This weekend, I lost two major journalistic influences, causing me to reflect now on what’s to come next. On Friday, Grantland, a sports and pop culture website operated by ESPN, was abruptly shuttered. And on Sunday, Gary Levine, an English professor here at AU and a regular reader of The Collegian, succumbed to cancer. 

It is foolish in many ways to compare the end of a website to the end of someone’s life, but please indulge me, because the combination of losses is bringing outsized distress to me.

I met Gary Levine in person a week or two after the start of the 2014-15 academic year. I was walking through the English hallway in Bixler when he stopped me to ask about an interview I had done with Interim President Crothers before the semester started. Crothers had said something about learning more sitting in the back of a taxi in Calcutta in rush hour than in some border-crossings courses. I laughed in the interview, thinking he was probably right.

Levine did not agree, and told me so in that hallway in Bixler. He asked why I didn’t follow up, why I didn’t ask what a student could learn without having some cultural context before he arrived in India.

It surprised me for a few reasons. I’ve never been sure how much people paid attention to my work, and I wasn’t expecting to have that (completely fair) critique lobbed at me in that moment. 

This wasn’t the start of some grand mentorship. Levine was critical of The Collegian’s emphasis on sports coverage on Facebook. I responded in a 1,200-word column exploring why we cover sports, which is almost certainly the best opinion piece I’ve written. 

These two anecdotes point to the value Gary Levine, and other readers like him, bring to journalism. We, like any other group, can fall victim to group think. We can aim to satisfy our expectations and standards, and it is only when readers offer constructive feedback that we can get better. He will be missed.

•••

When I got my first laptop, one of the first things I did was set Grantland.com as my homepage. It was a sports site, a site concerned with the X’s and O’s of games, but it was also something different and better than that. At the time, I was reading it as a model to aspire to, a place that produced stories that I wanted to write.

I got to college, and quickly shifted my plans from sports writing to general news, but my love for Grantland never waned. It was a daily check for me. I read thousands of word analyses of basketball offense, odes to athletes’ greatest celebrations and commentary on the role of athletics in society. The site did some important work, and more work that wasn’t important. 

But, in nearly everything it did, it was excellent. It didn’t ask for quick breakdowns, it didn’t report superficial facts. It valued depth and insight and writing in a way fewer and fewer places did. 

So when the site was abruptly shut down, I felt an actual, tangible sensation of loss in my stomach in a way that is completely ridiculous until I started thinking about what was lost when Grantland was shut down.

As the dust settles, it seems like the site was shut down because it wasn’t making money, and ESPN was done subsidizing it, or couldn’t afford to subsidize it any longer. I’m not sure it’ll ever become perfectly clear why Grantland died, but in a way it doesn’t matter. The simple fact that has me sad is that the site did things in a way different from so many others and now that site doesn’t exist, crushed by the invisible hand of economics. It was good, it was great, and it didn’t make enough money to justify its existence. 

•••

The loss of Gary Levine and Grantland have nothing to do with each other, and are incomparable, except that to me they symbolize the challenges that face journalism. Legacy media have fewer solid, dependable readers that offered constructive criticism, and start-up, online media have a hard time making it, even when backed by the behemoth that is ESPN. Which means I don’t have the slightest clue how to find a space in journalism to call my own. I can’t go back and find space at a newspaper that delivers yesterday’s news to your door, because that readership is getting smaller every day. 

The internet is the future, but nobody has found out how to make money there, and the sad reality is that money is needed to make journalism happen. 

The spaces where excellent journalism is being produced are fewer and fewer, shrinking alongside the attention span of the average reader. And that terrifies me, because I want to produce something great, something monumental and influential and simply excellent. 

And I don’t know if printed papers, the ones read religiously by people like Gary Levine will exist when I’m capable of doing that, and I don’t know if the Internet will be able to financially support consistently excellent work. And that terrifies me, and it should terrify you for any number of reasons. 

But as I apply for internships and start planning my career, these two losses have me scared for the very simple and concrete reason that I don’t know how to do exactly what it is that I want to do.