Simmons: Early Newspaper Pitch Presaged Future Internet Column Formats
Bill Simmons · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · Feb 13, 2023 · at 14:18
Bill Simmons, sports media founder of The Ringer, describes attempting to pitch a multi-element lifestyle-style page layout while working entry-level at the Boston Herald in the 1990s.
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“I remember I spent two weeks. I pointed out this whole Sunday thing for the Sunday paper, this whole page that I wanted them to give me. And it was like, it had like a 600 work column. It had these lists. It looked a lot like kind of what the internet would look like. 1012 years later, it was modeled like EW Entertainment Weekly had that little EW, the hot list. So there was like that version of that. It had a little mailbag thing, which I stole from Letterman. It was all these different things that I like.”
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