10 years ago, the sports longform boom died

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Online publishers are constantly grappling with the whims and trends that shape how readers consume content and how advertisers respond. Some of the more substantial shifts we’ve seen include social media’s reshaping of the industry and numerous pivots to video over the years.

In the early to mid-2010s, online outlets observed audiences shifting their reading habits from laptops to smartphones. With that came a perceived desire to engage with more complex subjects and to scroll for additional context and perspectives. While so much had been made (even more so now) about shortening attention spans and quick-hit content, there seemed to be renewed interest in “longform” journalism and the kind of stories that could keep you reading for 10 or even 20 minutes at a time.

According to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, longform articles were receiving twice as much engagement as short articles on smartphones. Publishers had noticed. So had advertisers. The longform boom had arrived.

Outlets across every genre and vertical amplified the trend in a way we had not previously seen in the online space. Longform.org became a go-to destination each week for curated reads during lunch and bathroom breaks. This wasn’t just the domain of The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and GQ anymore (though they continued to shine). The sports world was particularly primed to take advantage of the trend, with sites like Deadspin, Grantland, and ESPN jumping on board.

Few outlets embraced the longform trend quite like SB Nation. The Vox Media sports arm officially launched its longform division in 2012, in conjunction with naming college sports blogger Spencer Hall as its first editorial director and Glenn Stout as the longform editor. And for years ahead, SB Nation Longform was one of the crown jewels of the space. Pieces like “The Many Crimes of Mel Hall,” “Unclimbable,” and “Two Lanes to Accokeek” remain among the best of the era.

(I should also disclose that I ran an SB Nation blog for 10 years and worked for SBNation.com as an editor and writer between 2009 and 2011.)

The genre was humming along in February 2016 when SB Nation published a 12,000-word story on Daniel Holtzclaw, a former Eastern Michigan football player and Oklahoma City police officer convicted of raping multiple Black women (Holtzclaw is half-white, half-Japanese) and sentenced to 263 years in jail.

The sprawling piece was “a nuanced portrait that never loses sight of the fact that women were victimized,” according to a forward by Stout. “I think people will be talking about this one.”

He was more right than he could know.

Almost immediately, the article, written by freelancer Jeff Arnold, received intense pushback and criticism for attempting to paint Holtzclaw sympathetically, relying heavily on his teammates’ and parents’ beliefs, and offering up the possibility that he was only accused due to outside forces, such as movements like Black Lives Matter. It also wasn’t noted until the very end of the piece that Arnold had covered Holtzclaw’s college football career, providing a staggering potential conflict of interest.

“[Arnold] appeared to paint Holtzclaw in a sympathetic light by spending the bulk of the article talking to the people who naturally would take his side, mainly his father, his defense team, and his former Eastern Michigan teammates,” wrote The Washington Post’s Matt Bonesteel. “Holtzclaw’s victims were given two paragraphs, with quotations taken from transcripts of his sentencing hearing.”

“Aside from the fact that Arnold had this specialized knowledge, it’s hard to understand why it’s relevant, why this story was written, why it was published, and what lessons we’re supposed to glean,” wrote Jezebel’s Kara Brown.

“Basically, this is the local news interviewing the shocked neighbors — ‘He always seemed like such a nice kid’ — over and over again for 12,000 words,” wrote Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky.

Five hours after “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?” was published, it was taken down and replaced with an editor’s note from Hall. (An archived version of the article is available here.)

“The publication of this story represents a complete breakdown of a part of the editorial process at SB Nation,” he wrote. “There were objections by senior editorial staff that went unheeded. It was tone-deaf, insensitive to the victims of sexual assault and rape, and wrongheaded in approach and execution. There is no qualification: it was a complete failure.”

In the days that followed, the story shifted from “Why was this written?” to “How could this have ever been published in the first place?” Over the next two weeks, SB Nation put its longform vertical on hiatus and severed ties with Arnold; Vox Media announced it would conduct an internal review; Arnold released a statement saying he made a “grave mistake” by not speaking to victims; and Stout was fired.

Deadspin’s Greg Howard wrote a thorough breakdown of how the piece was published and all of the processes that broke down in order for that to happen, including the unheeded concerns raised by senior female editorial staffers, as well as the biases that were inherent in an editorial staff that was overwhelmingly male and white.

Within his write-up, Arnold also offered an analysis of the longform vertical at-large.

“There is no such thing as longform writing,” he wrote. “There is such a thing as features writing—profiles, investigations, essays—and if it’s prestigious, that’s mainly because of its association with careful selection of subjects and with vigorous research, reporting, editing, copy-editing, and fact-checking. A feature carries an implicit assertion that a publication has invested money, time, talent, effort, and care to produce something of depth. Longform is a variant of feature writing—a branding strategy, really—that confuses a secondary indicator (length) for the thing itself (quality). As the name implies, it asserts nothing more than that a certain mass has been attained.”

The Daniel Holtzclaw story wasn’t the first longform feature to fall headfirst into this kind of controversy. In 2014, Grantland published “Dr. V’s Magical Putter,” a 7,000-word “case study on how get-the-story tunnel vision can blind journalists and editors to grave failures.” In 2015, Rolling Stone retracted a 9,000-word article about a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity after it was roundly discredited, and was later sued by some of its subjects.

The Holtzclaw piece and the ensuing fallout felt like the end of an era. Longform reporting and articles are still written in great supply, but the days of promoting them as an audience-grabbing vertical subsided in that wake. Beyond the catastrophic editorial problems and the inability of fast-moving online publishers to properly handle weighty stories like these, the market had become oversaturated, and the overall quality of published work was declining.

You can see the bones of so many other recent (and current) trends in the rise and fall of longform. There’s no doubt that hard lessons were learned by the individuals involved. Lessons about listening, accountability, differing points of view, bias, toxic masculinity, power dynamics, cults of personality, and journalistic ethics.

But looking out at the media and business landscapes in front of us now, it’s hard to see if many of those lessons are being heeded on a larger level. In some ways, revisiting this story makes one realize we’re probably stuck in a loop waiting for the next Daniel Holtzclaw story to drop.