niece can crank out more words than this, sight unseen, left-handed, just about some dumb bimbo classmate's white poplin shirt from Banana Republic.

Second, the piece links to a ludicrous commercial airing on the #1 sports media broadcasting brand about arguably the #1 most talked-about sports media website. Coincidentally, Deadspin is a sports media blog. The presence of three posts about the world's largest sports media company on any website with a "sports media" brief represents a staggering non-event. It's not like opening Cat Fancy to scope out the purrrfect young Brazilian Shorthair hotties and finding that some jackass has vomited a 4,000-word essay about "Operation Barbarossa" in the middle of it.

What Deadspin's doing seems an awful lot like their fucking job. Ascribing some deeply personal motive to their doing it is like sitting in the backseat of a pizza delivery guy's car and going, "Driving, huh? Good Lord. What is it with you and driving? Why don't you spend all your time waiting for pizza to cook or walking up people's front walkways? You must reeeeeeaaaaaally have it in for roads to run thousands of pounds of vehicle across them all the time, asshole."

Further, the presence of a link to that video makes practical sense. Watch it, please — just watch it. On one hand, they'd be fools not to post something about it, since such a silly ad drives traffic, making it a good business decision for Deadspin. Two, it's just so goddamn bad. For just a moment, put aside that somewhere during the pitch phase, someone obviously made a strong bid for authenticity, demanding that everything from scene, to casting to filmic tone must scream, "100% Eastman VISION Premiere Color Print Douchebag." Forget, too, the preening self-indulgence that, yes, you know who this Simmons guy is; you recognize the word-count reference, and, yes, you care about this in the sort of significant way that would involve your potentially losing money.

What really stands out is the sensation that you're watching people with so much money at this point that even the misbegotten has no expense limit. Beyond the repugnance that makes you want to punch the bettor in the face so hard that he drops out of his MBA program, rediscovers books not written by the as-yet unindicted, and decides to put his Vegas money toward a trip to Florence, the commercial is wreathed in waste. It would actually be less offensive just to watch waste — actual waste — like someone recreating John Lennon's deranged scene from Magical Mystery Tour. Only this time, instead of shoveling mud in front of a fat woman until she starts weeping for mercy, he twitchily and ecstatically dumps spadefuls of money into a device that's half-toilet, half-shredder. Maybe something adorable could starve next to it.

3. Last but not least, Deadspin ran a corrections piece, which, combined with the two other Grantland links might have signified a truly embittered fit of pique. But they've been running the corrections pieces for weeks now, and they too have have a salient point, which is that Grantland articles often suffer major grammatical and usage errors, as well as errors of basic fact that send readers screaming for a TinyUrl link from LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com.

Plus, a lot of the comments are tremendous. I'll only quote it in part, so you should click the link and do a "FIND" on page for his name, but reader Patrick takes on Klosterman's abysmal Edgar Winter piece thus (more disclosure: I probably like this because it shares some of my quibbles with Klosterman):
This type of writing is talk-radio level discourse glossed in middle-brow pretension. Klosterman invents not one but two straw men, the philosopher behind his imaginary concept for OGWT and the "aesthetic fascist" who thinks that showing this performance on TV takes away from its "realness" (scare quotes his, even though he is not quoting anyone but himself) and then gleefully tears these imaginary philosophers and aesthetes down by proving to the poor reader why this argument he is having with no one is completely pointless.
It goes on, providing readers with their very own Chuck Klosterman Fallacy Generator to play with.

Here's the thing: readers' willingness to pick through the entrails of bad arguments probably would seem petty and jealous if Grantland hadn't been pitched with a lot of aspirational rhetoric about being a haven for high-quality longform journalism, promoting and mainstreaming the most lauded form of sports writing for the online world. Simmons took off his Daniel LaRusso helmet and said, "I'm Bill Simmons, and I'm here to rescue you! I'm here with Malcolm Gladwell!" That's fine, but if you're going to bill yourself as a repository for that kind of high-quality product, people are going to take you at your word and hold you to it.

None of this would have happened if Grantland had been sold to the readership as:
A homer bro, his dickhead lab partner who's in a band and looks like Gay Brian Posehn, the nerd from the AV Club who got a job selling PCBs for Dow, and their art chick friend who's into movies and writing in her diary gather in America's living room to smoke a lot of weed and say stupid shit while giving each other massages. Start the countdown—May, 2011!
But they didn't, and other journalists are willing to play by Grantland's rules. Failing so regularly, unconcernedly and dumbfoundingly on a basic, mechanistic "they teach AP-style usage in high school journalism programs" level will make pros take notice under almost any circumstance, not just because you've claimed to be the all-stars of the pro circuit. When even the "amateurs" reading at home and at work notice, it brings up another problem that fuels the existence of those Deadspin corrections columns: if you're going to set those standards for yourself, have courage enough to let your readership submit feedback to address errors and shortcomings.

Grantland doesn't. Murky figures behind the scenes disappear errors without notice while leaving others up for days at a time — denying readers the means to engage the text at all on a peer level. It's sealed off, immutable, beyond the filthy grasp of actual people. But that doesn't "work" on the internet, not as a standing policy, and certainly not coming from an everyman Editor-in-chief type. You don't get to pull the man-of-the-people routine while moving paper sports teams across the field from deep inside the bunker. You can only regularly fail to do basic things correctly while walling yourself off from all outside criticism and trumpeting a commitment to "excellence" if you're one guy, and at this point I wouldn't be surprised if someday I look at the list of Consulting Editors and see the name Al Davis.

Or maybe none of that is valid. Maybe Deadspin and everyone else are just pissed they couldn't get Al Davis on the phone. Maybe the Grantland fans and Deadspin critics decided to join up with Simmons' lip and Klosterman's usual bearded look and threw out Occam's razor, too, just to be on the safe side.