Abstract
In 2011, sports media outlet ESPN launched Grantland.com, a sports and popular culture Web site edited by blogger-turned-ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons. Taking inspiration from magazines like GQ and Esquire, the Web site specializes in long-form journalism; boasts a roster of noteworthy writers and editors who established their renown in print media; and is named after Grantland Rice, the ‘Dean of American Sports Writers’ whose work composes the foundation of America’s sports writing canon. Moreover, it teamed with the hip, independent publisher McSweeney’s to produce Grantland Quarterly, a collection of the Web site’s best works packaged as books. Grantland.com and Grantland Quarterly use print’s relative prestige among media to situate ESPN’s online content as exceptionally literary. This essay uses Simmons and Grantland’s engagements with print to examine and critique ESPN’s transmedia efforts to cultivate prestige that broadens its demographic reach and sustains its carefully crafted institutional identity as ‘The Worldwide Leader in Sports’.
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