Kevin Love announced his free-agency decision at The Players’ Tribune, Derek Jeter’s website that’s supposedly produced and written by athletes.
Here is The Players’ Tribune’s masthead
Editorial director Kobe Bryant presumably found out about senior editor Kevin Love’s free-agency decision before the rest of us. (But probably not.)
Andy Marlin-USA TODAY Sports
I think that’s neat! After a somewhat contentious year in Cleveland, Love just wanted to publish what he wanted about his decision to return to Cleveland without fear of a media middleman misconstruing his words. Critics have said The Players’ Tribune might be little more than a place for athletes to publish PR puff pieces, but, I don’t really see a problem with that, so long as there are also places in the world for things besides PR puff pieces.
However, I do find it completely hilarious that The Players’ Tribune assigns the athletes who “write” content for them titles. We know for certain that they are not, in fact, writing the words published on the site. That pretense is long gone. And yet Love’s article tells us that he is “Senior Editor.”
From a publication perspective, there is no rhyme or reason to these titles. Most of the athletes listed as “contributors” -- say, Vernon Davis -- have written exactly as much as the athletes listed as “guest contributors” -- say, Mike Conley. Athletes with prominent titles -- say, editor-at-large David Ortiz -- have only written one article.
It seems most likely editor-at-large David Ortiz and senior editor Kevin Love got their titles due to the fact that they’re more famous and good at sports than other contributors. However, I personally prefer to imagine that Ortiz and Love spend hours and hours every day poring over the words of their colleagues, shaping their ideas, pushing their authors harder and harder until their stories are worthy of the public.
The Players' Tribune doesn't actually provide a masthead, so I went through their archives and constructed one. We hope the order in which we placed the athletes reflects the workflow. I would've loved to link to the individual author pages that pop up when you hover over a player's name, but sadly, these all link back to The Player's Tribune homepage.
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