It's With Some Reluctance That I Say That Bill Simmons Got It Right With the Ringer

we don't have many good models in the #content game

I’m not, it’s fair to say, a big Bill Simmons guy. I don’t have anything particularly against him, but I couldn’t name a lot of his work that I like, either. Back when he regularly wrote columns I felt that his mannerism got stale pretty quickly. I don’t begrudge anyone in this business a formula - if you’ve got a good horse, you might as well ride - but his particular schtick was not my cup of tea even in his formative early ESPN.com years. His written work was always referential, which is fine, but over time his columns became a collection of references to his other columns. (MY FRIEND HOUSE LOVES TO EAT!) Now he seems more content to be a podcaster and mogul, which is cool. I have a hard time listening to podcasts thanks to my medications. (It can easily take me three hours to listen to an hour-long podcast, due to constantly having to rewind and replay.) But he’s making documentaries for HBO and rubbing the right elbows and (key for the Ringer) seems like a big enough deal that he can throw his body in front of problems for the site. And that’s good, as I genuinely see the Ringer as the right way to do [heaves giant sigh] content in today’s media economy.

The Ringer runs a lot of your standard 2020s online media fare, at least for a site with a sports plus pop culture formula - rapid reactions to Sports Event X, implausible but enticing fake NBA trades, TV recaps of the latest Netflix show sensation, deep-think pieces about what the popularity of that latest Netflix show sensation really means, listicles aplenty, analysis of the NFL that’s sharp and yet which wildly overreacts to every turn of a season that lasts almost half a year, and podcasts. So, so many podcasts. I think I actually host a Ringer podcast and forgot about it, that’s how many podcasts they have.

If this sounds like a takedown, it’s not; I’m just reflecting on the reality of putting words on the internet as a business in 2022. And most of the stuff I mentioned is at least done with a certain verve, which I can chalk up to the quality of hiring that’s gone on there. It results in some hard-to-categorize gems alongside the more formulaic stuff, such as this piece from 2017. Of the many, many “hey socialism is a thing now” essays that sprung up around then, this was among the very few that I found perceptive and smart. Or this piece on haptic feedback in video game controllers, a topic I would never have thought I cared about until I read it. Or this essay, which takes you behind the scenes of play-by-play announcers and demonstrates how the networks get some certified oafs to sound smooth and natural. All of online media is a matter of generating enough high-click dross to subsidize more thoughtful work, but you can do it better or worse.

Simmons genuinely has an eye for talent. Getting Wesley Morris for Grantland seems like a real coup in hindsight, and Bri/yans Phillips and Curtis brought little-seen perspectives to the publication. Zach Lowe and Bill Barnwell have distinguished themselves in a crowded field for analysis of tactics and tendencies in the NBA and NFL respectively. At the Ringer he seems to have developed more than poached and it's created some interesting voices. Whether developed inhouse or not, there's a lot to like. My personal favorites are Katie Baker, Justin Charity, and Mallory Rubin. Kevin O'Connor and Jonathan Tjarks do basketball analysis I enjoy. Kevin Clark is a very bright Xs and Os guy who wiggles constantly between thoughtfulness and the kind of Sneering Haughty Analytics-Humping Typing Penis that NFL media is full of now, but the social capture of that attitude must be pretty hard to resist in that culture right now. (For the record I think analytics in the NFL make teams better and result in more exciting play.) This is pure speculation but someone like Chris Ryan strikes me as the sort of “glue guy” organizations really need. It's also a very diverse masthead without constantly asking for credit for such. I like the work the art department does too.

And, you know, there's plenty I'm not into. Simmons is the high priest of the American middlebrow; whatever the boundaries of any given scale of populism and elitism, crudity and refinement, Simmons can be found at its perfect center. Somewhat relatedly, the man is unrivaled in his talent for speaking the language of provocation from a place of utter conventionality. (You might say he’s on the Mount Rushmore for that, if you were into that kind of thing.) The Ringer takes after the boss in this regard. I’m part of a dying breed, the unapologetic all-American snob, and I would prefer more provocations that are actually provocative, less pandering, sports coverage that looks critically at recent trends in “sophisticated” fandom, maybe some coverage of foreign films and truly arthouse fare. Doubly so for music. (Write about Pharmakon, cowards.) And the site’s sensibility is often caught in its founder's own private war between sarcasm and sentiment; often the house voice is cynical when I would prefer it to be sincere and sentimental when I want cynicism. As all sites in their broad milieu are, the Ringer is also constrained by the limits of the click-chasing economy, and some of what they put out seems a little low-effort. But there are plenty of sites I could name that try the same things and do them much worse, were I not so reliably up upbeat in my work.

Is it sustainable? Well, they’re a subsidiary of Spotify now, which is good and bad, depending. Deep-pocketed parent companies can keep publications afloat, but they can also be fickle and demand slashed costs, which in web publishing pretty much always means layoffs. But the site sold for $200 million, and I believe it when they say they’re profitable. Here again Simmons’s clout is important, as he has the kind of profile that could help him minimize the ritualistic payroll bloodletting that’s common to media these days. That Axios piece almost exclusively discusses the site as a podcasting venture, which about fits with my (depressing) read on the industry right now. But as I’ve said elsewhere, if written pieces have to function as a kind of loss leader, subsidized by podcasts and whatever video platform the kids are into these days, so be it. It’s never been a very stable business and I’ll take my success stories where I can get them.

Look, I’m a grouchy hater with a history of getting into one-sided feuds that serve nobody, and I'm sure there's few people at the Ringer who are interested in my praise. But hese days I’m trying to be more vocal about who I think is doing something right. Recently I advised people not to try to write professionally, as it’s a brutally competitive business and even the status of people at the top is way worse than it once was. Responses were mixed! I do think that it’s simply the case that structural conditions beyond the control of any individual writer make writing professionally a dicey proposition in 2022. That’s true in the takes game, yes, but also in traditional reportorial journalism, in nonfiction book writing, in fiction, in magazines, you name it. And I think those of us who are privileged enough to do this for a living have to be relentlessly real with people who want to be in the same position, as hard as it may be for them to hear. That said, I am and will always be a supporter of writers and writing, and if I’m frequently hard on writers it’s only because I want the profession to demand much from itself. I want everybody to have a good salary, benefits, and a union, but for that to be sustainable there has to be basic fiscal stability at the publications. I think the Ringer has found a niche, and I like a lot of the people there, and now I’ve said so.