TNSFF

Tech, music, sports, and other stuff.

© 2024. All rights reserved.

Grantland: 2 Weeks of a Noble Endeavor 

22 Jun 2011

On June 8th, Bill Simmons launched his latest ESPN endeavor: Grantland, a sports and pop culture site. "Wow!", you say sarcastically, "isn't that exactly what Page 2 is?"

Yes, yes it is.

But Grantland is more than Page 2, for a few reasons:

At the core, Grantland seems to be an attempt to prove that if you generate good, sustainable content (even if it might be magazine article length) that the audience will come. And that makes Grantland a noble endeavor.

So, after two weeks, how does Grantland look? Let's start with the bad.

As a web property, its design is, well, I don't want to say excruiatingly bad, but it's pretty bad. The layout with new content appearing at the top is reasonably blog like, but without any of the markers that give you a clue about what's new since you last visited (or even just what's new today). The intermingled blog content (where sometimes it seems blog posts make the front page, but other times they don't) adds a bit of confusion.

Those are reasonably minor quibbles.

The site itself looks like it was designed in 1997. That's ok, I think, since they're going for the old-timey media feel (or at least I think they are). Except it ends up looking pretty ass-like when you end up with a giant Subway or Klondike ad in the middle of a page.

The use of footnotes (which is a Simmons favorite) is fine. The footnotes showing up in the right column, in line with the reference is a clever idea that sounds better than it works, especially if you use a service like Instapaper or ReadItLater (perfect for the longer content of Grantland). Footnotes are called footnotes for a reason -- the bottom of the page is *always* the bottom of the page.

Oh, and no full text RSS feeds. Seriously, it's 2011.

However, the the poor-to-middling site design can be completely overlooked if the content is as stellar as I think the team at Grantland wants it to be.

So far, sadly, the answer to that is that it is not uniformly great. But there have been some bright spots. Some truly, supremely, worth the experiment already bright spots.

Tom Bissel's incredibly thoughtful, "review as commentary on society" review of the video game L.A. Noire was the first article on the Grantland site that really met the high bar the Simmons' team is aspiring too. There are almost no mainstream outlets that would devote 5000 words to a review of a video game, unless it ended with the conclusion that they cause all of society's ills.

Charles Pierce's recollection of his time at The National is just the sort of well-written piece that doesn't really get written any more, or if it does, it's on some backwater blog that you hope you catch a link to on a Twitter. And it really was the perfect entree into what is probably Grantland's signature piece, to this point, the Tom Shales-ian oral history of The National.

The oral history piece does a few amazing things that I can't imagine flying on ESPN. It allows some ESPN folks to crap on other ESPN (and non-ESPN folk). It spends thousands of words reliving the days of a long departed sports daily. It makes it interesting.

If Grantland can launch one or two of these pieces a quarter (and, it's somewhat telling all 3 of these hit in the first couple of days), then it may not just be a vanity outlet for Bill Simmons, but instead a place where long-form content can go and actually be read.

If Grantland has more of the, let's say, spotty content that has filled its "pages" since the launch, I think it'll end up as just another Page 2. I'm hoping that the Chris-Jones-and-Wesley-Morris-like articles (two authors who I have enjoyed elsewhere), where we take a simple sports topic and try to turn them into something more poetic (or simply, purely, less readable), find their way to an editor who can reign them in.

Ironically, that editor may be Bill Simmons, and that hasn't proven to be one of his strong points.

I'm actually hopeful that each month Grantland will spit out a couple of "I'll read that once a year" articles mixed in with a few "did ya read that one yet" articles you share with your friends. Mix in a slightly better site design and I think it'll be a success.

By success, here, I mean something I'll go to and know that I'll be able to grab a good article or two to read on a plane or subway ride (or more likely, on the shitter). I'm not sure, beyond the Bill Simmons articles (which have lost some of their sheen when put next to better writers) that there's an audience for the site, but I'm really hoping I'm wrong. (I'd love to see what their webstats look like.)

There should be a place in this world for a site like Grantland.