On Grantland and Sports Media By Way of Food

I was on vacation at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park when I learned about the demise of Grantland via Twitter.

My first reaction was shock. My second reaction was, well, this: 

This was my first thought. Good people got the axe today. Bayless and SAS will be on air Mon. w/o fail. https://t.co/AoNt9aZFbK

— Dave Singleton (@dfsingleton) October 30, 2015

But as I continued on throughout the day, and as some of the eulogies and takedowns have rolled in, I've become somewhat introspective (as I am wont to do).

The main takeaway I've gathered from the demise of Grantland is this:

I don't necessarily think I want to work full-time in sports media anymore.

Every now and then, I've had the itch and I've managed to scratch it in some ways. I do part-time work here on my own site (where I have the pleasure of being able to write whenever I please and whatever I please) and on The Student Section. I've written at Crystal Ball Run, Southern Pigskin, Rock M Nation and at Bleacher Report in the days when that was considered to be a punchline instead of an opportunity. I started on a site way back in the day called E-Sports Media Group.

I dabbled in a couple of podcasts on here, and did semi-regular spots on ESPN Radio in Coastal Georgia. I have been grateful for all of those opportunities.

And yes, during a couple of bouts of (extended) unemployment from my vocation, I probably could have better seized opportunities to turn this sports media avocation into a new career.

The time for that has come and gone, I believe. Some of it because of my age and the fact that I feel it is too late to really break into the game.

Some of it is because of a lack of confidence.

Some of it is plain old frustration with the state of things.

Clay Travis (I won't link to any of his work) and Jason Whitlock (ditto) both recently keyed in and published self-congratulatory think pieces about the state of sports media. Granted, given that I am referring to the two of them, self-congratulatory was probably understood.

But the fact that some of the people most talked about in sports media are the two individuals I named above, along with Colin Cowherd, Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless, is what frustrates me.

Things today are mainly about bluster and flash and not about substance. It's about yelling loudly, not making a cogent, coherent, salient point.

I'm not saying that sports media has to be highbrow; I wouldn't expect that or want that.

But it seems that as we moved to a 24 hour news cycle, the time for reflection and patience has diminished. Everything has become, for lack of a better term, NFL-ized; everything has to be a major breaking story with analysis being beaten to death until the next major thing comes along to break the cycle—and football will trump all.

I think that's where some of my frustration comes in. I admit to being a slow writer, and my style is probably best suited for feature length, longform pieces or series like the college major series I worked on this summer. I actually worked on that off and on for five months or so because of life, and I actually got the initial idea about a year ago.

I'm a slow cooker, not a microwave. I braise ideas instead of tempura frying them. And I am okay with that.

And obviously, Grantland was not something that did slow cooking and braising all the time, but (to continue the food analogy) they were definitely a sit-down restaurant in the face of fast food sports coverage.

It's always a shame when a good sit-down restaurant goes away.