Thursday, June 5, 2008

STUART SCOTT, BARBARO, BISSINGER, AND BRADY QUINN ARE CHIPPING IN ON A GOING-AWAY PRESENT: One of the few things we lay folk know about professional journalism, and therefore, presumably one of the first things that they teach you when you become a respectable journalist, is not to bury the lede. (I, for example, am not a professional journalist, and so it will be over two sentences plus a headline before I get to the point.) New York Magazine's newest contributing editor would be wise to learn this himself, since you actually have to click past the jump -- the equivalent of following the "continued on page A17" notation on a front-page newspaper story -- to find out that OMG you guys Will Leitch is leaving Deadspin!

I've credited Leitch's blog, Deadspin, 14 times on this site (for seven-legged hermaphroditic deer, meta-blog commentary, and homicidal child-hating Atlanta Falcons mascots, among other things), and that doesn't count the number of times I linked to Deadspin (innumerable) or just failed to credit it (supernumerable). Leitch, for better or for worse, either transformed Internet sports coverage or was just the first guy to do on a mass scale what is now so common -- bring the barstool into the Interwebs, where people can consider and discuss sports the way they do in real life, i.e., with insults, alcohol, and sex jokes. He made a well-respected author go bonkers, exposed an entire subculture of people who thought that a thoroughbred horse was not just a real person but a saint, gave us wall-to-wall coverage of the Zapruderish dissection of the momentary exposure of a USC Song Girl's tush during a football game, and linked to us every year when we covered the Spelling Bee.

He also, perhaps most impressively (and Bissinger notwithstanding), largely kept himself free of the oily film that covers a lot of both sports bloggers and Gawker Media employees. Leitch's own posts were sometimes sophomoric, but he never adopted the jubilantly crude persona of some of his contributors (Daulerio and Big Daddy Drew, and I want to emphasize that I read and like both of them) or of the sites that spun off of the Deadspin comments (Kissing Suzy Kolber, With Leather; again, I read and like those). Nor did he seem to embrace either the self-promotional predilections of some Gawker editors (Gould) or the mercilessness of others (Lisanti, Cohen). Best of all, because Deadspin frequently celebrated, unironically, the feats of its subjects (and in particular the feats of Leitch's favorites, the St. Louis Cardinals and Arizona Buzzsaw), it never seemed as relentlessly negative as some of the other Gawker sites.

Deadspin is as much Leitch as Wonkette was Cox, and you can see what happened to Wonkette after she left. While I'm afraid for where it will go without him to pull it toward Midwestern amiability (notwithstanding its content), I certainly wish him well.

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