Jun
12
“The only real difference is that I have more people reading me now. When I was writing for ESPN in 2001 or 2002, I remember thinking that 200,000 people was an absolutely staggering number of readers for a column. Now I might have 1.2 or 1.3 million readers for some of the bigger columns—and not people who flipped through it in a magazine and may or may not have even read a single line, but people who willingly clicked on the link to get there and almost definitely read it. That’s kind of incredible. I grew up dreaming of writing for the Boston Globe and I think the Globe has a circulation of 400,000 households total, and of those people, how many of them even check the sports page? That’s the one thing I will never get used to: just how many people read ESPN.com. Every time I think about leaving to start my own site some day, I always remember those times when something gigantic happens—like, say, Manny’s steroid suspension recently—and I have two to three hours to write a reaction knowing that it could potentially be read by a million-plus people. What’s better than that? I live for those ten to twelve times a year when I have to come up with a unique angle, write the shit out of it, hand it in, and hope it turned out O.K. The day that something like the Manny story breaks and I say to myself, ‘Screw it, I’ll sit this one out, I can’t come up with anything’ is the day I will quit.”
Bill Simmons (via beekeeperssociety)
