The last article was posted an hour ago. Did they not bother to tell anyone there before then?

He makes it sound like they are fulfilling their legally binding contractual obligations out of the goodness of their hearts.

Fuck ESPN. What a fucking clown show. Way to reward horseshit idiots like Bayless and SAS and snuff out the good stuff about your stupid brand.

No, this was a "people found out via Twitter" kind of deal.


Six months was the answer there.

"Look, guys, this is a business. And our business is miserable idiots trolling people with hot takes they don't even believe." - ESPN

— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) October 30, 2015

I loved everyone I worked with at G and loved what we built. Watching good/kind/talented people get treated so callously = simply appalling.

— Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) October 30, 2015

"Hey, sorry about Grantland. But coming up next: The Fanduel/DraftKings Shouting Hour," where 8 doughy men shout about YOUR tweets!" - ESPN

— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) October 30, 2015

Well, I haven't really gone voluntarily to ESPN for a year or two now. But have been going regularly to Grantland. I liked the columns and would have the podcasts blaring while doing stuff around the home.

Are there any decent sports podcasts elsewhere, other than The Bill Simmons Podcast and The Starters (on NBA.com)?

Sorry to Maple Leafs but I'm sure he'll end up somewhere very good once his deal is up.

Yeah, I'm more sad that the podcasts are/will be gone. Mays/Barnwell and Ryan/Greenwald have been missed.

It's more that I'm going to miss having so many good writers no longer being in one place. Having to track them down is more effort than I'm really willing to put in at this point in my life.

Nate Duncan and Danny LeRoux have my favorite basketball podcasts but they get more in-depth and nerdy than Simmons or even Zach Lowe. Here is an archive of Duncan's podcast and a good starting point would be to check the season preview of your favorite team; he recorded 30 of them with different writers associated with each team.

from the LA Times

Unless I'm misremembering things, uh, The National it wasn't.

Honestly, the stuff worth keeping really can be folded into the other properties pretty seemlessly ... IF there's a market for it. Having a separate brand for it at this point doesn't make a whole lot of sense that I can see.

Like I said, couldn't care less about the brand, just want to be able to read clean articles. I think Zach Lowe and Sean McIndoe are the only two I'd fight through the regular ESPN interface to read.

Btw, it is a little weird that there's no link to the press release on Grantland's front page. If you just go straight to grantland.com you really would have no idea this happened.

Cool, was looking for something like that. I'll check it out.

Gonna miss reading McIndoe, Rembert Browne, and Lowe. They must have known this was coming a bit before this morning though, right? The Rembert Explains article from the 28th states it is his last one, which had me wondering if he was leaving, but they must have known.

Rembert was already planning to leave.

Today was Rembert's last day. It's somewhat funny, on twitter you can see Grantland people tweeting about his last day, then maybe 20 minutes later, tweeting about Grantland shutting down.

The sad thing is, ESPN's handling of this will in no way negatively impact their brand in any measurable way.

I enjoyed Grantland as much as the next person, but people are already laying on the hyperbole in remembering the site. There was plenty of good to great stuff on Grantland. There were also Reality TV leagues and Carles.

Yes. The great stuff was great. But not all the stuff was great. Or even good.

It was a nice change of pace from the Stephen A/Bayless/Jemele Hill/Lebatard "gotcha/hot take" programming we normally see from the site. I think it's funny that Jalen and Jacoby were the only real acts from grantland to be formally endorsed/supported, as they were the thing on Grantland most like the tripe normally found on ESPN.

I hope guys like Lowe, Keri and Barnwell go off to other sites - as trying to track them down on ESPN's crap website will be quite the chore. The men in blazer's left and I watch/listen to them more than I did on Grantland. I don't think any of these guys leaving will impact my ability to read/listen to them.

Hey guys...

I fell behind on this thread. Anything new? We're still talking about sideline reporters, right?

{hug}

I wasn't even aware of the tie with ESPN lol. I have "liked" like a half-dozen things on Facebook and Grantland was one of them, so I would read a couple of articles on it daily at work. Really enjoyed it, so naturally ESPN would fuck it up.

