He is so incredibly terrible. Love how his opening line really hooks you in.
Quote:
If you’ve accomplished anything worthwhile, you’ve at least experienced it without maybe knowing it was an actual thing. (If you’re a useless phony, this doesn’t apply.) Psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes first described it in 1978 as, “Despite outstanding academic and professional accomplishments, [people] who experience the imposter phenomenon persists in believing that they are really not bright and have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise,” and that those people constantly fear exposure of their self-perceived phoniness.
That’s me, most of the times I write a piece here, most of the times I do a radio, TV, or podcast appearance. Most of the times I have to speak in a faculty meeting or at some teacher seminar. “This is it,” I think. “I’m going to write or say something so dumb in its basicness that people will cease to respect my acumen and figure out I drank my way through college while being just good enough to BS my way to a degree. Someone’s going to ask me about some sports blind spot of mine or about some canonical novel I haven’t read, and I’ll be exposed as inferior.”
So, yeah, I suck. But my imposter syndrome creeps up even louder when people I’m absolutely sure are better at this writing thing than I are told by their employers that they have become expendable. In April, it was ESPN’s latest periodical round of cuts that had begun in late 2015 with the dissolution of the great Grantland and gutting of many of ESPN’s writers at online hyperlocal affiliates. Then Sports Illustrated laid off some writers and editors at the same time it was hammering out plans to increase video content on its website, part of some 300 people losing jobs under the Time Inc. umbrella. Days later it was Yahoo Sports getting rid of writers and editors over the course of May through June, along with eventually 2,100 people there and at Huffington Post as they were acquired by Verizon. Then it was Vocativ losing its entire editorial staff in a shift to video content on the site. On Monday, Fox Sports announced it had eliminated its entire digital writing staff in favor of 100 percent video content on its site.
Plenty of better writers and thinkers keep finding themselves out of work, which worries me, as eventually the rock I hide under has to be turned over. But I’m also bothered intellectually by a theme in these sports media layoffs.
More and more there seems to be a shift away from good writing and toward snippety pieces or just outright video. I then forget my insecurities and become insulted that so many sports sites or their parent companies are increasingly choosing to invest in the junk food equivalent of media. Video content is hardly my bang. I’m a reader, and I want to be challenged by great writing, including sports.
If an online article has a video at the top like this one probably does, I mute it. Video has a place, and some of it is done really well — see the stuff SB Nation does, for example. But it’s supplementary for me or, again, “junk food”—fun in small doses, but should never dominate one’s diet. And I’m not alone, as Reuters Institute recently published its annual report on digital news. Per NiemanLab, “One of the more surprising findings from last year’s report was that most people really don’t like getting news from online video. This is still the case.”
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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?The Missing Link wrote:
For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.
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