"This Is a Good Idea" (1989)
A brief history of journalism, creativity, and no one knowing anything.
This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics. Welcome to all new readers/subscribers, and if you like what you’re reading, please join the mailing list and share, on social media or through e-mail or however you feel comfortable sharing. (It’s still FREE to join the list: Just click “None” on the “subscribe now” page.) The best way you can help out is by spreading the word and sharing with others. I have set up payment tiers, if you wish to chip in and allow me the time to do a little more research on on these posts and have full access to the archives—I’ve made those subscriptions about as cheap as Substack will let me make them, which is $5 a month or $40 a year.
I.
In 1989, the publisher of The New York Post, a man named Peter Price, had a very strange lunch with a Mexican billionaire named Emilio Azcarraga. As they talked, Azcarraga brought up an idea: In Mexico and several other countries, he said, they had successful daily sports newspapers. So why couldn’t that kind of idea work in America?
Price thought it over, flew to Mexico, and told Azcarraga the whole thing might cost up to $100 million before he even potentially began to turn a profit. Azcarraga did not ask any questions. He did not express any concerns.
“This is a good idea,” Azcarraga said. “We’re going to do this now.”
II.
The National Sports Daily lasted eighteen months, from January of 1990 until June of 1991. It famously employed a murderer’s row of great writers who happened to write about sports, from Frank Deford to Dave Kindred to Peter Richmond to Johnette Howard. Eventually, issues related to poor planning distribution killed it, according to this oral history of the National, which appeared in the first days that a new ESPN-backed website called Grantland, dedicated to outside-the-box writing about sports and culture, surfaced on the Internet in 2011.
“I don’t know if it was jealousy or morbid fascination, but people would constantly talk about whether the paper was going to fail,” one former National employee told Grantland writers Alex French and Howie Kahn. “I started to wonder, if my mom was sick, would they be doing this? Always telling me she doesn’t look very good?”
As someone who wrote for Grantland in its early days, and throughout the course of its brief existence, I can tell you that the same thing happened with Grantland. Some of it was professional jealousy, but some of it, I think, was built on the notion that a site so unpologetically niche and so utterly unconventional could never make any real money—that it was thumbing its nose at the culture of spreadsheets and hedge funds and the notion of getting a real job that most of us who worked there had spent our lives rebelling again.
Ultimately, while the reasons for Grantland’s demise were complex, those people were right, in a practical sense. But I also think those people are missing the point, because there is nothing practical about best stuff The National and Grantland published. It was weird and offbeat and unexpected; when it worked, it elevated the very idea of what writing about sports could be. And frankly, there’s nothing practical about creating anything at all.
Every creative industry is defined by a perpetual battle between art and commerce; and those of us who lean in the direction of art understand that the only way to push the culture forward is to find someone who believes that the ideas that no one thinks are “good”—the ideas that are steeped in craziness, and sanctioned by wild thinkers like a Mexican billionaire nicknamed “El Tigre”—are actually the best ones of all.
III.
This week, The Athletic, another sports journalism entity that I once did some work for, announced that it was laying off four percent of its staff and pivoting to…something.
That’s a quote from the leadership of The Athletic, the gist of which seems to imply that they are moving away from straight beat writing and toward feature writing, I think, maybe, perhaps? But mostly, it seems to imply that The Athletic is going to pivot toward writing things that people want to read, which is such an oblique goal that they cannot possibly know what it means. Because the truth is, the idea of a story landing with a broad group of readers, or viewers, is not a science at all. Because in truth, the best piece of wisdom about the marriage of the creative process and commerce came from the legendary screenwriter William Goldman.
“Nobody knows anything,” he said.
IV.
The best editor I ever worked for was a subversive and wonderfully brilliant weirdo named Jay Lovinger. For several years, I wrote features for him at ESPN, in a small unit of writers and editors that was dubbed E-Ticket, which produced the kind of long-form journalism that earned admiration within the industry and didn’t make any real money for ESPN. Even as we were doing it, we understood we were living on borrowed time; you could not do things this strange and this offbeat without some bean counter eventually wondering why the hell they were paying this much money for these kinds of pieces in the first place.
Clearly, sports journalism—and journalism itself, and to a larger extent, the entire idea of creative work in the modern world—has reached an uneasy and unsettling crossroads, and it is easy to look at all of this and declare that culture itself is trapped in a “doom loop.”1 As machines become more sophisticated, it is easy to think that you can produce creative work through algorithms, and that’s made this period seem even more threatening to those of us who create for a living. In Hollywood, writers are currently on strike in large part because of the threat of AI taking their jobs and generating everything via algorithm.
On a basic level, the problem is simple. It’s not that much different than the problem that faced The National, which is that is expensive to make good things, and it is harder than ever to make money producing and distributing these things. So people want to minimize their risk; people want to create without the problem of dealing with creative people. But the truth is that great writing only emerges if someone’s willing to take a chance, and foster the kind of atmosphere that allows great writing to emerge in the first place. (Hopefully The Athletic will continue to find a way to do that within the constraints of a corporate environment, but it’s tough.)
This is what happened during the Golden Age of television: Networks like AMC and FX were willing to take those chances in order to establish their identities, and produce shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. This is what happened during the golden years of newspapers post-Watergate, and the golden years of the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s. Entities like ESPN were willing to establish websites like Grantland in order to attract and retain out-of-the-box talent. Investors bought into the idea of places like BuzzFeed buoying their clickbait listicles with a backbone of really good writing, so that you could have your prestige and your revenue stream at the same time.
The window stayed open for a while, and then it closed, and now we’re at that point where we’re waiting for a new generation of visionaries and weirdos to come along and foster a new batch of good ideas that everyone else thinks are terrible. I just hope that they still can. I hope that AI cannot supplant the natural human desire to break free of some dull template and create something real. As much as we’d like to think we know more now than we ever have before, Goldman’s Law remains truer than ever: Nobody knows a goddamned thing. At least, not until they see it. And you need someone with the money and the cojones who’s willing to foster that atmosphere, like The National once did.
“Azcárraga was amazing,” Deford said of The National’s owner in that oral history. “I think he committed to 50 million and lost closer to 150 million. Amazing guy. Paid every bill at the end.”
Said writer Johnette Howard: “All we need is a guy with about $100 million. Have another rodeo.”
I borrow that phrase from the San Francisco Chronicle, which has so relentlessly and shamlessly co-opted the phrase “doom loop” to describe the current problems facing downtown San Francisco—and to drive its own web traffic—that it almost feels as if they signed a blood pact with the ghost of William Randolph Hearst.
This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Reply to this newsletter, contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please join the list and/or share it with others or consider a paid subscription.