By Adam Cancryn
The inevitable rise of writer-centric sports sites, and what it means for the rest of us.
Kinglandia. That's the working title for Peter King's new standalone NFL website, a Sports Illustrated offshoot aimed at turning his stardom into a lucrative franchise. It's also a particularly appropriate title, given the site's place within a major shift taking root across journalism; call it the medievalization of media.
In short, what's happening in this: Major publications are spinning their most popular writers off into separate entities. Those writers are given their own platform and near-complete control of it. The branding, design and content is tailored specifically to promote them. They get to write what they like, hire who they like and yet still enjoy the financial and operational security of being attached to a large media company.
It's The Dream, and it's one that the most famous 0.1% of reporters are or will be living. Longwinded blogger-turned-longwinded ESPN property Bill Simmons lords over Grantland, New York Times sourcemonger Andrew Ross Sorkin sits at the helm of DealBook and Andrew Sullivan — until he struck out on his own — watched over The Daily Beast-backed The Dish. Now King is ascending to the top of Kinglandia. These are the industry's dukes, overseers of their respective fiefdoms in a world controlled by media conglomerate kings. It's a hierarchy straight out of the 1600s, and one writers and readers will become increasingly familiar with. And it's technological progress we have to thank for this blast from the past.
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TO VARYING DEGREES, these fiefdoms are ego projects for those at the center of them, a chance to indulge their entrepreneurial spirit without taking any real risk.* They get to be the player-coach, simultaneously running the team and leading it in scoring. For that privilege, they get paid. King will reportedly make $1.5 million per year under his now contract, which would be encouraging amid journalism's perpetual financial flux if SI and its corporate parents did not just finish firing a bunch of reporters that likely worked for a fraction of that Kinglandia pie.
*For what would be the worst that could happen to these stars? Their site fails and they're brought back under the umbrella. They retain both their popularity and their job, and likely never put any personal money at risk. Maybe there's an unflattering post-mortem on your failure, but at this level you're getting criticized every day anyway, for both legitimate and illegitimate offenses.
But such is the state of the game right now. The peaceable media landscape dominated by a few central players is long gone, leaving the world fragmented and its inhabitants scattered to the winds (or in this case, to the far corners of the Internet).
Within that environment, it's no longer worth chasing the widest audience. You could be the largest sports journalism organization in the world, and Bleacher Report will still come along and plant its flag on your best land, with few repercussions. No, it's now about locking down the most dedicated audience, that however-many online avatars ferociously clicking and consuming and refreshing your site all day long.
And that's where the Peter Kings of the world come in. In exchange for that bloated payday and ego indulgence, you get their soldiers, the people hanging onto King's every inane Tweet about coffee or the delays on the Acela train to Boston. They're clicking and commenting and sharing and spreading King's good word, all the while lining the pockets of the real king, SI. That's much more efficient than chasing each one of those soldiers down and begging them to side with you over the next faceless monolith offering pretty much the same perks.
Meanwhile, you're also locking down that wildly popular writer with the sweet promises of financial security and editorial autonomy, ensuring that he doesn't take those loyal soldiers to the kingdom next door.
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TECHNICALLY, THIS ISN'T a new concept. Newspapers have always had columnists, websites have commentators and TV has pundits. But it's nevertheless a significant leap. As writers develop their reputation more through outside sources — Twitter mainly, but to some degree Facebook and Instagram, etc. — rather than through their main work, they've become more detached from their employers. Joe Weisenthal is @TheStalwart just as often as he's Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal, for example. Same for Fox Business Network's Charlie Gasparino, or ESPN's Adam Schefter. It follows, then, that the next step would be to take advantage of that divergence and make their work "independent" too by franchising them.
