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I get Simmons' complaints about publicizing the site but from what others have written, Grantland staff and writers were paid well above industry norms and had large travel/expense budgets. I'm guessing ESPN quickly realized that they weren't going to generate the type of traffic to warrant all the overhead and they threw in the towel pretty early.
I think combining sports and pop culture makes plenty of sense but in hindsight, maybe they should have gone with either the smart writers on their own (or combined them with Silver's site) or taken a more traditional, but fun sports writing approach still mixed with pop culture. Basically a staff of mini-Simmonses. He loved guys like Barnwell, Lowe and Keri but none of them wrote anything like him.
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