Grantland

• 1. Introduction

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  Grantland launched on the 8th of June, 2011, with a name borrowed from a sportswriter who had died nearly six decades earlier. Grantland Rice, the early-20th-century journalist who gave his name to the site, died in 1954. Invoking him was a deliberate act. Bill Simmons, the veteran sports journalist who created and ran the site for ESPN, was betting that long-form storytelling still had a future in the digital age.

  The bet was audacious. Online readers were already being trained toward shorter and shorter pieces. Quick-hit content was winning. Simmons wanted something closer to a magazine, with space for deep dives and analytical essays, written by both established names and new voices. ESPN, the broadcasting giant, backed him.

  For four years, Grantland attracted millions of readers and some of the most celebrated writers in American journalism. Then, on the 30th of October, 2015, ESPN announced it was shutting the whole thing down. The site that had drawn 6 million unique visitors in a single month was gone. What it left behind was a debate about whether quality writing and commercial survival can ever truly coexist on the open web.

• 2. The Talent Assembled

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  Chuck Klosterman, Malcolm Gladwell, and Dave Eggers were among the contributors who appeared on Grantland in its early days. That roster signaled Simmons' intentions. Grantland was not going to be a site staffed only by beats reporters cranking out game recaps. It would bring in cultural critics, novelists, and journalists whose work had appeared far beyond the sports pages.

  The full contributor list that accumulated over the site's life was striking in its breadth. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Morris wrote for Grantland. So did MacArthur Award-winning novelist Colson Whitehead. The screenwriter Brian Koppelman, who co-wrote the film Rounders, contributed. Former NBA player Jalen Rose had a voice on the site alongside television critics, music writers, and basketball analysts.

  One section in particular became a hub for basketball obsessives. "The Triangle" was a basketball blog led by Simmons himself, drawing contributions from prominent NBA analysts. The site also produced a print publication called the "Grantland Quarterly," which collected the strongest pieces from the website into a physical format. That decision to publish in print, at a moment when most digital outlets were abandoning paper entirely, said something about how seriously the site took its own work.

• 3. Statistics as Storytelling

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  Football Outsiders, Baseball Prospectus, and Synergy were among the data sources Grantland's writers pulled from regularly. That was unusual. Most sports journalism at the time either ignored analytics entirely or treated numbers as decoration. Grantland made the data part of the narrative itself.

  As Stephen Carter of the Chicago Tribune described it, the site offered sportswriting for grownups. Articles frequently included data visualizations alongside the prose, giving readers a way to see patterns that the writing was describing. The goal was not to overwhelm a casual fan with statistics but to make the numbers understandable, even illuminating.

  This approach gave Grantland a distinct identity within the ESPN empire. The site was technically under ESPN's umbrella, but it operated with considerable editorial independence. Writers could explore topics and take angles that might not fit elsewhere in ESPN's programming. That autonomy was central to what made Grantland feel different from the content appearing on ESPN's other platforms.

• 4. The Dr. V Controversy

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  In January 2014, a piece by writer Caleb Hannan about the Oracle GXI golf putter arrived on Grantland and immediately drew condemnation. The article's subject was Essay Anne Vanderbilt, the inventor behind the putter, who went by the name Dr. V. Hannan's reporting had uncovered that Vanderbilt had fraudulently claimed several scientific credentials. But the piece also revealed Vanderbilt's transgender identity, treating it as another form of deception in the same way it treated her false qualifications.

  Before the article was published, Vanderbilt died by suicide. The piece ran anyway. The response from the transgender community and others was intense. Simmons initially dismissed the criticism, which made the backlash worse.

  He eventually published a public response. In it, he acknowledged that Hannan had outed Vanderbilt to one of her investors, and he described the editorial team's "collective ignorance about the issues facing the transgender community in general" as one of its biggest failures. He also named the central mistake: the staff had not educated themselves on those issues before deciding to publish the piece.

  A profile of Simmons that appeared in Rolling Stone in April 2014 addressed the controversy at length, incorporating criticism from senior ESPN personnel while also including Simmons' own defense of his decisions. The episode remained one of the most serious editorial failures associated with the site.

• 5. The End and Its Causes

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  In May 2015, ESPN President John Skipper told The New York Times that the company would not renew Bill Simmons' contract. That announcement effectively ended Simmons' tenure and set a clock ticking on Grantland's future. Chris Connelly was named interim editor-in-chief later that month.

  Five months later, on the 30th of October, 2015, ESPN made the shutdown official. The statement ESPN released explained the decision in terms of priorities: "After careful consideration, we have decided to direct our time and energy going forward to projects that we believe will have a broader and more significant impact across our enterprise."

  Skipper said publicly that finances were not the issue, framing the decision instead as a question of where ESPN's time and energy should go. But the context around the shutdown was hard to ignore. In September 2015, ESPN laid off roughly 300 employees, about 5% of its workforce. Reports circulated that year that ESPN had lost 3.2 million subscribers as cable consumers cut their traditional TV packages.

  Grantland's 6 million unique visitors in March 2015 was a substantial number. But sustaining a staff of 50 writers, editors, and technical personnel on that readership was, by many accounts, economically difficult. Huffington Post writer Justin Block argued that the site's defining characteristic, its unhurried, long-form approach, was fundamentally at odds with the economics of digital media in the mid-2010s. Simmons described the shutdown as "simply appalling."

• 6. What Came After

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  Bill Simmons launched The Ringer in 2016, building a new operation on the same editorial philosophy that had defined Grantland. A substantial number of former Grantland staff joined him, including Sean Fennessey, Chris Ryan, Mallory Rubin, Juliet Litman, Craig Gaines, Bryan Curtis, Ryan O'Hanlon, Danny Chau, Shea Serrano, Jason Concepcion, Riley McAtee, Joe Fuentes, and Tate Frazier.

  Simmons also brought forward specific shows from Grantland's podcasting network. The Watch, hosted by Chris Ryan and television critic Andy Greenwald, continued under The Ringer's banner. Ryan and Greenwald had hosted a Game of Thrones recap show on HBO, modeled on their Grantland podcast Watch the Thrones, which Simmons produced.

  Simmons himself debuted a weekly show on HBO on the 22nd of June, 2016. Titled Any Given Wednesday with Bill Simmons, it ran for one season. The migration of so many Grantland voices to The Ringer meant that the editorial sensibility Simmons had built at Grantland did not entirely disappear when ESPN pulled the plug. The closure had prompted a wider conversation about the economics of long-form journalism, with some observers concluding that the pressures facing outlets of Grantland's mid-size made survival structurally difficult regardless of quality.