Posts tagged WillLeitch at FanHouse - AOL Sports Blog

Although the popular sports blog Deadspin has grown into much more than a one-man show over the last three years, it has always been viewed, first and foremost, as Will Leitch's site.

Until today. Leitch is leaving to become a contributing editor at New York magazine, and Gawker Media has announced that A.J. Daulerio, who had served as the site's senior writer, is taking over the top spot.

It's a busy day for Daulerio, but he took a few minutes to talk to me about how he felt when he got the job, where Deadspin is going, and why he thinks Stuart Scott has every right to hate him.

After weeks of speculation about who would fill the sports blogosphere's highest-profile job, it was confirmed today that A.J. Daulerio will become the site's new editor, replacing the departing Will Leitch.

Clay Travis will be named the site's new associate editor. Current associate editor Rick Chandler will remain in that position.

The hiring of Daulerio was no surprise; as Leitch's right-hand man at Deadspin, he was widely viewed as the favorite to get the job. Daulerio previously ran the blog Oddjack and was a founding editor of The Black Table.

Travis, who writes the popular ClayNation column at CBSSports.com, is more of an outside-the-box selection -- a representative of the mainstream media, not the blogosphere.

UPDATE: Deadspin's official announcement is here.

UPDATE 2: A.J. Daulerio Interview: 'There's Going to Be "Why Deadspin Sucks" Columns All Over the Place'.

Previously on FanHouse:
Who's Next? Odds on Deadspin's New Editor
Leitch Leaves for New York Magazine, but He'd Like to Be Deadspin's Tom Brokaw
Will Leitch Leaving Deadspin

Hey, it's a sports blog writing about a sports blog and the world's first sports blogger! This is somewhere between navel-gazing and blogsturbation; we'll stick with the navel one for the picture's sake.

Regular readers of the super-famous sports blog Deadspin are probably aware of two things about it: 1) it's editor Will Leitch's last week, and 2) ESPN loathes Deadspin. Loathe hate anger rage.

Regarding the first point (we'll get to point two in a second), in the tradition of fine sendoffs, the peripheral characters of Deadspin are conducting a multi-segmented roast of Mr. Leitch, starting today. There's Big Daddy Drew, the Awful Announcing guy, Will's girlfriend, and hey, there's Bill Simmons too.

Wait wait wait wait. ESPN's Bill Simmons? That guy, the Sports Guy? ESPN.com's most decorated columnist is writing for ESPN's most hated nemesis?! (link is sort of NSFW: language and a crude fellatic photoshop that looks more like monochromatic vomit)

You directed 500 of your minions over to ESPN.com's brand-new Conversation boards so they could make jokes about Harold Reynolds banging my wife. (Note: I didn't think this was funny at the time ... now, I have to admit, it was kind of funny.) You were described by Buzz Bissinger as "Jimmy Olsen on Percocets," an analogy that gets more amusing every day. You even turned Chris Berman into the Casanova of the 21st century.

Sure enough. Erstwhile Page2 colleague Dan Shanoff appears in the comments of the article to make a statement about ESPN that, due to its scatological nature, we can't possibly repeat here or in front of our parents. The entire piece is supremely entertaining, especially as Simmons pores over pictures of Leitch from Google Images, and a strange salvo to be fired in the war between MSM and Blogfrica.

With Will Leitch leaving his post as Deadspin editor, one of the most coveted jobs in online sports media is now open. So who are the top candidates?

I've broken down (subjective) odds below, keeping in mind that Deadspin is a successful, popular site in the Gawker Media stable, and that Gawker is unlikely to want to shake things up -- but also that if the right candidate became available, Gawker isn't the type of company that hesitates to rock the boat.

Note: Some of the people whose names you see below are friends of mine; I did not consult with any of them before putting this list together.

Will Leitch has spent the last three years as the web's most influential sports blogger, and now he's joining the dreaded mainstream media.

New York Magazine is about to become his home, but before he leaves sports blogs behind, he agreed to talk to me for an interview in which we didn't discuss Buzz Bissinger (other than him assuring me that he had been talking to New York before the Bissinger blowup -- "it's not like they thought, Oh, that guy was on a TV show, let's get him'") but did discuss Deadspin's past and its future.

What will Deadspin look like post-Leitch? He told me, "I guarantee you, Deadspin is going to be considerably larger in a year than it is now." A full Q&A is below.

Will Leitch, who started Deadspin in 2005, quickly established it as the most popular sports blog on the web and achieved a measure of fame when pitted against a Pulitzer Prize winner in a raucous debate about the merits of the sports blogosphere, announced today that he's leaving the site.

He has accepted a job as a contributing editor for New York magazine, where he has written several pieces, including a much-publicized look at Alex Rodriguez last year.

Leitch writes that he will still contribute to Deadspin, but that a new editor will be hired to run the site. One would assume that senior writer A.J. Daulerio, associate editor Rick Chandler and several of the people who handle Deadspin on weekends will be candidates.

