FanPost

On Blogging

There was a time when I thought I’d make a career out of sportswriting.

It all started when I got kicked out of TCOB (for grades) and was invited to join in the fun at the Daily Iowan. Jordan Garretson, a former contributor here, hired me to cover men’s tennis and that was that.

This is where I was truly exposed to the craft of sports writing. Former DI staffers who went on to literary fame were spoken of in hallowed tones. Wayne Drehs, Roxanna Scott, Adam Kramer. Every now and then we'd drag their bylines out of the archives.

As sports editor, a position I mostly fell into by accident my junior year, my proudest moment was when I was able to get Wright Thompson to come speak to the staff. And certainly my best memory of my time in Iowa City was hoisting a few with him at George’s and Dave’s Foxhead later that night.

But these vanguards of ink-stained sportswriting weren’t who I—nor anyone else on staff—wanted to be. I think. It was the voice of Drew Magary, who had no use for punctuation and an itchy caps lock finger, that I wanted to strike into my word doc. I wanted to use the inside-jokiness of Shea Serrano when covering Iowa sports, and the "I don't give a fuck attitude" of sigh Big Cat in my overall prose. I thought Barry Petchesky was the best hockey writer on the planet. (I consider this the finest piece of sportswriting of all time.)

Even Patrick Vint and the previous stakeholders at this here site had a not-so-small influence on my writing. Every morning, as a fast-approaching-300-lb student, I’d shake off a hangover with a bong rip and then go through the cycle of checking Deadspin, Grantland, BHGP, EDSBS. It was like that for years, well into my "professional" career. Rinse repeat.

Now, just the Pants remains.


After graduating, I rotted at a small magazine in St. Paul, making a salary of $24,000 from 7-5 for about nine months. Then, I got my big break. An offer to write for the Chicago Sun-Times appeared out of thin air. I was told I’d have the opportunity to write about sports for their new digital blog. I probably would have worked for giardiniera if they’d asked.

It wasn’t until about a month after settling in at the Sun-Times that I finally came to terms with the fact I wasn’t writing for the Sun-Times at all. It was the Sun-Times Network AKA Aggrego AKA the content farm blog they were using to try and keep the lights on for the real journalists. And for a time, it worked. I was assigned three cities I had never been to before—Boston, Baltimore and D.C.—and had to write three blogs a day, or 14 a week. Anything was on the table in terms of topic, as long as it tied loosely to that city. Pageviews were baked into monthly bonuses.

It wasn’t long until this model wore us, a subsection of the (now relocated) Sun Times newsroom full of journalism-school flunkies, to a fine pulp. Vague opportunities of writing for the brick and mortar paper were dangled in front of us. I got to cover a music festival and interviewed platinum artists. I got to play TV critic for a hot minute. But eventually, for whatever reason, Yahoo and Google and Reddit stopped referring us to the public. The pageviews that consistently read in the millions and tens of millions on the ticker of the office each day eventually fell to six figures, then five. Eleven months after joining the Sun-Times, the blogging days were over. There’s no digital proof I ever held a job there, a URL bleach job Walter White would be proud of.

Eventually, the Sun-Times would become part of TRONC, which would become a part of the same operation that the guy who gutted Deadspin runs.

I think I applied to Deadspin informally three times in the month I was out of work post Sun-Times. Tommy Craggs or Barry never responded to me. I practically begged Andy Greenwald for a job with all the mailbag questions I sent him. No response, and that was fine. I even applied to Barstool, hoping they valued experience over toxic masculinity. I still checked the sites in-between delivery orders. I eventually landed at another withering magazine, where I was fired for the most hilarious reason of all time after about a year. And that’s when I gave up any and all hope of being a blogger.

All this is to say: if blogging was easy, everyone would do it. I’m still in a profession where I get paid for shouting words into a processor, but it’s a far cry from posting bear gifs or making fun of the Williams Sonoma catalog or fetishizing Alex Pietrangelo or declaring war on the NCAA.

I have no doubt the folks at Deadspin will land on their feet; they supply something a not-insignificant number of people demand. Whether it be at Vice or the Ringer or Slate or SB Nation or an Undeadspin Collective. Still, it’s hard to look around and not be saddened by the state of the Internet of Things. I cancelled my Sports Illustrated subscription just last week. I don’t know if I’ll ever go to that site (save for John Bohnenkamp content). The Athletic is great for now, but how long until a couple more Tech Bros gut that place? ESPN is what it is and I had to reach back into the bowels of my brain to think of Bleacher Report. I hate-follow more than one Barstool Vape Pen on Twitter, but those are the only morsels I'll allow in my diet.

This past week, on trip to Milwaukee for my college roommates wedding, I asked the car: if you could see one musical artist in their prime who would it be? The car answered Led Zeppelin unanimously.* I wonder to myself now: has blogging had its Zeppelin moment?


*I chose Elton John but that’s neither here nor there

Unless otherwise expressly indicated by BHGP editors, this FanPost is strictly the viewpoint of the author and is not endorsed by BHGP in any way.