What is Bill Simmons going to do next? The possibilities are... well, not exactly endless. Fox will probably make a play for him. Bleacher Report? Haha. There will definitely be various rich dudes looking to align themselves with the one-time bratty prince of ESPN, including, as we’ve heard, possibly a (fellow) beloved television personality who will soon be out of a job.
Since its official launch in 2013, Fusion has aimed to be a haven for sweet millennial clicks and a place for journalists to make a lot of money while practicing “post-text” journalism. You can debate whether it’s accomplished either of those things, but one thing that can’t be debated is that no one is actually reading Fusion.
Talk to someone who works at the Huffington Post these days and inevitably one word will keep popping up: “demoralized.” “I’ve never seen people so demoralized” is what a typical HuffPost employee usually says.
Since 2012, the website Politwoops has tracked which tweets U.S. lawmakers delete from their Twitter accounts—usually due to innocent typos or simple errors, and sometimes due to more embarrassing mistakes. Last month, however, the site abruptly stopped working: The last deleted tweet listed on its main page, by Rep. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, is dated May 15. Politwoops has not been updated in the two weeks since.
Media gadfly and would-be mogul Michael Wolff has a new book out, or maybe coming out soon, presumably with a title and so on. Here are the blurbs:
On Thursday, at about 4 p.m. Central Standard Time, several news outlets reported that Dennis Hastert, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and Illinois congressman, was indicted for, among other offenses, lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The media entities included BuzzFeed News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and CBS Chicago, all of whom posted their stories within minutes of each other.
In January, Sasha Frere-Jones, the longtime music critic at the New Yorker, left the fabled magazine for a job at Genius (neé Rap Genius), the annotation website that sticks bad jokes next to your favorite rap lyrics. The honeymoon, though, appears to have been short: Frere-Jones recently moved from full-time to contract at the company to devote more time to other projects.
Many people—especially those people who earn livings by convincing editors and bookers that rich and influential strangers consider their thoughts and opinions interesting—have ideas about who should or should not run for president. If you are one of those people, here is a bit of advice: If you are going to write a column arguing that someone should enter the presidential race, it is your responsibility to come up with a coherent and plausible path to victory for that person.
One morning last month, staffers at First Look Media’s New York City office discovered a hole in one of the windows overlooking Manhattan’s Flatiron District. Nearby, they found a bullet. Though First Look officials initially feared their company had been deliberately targeted by small arms fire, the New York City police department later blamed an unrelated incident at a nearby intersection in which someone discharged a gun. For some reason, the company has kept a tight lid on the fact that the incident ever happened.
You are a writer. You write features. You are supposed to write a feature about a very famous person at a major sporting event, but the event has not started yet, so you have no new reporting or novel insights on the subject. No one does, and no one can. This is a difficulty, perhaps even a metaphysical difficulty; if you think about it, you can see the whole futility of human experience in this. Indeed, it is possible, when you start looking at it this way, that your material is not thin and generic, but universal—maybe, in having nothing to say, you will find that you have everything to say.
Last month, the three members of the rap group Migos were arrested after a performance at Georgia Southern University. Combined, they were charged with multiple felonies related to alleged gun and drug possession and booked into a Bulloch County prison. Two members, Quavo and Takeoff, were released on bail a few days later, but the other, Offset, remains in jail, from where he recently gave an interview in which he, at least in part, places the blame for his arrest at the feet of Vice and its music channel Noisey.
This is the day that the New York Times, National Geographic, and BuzzFeed, among others, began publishing stories directly to Facebook. The instant-publishing partnership is the newest concession to, or accommodation with, Facebook’s ever-greater dominance of how people encounter and read (or watch) material.
Cablevision, the East Coast telecom company controlled by an incompetent buffoon with both a bad case and a poor understanding of the blues, has decided not to purchase the New York City tabloid the Daily News, after “after spending hundreds of hours analyzing a potential deal,” according to Reuters. We at Gawker would once again like to let it be known that we are interested in purchasing the Daily News; however, in light of the lack of interest by other suiters, we are dropping our offer to $50.
Here are some words that, in this particular order, do not refer to anything that exists: “parody sports-style game show.” What does that mean? Does “parody” modify “sports-style” or “game show” or “sports-style game show”? What is a “sports-style game show”? “Double Dare”? Would this be a parody of “Double Dare”? I’m happy to report that we’ll soon learn what one media organization thinks that term means, thanks to the money-drunk Bloomberg Politics team.