The problem I have with espn.com since the redesign is that they're folding everything I found interesting into other properties. This means I have to search to find the stuff that was a click or 2 away. Every single item on the website that I've read regularly for the past couple of years takes more clicks to find than it did in the past. That's an issue that will eventually drive me away from the site.

Thanks!

I hope these guys don't wind up behind the insider paywall at espn. I'd miss Lowe, Mapleleafs, Barnwell/Mays and Keri.

Lunch sucks without Grantland :(

I know what you mean. It was so nice to have one site where I could access a bunch of good sports columns. I'm sure these guys will all work in the near future again, but it'll be split up among 10 sites and I may not end up reading some of them because I'll just forget. It was nice to be able to go to grantland.com and click on all the various podcasts as well.

Deleted the bookmark from my browser today. Sad feeling.

Yeah. It's weird, the last couple of days I just click on ESPN from my bookmarks by instinct more than anything, scroll down looking for Grantland, remember it's gone, and then move on to another site.

Are there any other sports websites you guys enjoy reading? I used to really like SI but once Peter King got his own site and they had the redesign I've found their writing to be a bit of a tire fire.

Also great tip with the Dunc'd on podcast, I'm working through the team previews and it's just the type of analysis I like to here.

Can't remember the last time I went to the main page of a sports site. I just go directly to articles from Twitter or links on boards like this one.

I don't read a lot of long-form sports columns, so I use the sports websites for quick work-break checks on scores, standings, what games are coming up this weekend, bullet-point breakdowns of playoff races and trade rumors and free agents, etc. ESPN still seems to be the best for that purpose, but they're all pretty similar. But, I don't have the same eye for poor web design most others here probably have. I can get what I'm looking for at ESPN and that's enough.

And simply to prove that we still exist, I'm more in the line of Molson. I check primary sites 2-3 times during the day, accounts for at least 95% of my sports-related web activity.

My biggest beef with ESPN is that it insists on throwing the most garbage mobile player cards. They have virtually no stats or info for the player.

The Detroit Lions have been broadcasting their games on the radio on the local FM sports channel, 97.1, for over a decade now.

They recently announced that next year they are switching stations and moving to an AM channel.

It turns out the reason the Lions are making the move is because they demanded that one of the sports talk radio personalities, Mike Valenti, be fired because he's wildly critical of the team. Valenti is part of the afternoon drive talk show and is pretty much the most popular sports radio guy in Metro Detroit. Some people hate him, but it's a pretty popular show.

It's really embarrassing and shameful. The Lions are such a stupid organization. If you don't want to be criticized so badly, stop sucking. In the last 58 years, it's been one playoff win and a great big bag of dicks.

Isn't that the AGAIN guy?

Some of the clips are still broken, but we just went ahead and published. People in Bristol are working on it, I'm told.

— Zach Lowe (@ZachLowe_NBA) December 8, 2015

Yes!

Huh.

i like that

Sports media in one screenshot:



From [UPDATE: Silver didn’t say this] Adam Silver to North Carolina: Repeal law within 30 days or lose Charlotte All-Star game – ProBasketballTalk

re: that last version of the link


Which, for some reason, made me LOL

And while not entirely a sports media indictment, this seems to fit somewhere in the story. That hoax story about Silver's alleged threat?

It prompted this response
Atlanta City Council makes pitch for 2017 NBA All-Star Game | 11alive.com

edit to add: Point being, I guess, is that if we're electing officials who can't tell the difference (or can't be bothered to verify information) between real & fake, maybe the problem isn't the media but rather the audience.

Uh... the Atlanta City Council made their pitch for the game before any fake news story about Silver's comments arose.

I thought (think actually) the two were in very close proximity.

I find articles citing Silver (allegedly) threatening Charlotte as far back as March 25th.

The Atlanta city council pulled their little grandstand ploy back on March 30th


Is the distinction here -- which I missed if so -- that the initial reports about Silver's threats didn't include an apparently phony quote?

What Atlanta cited is something the NBA actually did say. The fake quote part was the "You have 30 days to repeal the law" aspect. So the officials of the City of Atlanta actually did use the real information. So no indictment of audience is warranted by this example.

A reporter got what was coming to him after he asked an insensitive question to Draymond Green.