Whoever his replacement is, it's fair to say that person should expect a commenter backlash -- not because the Deadspin commenters are quite the angry lynch mob they've been portrayed as, but because Leitch is enormously popular with thousands of readers. They'll miss him.

This might seem surprising given all that I've written about him in the last two weeks, but I admire Buzz Bissinger. Friday Night Lights, which I read in high school, is one of the reasons I wanted to become a sports writer.

And I admire the fact that he's given some fairly introspective interviews since his anti-blog rant made him the subject of great derision. But I also read some of the things he says in those interviews and think he still doesn't get it. Take this, for instance, from Vanity Fair:

I was a little bit surprised that people were so indignant about the use of profanity on a network that basically invented the use of the word "c---" as a noun, adjective, verb, and adverb through the show Deadwood. I mean-we were on HBO, were we not? It seemed to me that, when convenient, people seize on the fact that I used profanity.

Those of us who object to Bissinger's use of profanity in addressing Deadspin editor Will Leitch aren't prudes. I use and hear profanity in daily conversation and it doesn't offend me. Many of my favorite movies and TV shows use profanity and it doesn't offend me.

What offends me is that Bissinger used profanity in place of rational argument, that he used profanity to attack someone, and that he used profanity while decrying the coarseness of blogs. Bissinger seems to understand that elsewhere in the interview, when he says, "I should not have used that invective and profanity." But when he then follows it up by saying he's surprised by the reaction to his profanity, you realize that he still doesn't quite understand why so many people reacted so negatively to his comments.

It all started a week ago Tuesday. Pulitzer-prize winning author Buzz Bissinger ambushed Deadspin's Will Leitch on Costas Now; the blogosphere was predictably incensed in the minutes, hours, and days that followed; and finally, the mainstream media weighed in on the blogosphere weighing in on the whole mess.

By Internet standards, Kansas City Star columnist and FOXSports.com contributor Jason Whitlock was late to the discussion -- his column went up Thursday night, some 48 hours after the spectacle in question -- but he was the only member of the media to raise questions about Leitch, the blogger, referencing a bizarre NPR interview from earlier this year.

Leitch offered a thoughtful response to Whitlock's column on Monday, and he spoke to FanHouse about it a day later. Next up: Whitlock, naturally.

Whitlock admits to liking blogs, but understands that "bloggers are no different from writers or journalists. There are good ones and bad ones, fair and unfair ones, moderately accurate and horribly inaccurate ones. None is infallible," something lost on Bissinger until his recent mea culpa tour.

In the quick interview that follows, Whitlock looks at the present and future of the sports blogosphere.

Last week Jason Whitlock noted that Deadspin's Will Leitch, in his recent book, God Save the Fan, "spends an inordinate amount of time telling prominent, successful, well-spoken African-Americans that they're not really black." Whitlock also referred to Leitch's NPR appearance some four months ago, where the same subject had come up.

I'm black, hardly prominent, debatably successful, and relatively well spoken. And I was dumbfounded when I heard the NPR interview. Not because of the sentiment, but because NPR's Scott Simon appeared to have exposed a blind spot in Leitch's thinking. It seemed upon listening that it had never occurred to Leitch that what he was writing might be problematic to some people.

I didn't write about the NPR show. In four years of blogging, I've never written about race and sports, because my focus has always been about the games, the players, the fans.

But I think race does belong in the discussion that's followed Leitch's appearance on Costas Now last week, because so far it seems Whitlock and one lonely blog are the only ones taking the lead. After reading Leitch's response to Whitlock's column, I e-mailed asking if he'd be willing to answer some questions. He agreed, and the short interview is after the jump.

One of the questions some bloggers have asked in the six days since Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Buzz Bissinger launched into an anti-blog tirade on Bob Costas's HBO show is: To what extent do others in the mainstream media agree with the content of Bissinger's anti-blog screed?

I think Bissinger's opinion is shared by a large number of journalists, even if most journalists wouldn't have expressed the opinion as profanely as Bissinger did. And Bissinger seems to back that up in an interview with The Big Lead:

The initial reaction was quite positive, more than quite positive from those I immediately spoke to–fellow panelists and members of HBO with the exception of Costas (Bob was friendly but muted in his response to my performance. He is one of the most thoughtful people I know and I think he was mulling that I had gone way too far.)

Bissinger doesn't say specifically which fellow panelists agreed with him, but the other panelists on the show included many of the biggest big-shots in sports media, including Joe Buck, Mitch Albom, Dan Patrick and Mike Wilbon. It wouldn't be at all surprising if all of them feel basically the way Bissinger feels. (Wilbon and I have discussed his thoughts on blogs.)

But it is interesting that Bissinger specifically says Costas did not offer him a pat on the back, which would seem to indicate that Costas meant it when he told me he didn't like the way the Bissinger-Will Leitch argument played out, and that I was wrong in thinking Costas wanted a Jerry Springer-style confrontation.

The best news in Bissinger's interview with The Big Lead is that he gave it at all: If he's engaging with bloggers rather than yelling at them, he's made a lot of progress in the last six days.