Why Bill Simmons isn’t the cash cow you might think
Our own Jason Fry wrote a post worth reading on web economics at Deadspin, the Gawker Media sports site. It’s about Bill Simmons, the star columnist for ESPN.com and one of the bigger web-native...
View ArticleBill Simmons on breaking news in a Twitter universe
A brief treat for sports fans and future-of-media junkies: Bill Simmons’ column at ESPN.com about his accidental tweeting last week about Patriots wide receiver Randy Moss’ trade to the Minnesota...
View ArticleBoth the short and long of it: How sportswriting is taking over the web...
Readers paying attention to sportswriting for the past few months have had ample room for excitement. Not only have we been treated to great takes on the Super Bowl, March Madness, new seasons for...
View ArticleBetting on Grantland: Will ESPN’s sports and pop culture site win big?
ESPN’s Bill Simmons periodically writes about gambling, whether it’s on sports he’s watching or trips to Las Vegas with his fantasy football buddies. So it seemed fitting that in the hours before...
View Article“We want people to do their own thinking”: What Nate Silver’s looking for at...
What will the new FiveThirtyEight look like when it debuts next year? More politics, more sports, and, according to Nate Silver, all the other data they can get their hands on. “For example, maybe...
View ArticleThis Week in Review: Learning from Grantland’s errors, and Ezra Klein cuts...
Lessons from Grantland and Dr. V: Much of the talk about journalism this week centered on a single story about the creator of an innovative golf club on the ESPN-owned site Grantland. What drew all the...
View ArticleQ&A: ESPN’s Henry Abbott on TrueHoop, serving readers, and the future of...
The reason Henry Abbott started writing a blog was simple: It seemed like the only viable route he had to being a sports writer. That was almost a decade ago. Now the founder of the NBA blog TrueHoop...
View ArticleThe newsonomics of Schibsted’s VGTV and web-native TV
AUSTIN — What’s one of the first principles of building a new digital business? “Make sure you lose money for at least three years,” VG CEO and editor Torry Pedersen told a London publishing crowd last...
View ArticleHot Pod: Talent discovery, a podcast accelerator, and a Ryan Seacrest joke...
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is Issue Thirty-Eight, published August 25, 2015. Hey Nieman Labbers! RELATED ARTICLEHot Pod: The Netflix-YouTube-Twitter-Starbucks of...
View ArticleHot Pod: Podcast upfronts, 99% Invisible goes dynamic, and Freakonomics goes...
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is Issue Forty-One, published September 15, 2015. Okay. Last week’s issue was a little crazy with that whole bit about shareable audio and all that...
View ArticleHot Pod: What will we find out from the deeper podcast metrics everyone says...
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is Issue Forty-Three, published October 6, 2015. So it looks like I’m back after a week off, and it seems I’m a little rusty with the Oxford comma....
View ArticleHot Pod: Decoding the secret histories of podcasting
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is Issue Forty-Six, published October 27, 2015. Alright, folks. We’ve got a lot to get through today. *cracks fingers* The secret histories of...
View ArticleESPN abruptly shuts down Grantland “effective immediately”
Grantland, the sports-and-culture site launched by Bill Simmons for ESPN in 2011, is shutting down, ESPN said in a brief statement on its website Friday afternoon: Effective immediately we are...
View ArticleHot Pod: What happens when NPR tries to sound casual and podcast-y
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is Issue Forty-Nine, published November 17, 2015. NPR’s new politics podcast, also a multiplatform coverage play. Look, American elections can be a...
View ArticleHot Pod: Charting the outflow of public radio talent to the new for-profit...
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is Issue Fifty-Five, published January 12, 2016. Pods for all seasons. Lately I’ve been noticing something of a small trend: podcasts that were...
View ArticleHot Pod: What should an on-demand news podcast look like?
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is Issue Fifty-Nine, published February 9, 2016. Happy Lunar New Year! The Tow Center’s “Why Podcasting Matters.” And so there I was, once again,...
View ArticleBill Simmons’ new digital venture, The Ringer, will launch in mid-March as an...
Last October the Internet bid a sad farewell to Grantland, the sports and culture website Bill Simmons started for ESPN in 2011. On Wednesday, it learned the name of the new digital venture from...
View ArticleHot Pod: Not enough advertisers for podcasts, or not enough podcasts worth...
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is Issue Sixty-One, published February 23, 2016. *cracks knuckles* The podcast advertising hurdle. Podcastland received a fair bit of attention...
View ArticleHot Pod: We now have new, free rankings to show how podcasts stack up against...
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue seventy-four, published May 24, 2016. Public podcast ranking. This just in, and it’s pretty big: Podtrac, a decade-old podcast measurement...
View Article“Medium’s team did everything”: How 5 publishers transitioned their sites to...
“Even 15 years after Blogger, it’s still hard to publish on the internet,” a Medium executive told a group of publishers this past spring. Medium has now made it its mission to make publishing easier:...
View ArticleThe true crime show that’s gotten comparisons to Serial is heading for a...
Oh, and speaking of mysteries: Starlee Kine appears to be part of the S-Town editorial team, according to the circulated press release. This would be her second podcasting effort following Mystery...
View ArticleThese are the most important developments in the podcast business so far in 2017
Audience size: 67 million U.S. monthly listeners, according to Edison and Triton Digital’s annual Infinite Dial report, up 21 percent from 57 million from the year before. The volume of growth between...
View ArticleToday, Explained, explained: Vox enters the daily news podcast race with a...
The choice to target the evening commute is a really, really smart one. I’ve argued this before, but I think it’s safe to assume that there might be considerable overlap between the audiences of The...
View ArticleSpotify is buying The Ringer, expanding its podcast footprint (and dipping...
“What we really did with The Ringer, I think, is we bought the next ESPN,” said Spotify CEO Daniel Ek during the earnings call this morning, shortly after the company sent out word that it had...
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