This is something that you'll see particularly in sports. Business, tech, politics and every other subject have their larger-than-life figures, sure, but sports is different because its readers are the ultimate lemmings. A substantial chunk of sports fans are obsessives about their team, and that obsessiveness extends to the writers that feed them the information they crave. Keep them well fed, and they'll latch onto a news source. Take a look at Schefter's Twitter timeline, if you're skeptical, or the comments section on Jason Whitlock's blog. The degree of interaction that the sports-loving population wants is unparalleled (and a little scary at times). If TV made newspapers' top columnists into famous faces, then social media have shown that they can make the right people into industry rock stars.
Publications (some faster than others) have recognized that. Rather than let their top guy appear on ESPN in exchange for "brand exposure," they're instead setting him up with his own podcast or YouTube channel, crossplatforming him like ESPN did in putting Simmons on its NBA coverage, or SI parent NBC did by putting King on Sunday Night Football telecasts. Everyone is multimedia now. Everyone is battling on every front for eyeballs.
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GRANTED, MUCH OF THIS is nitty-gritty, intraindustry stuff. The average fan doesn't care how journalists are making their nut, the same as journalists don't care that Knicks-obsessed Sal from Islip finally locked down that client his midmarket insurance agency has chased for years. But what all of this does mean for the broader public is that the sports media's titans are expanding their reach, even if it doesn't look like it on the surface.
Simmons might have his own fiefdom, but he's still an ESPN lackey, as his recent Twitter suspension demonstrated. King and his crew are extensions of SI. The high-profile Sports On Earth poached great writers from around the nation and consolidated them under the Job Eliminator2000 robot better known as Gannett Co. Each time this happens, the local and regional papers and TV stations are the losers. The biggest companies gain greater control over the news cycle, even as your favorite writers champion their newfound autonomy.
For journalists, and anybody who aspires to write sports in particular, the consequences are a bit more nuanced and unpredictable. What we know is that more company resources are being funneled into fewer pockets; the most popular individual is worth increasingly more than a handful of hardworking, yet no-name, writers. That's not good for sports journalism's already notoriously low starting salaries.
But at the same time, each new fiefdom means another stable that needs to be filled with reporters, likely younger ones with social media skills and low pay standards. Get hired, and you get instant national exposure and a head start in the race to join the franchised 0.1%. The traditional climb-the-ladder method of career advancement is no longer relevant in that situation. So it's a tradeoff of more jobs and exposure vs. less pay. Not great, for sure. Yet one that many would take.
More unpredictable is how medievalization alters the dynamic of employer and employee. If ESPN can spin off Simmons & Co. and ostensibly make a profit, what's stopping a private equity firm or venture capital company from doing the same? Why invest in the expensive, bloated kingdom if you can pick off their most popular dukes and raise an army of your own? Sure, a business site brought to you by Bain Capital might not work for obvious conflict-of-interest reasons, but an NHL site backed by them? It's possible.
It's early yet. Grantland is still in its infancy, and Kinglandia is a few months away. It remains to be seen how FOX and some of the other big boys will respond, and whether writers will get more entrepreneurial. But the winds have changed, and there's power to be grabbed. No doubt some of the biggest names in the business are eyeing a castle of their own.
Adam Cancryn is a co-founder and editor of Began in '96.
**A few caveats: I focused only on legacy media launching separate sites on the backs of their most popular writers. This doesn't even begin to contemplate the impact of the rest of sports media, from Gawker's Deadspin and Vox Media's SBNation down to independent sites like Began in '96. That'd take far more words than is worth spilling, and I wanted to narrow it to just the outlets that account for the largest share of industry profits and readership. That landscape is also much more dynamic and carries substantial promise, and there are some interesting business models that might arise there.
It's also not lost on me that these smaller sites have also disrupted the climb-the-ladder dynamic; see the any number of writers who franchised themselves on their own or leapt to more mainstream outlets. And Kickstarter adds a whole new element to the mix, raising the question of what it takes to get readers to fund the franchise. Who knows what'll happen with all that. The industry is a source of constant innovation. But for these lumbering mainstream outlets, this idea of putting writers ahead of their own brand really is something new. The question is whether, in the end, it benefits the employees or the employers, the dukes or the kings.
