![]() ![]() But we were in contact with Kevin and his team throughout the weekend, so we kind of had an idea of what would be coming in and when.” In the piece, Durant refers multiple times to “growth” and “evolution,” and describes his choice as a matter of “moving out of my comfort zone.” “It was what he wanted,” Robertson said. “We got the text from Kevin, and the story was published maybe thirty minutes later, just because there’s some production that has to happen on the back end. In general, though, we do not add words to the story.”Īs for his latest article, Durant wrote it himself, Robertson told me, and he received little more than a light copy edit. We ask the questions we feel we need to ask. “You clean it up and you might move some anecdotes around and paragraphs around. “We edit them as any publication would,” Robertson said. It takes you away from the moment you’re in.”) On these stories, he’s gotten help from his editor, Seamus McKiernan, formerly of the Huffington Post. But I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the future. (“We’re all built to want to look back or speed life up. Durant’s big story on Monday was not his first piece for the site: in the past, he has written about photographing the Super Bowl and being in the moment. The site has about forty full-time employees, mostly in New York, where the publication is based, and so far they have worked with more than nine hundred athletes, Robertson told me. For some sponsored content, athletes receive a fee.” Athletes are not paid for stories, a publicist for the site explained, “unless it’s brand connected. feature, which revealed that David Ortiz would like to have been a porn star if he hadn’t become a baseball player. Not like he was hitting a small child-but like he was in a bar fight with a grown man”) and where the site’s founding publisher, Derek Jeter, offered a five-sentence, rather boilerplate tribute to Yogi Berra after the baseball legend’s death (“To those who didn’t know Yogi personally, he was one of the greatest baseball players and Yankees of all time”). I want you to know now / So we both can savor every moment we have left together”) where the hockey player Patrick O’Sullivan described, in moving fashion, what it was like to grow up with an abusive father (“He would throw punches. The_ Players’ Tribune is where Kobe Bryant announced his retirement, in free verse (“I’m ready to let you go. But the Players’ Tribune is a great complement.” So we see an opportunity to get outside that headline stuff a bit and go deeper with players.” Robertson added, “There’s still very much a place for traditional journalism and reporting and context you’re not getting from us. “Hopefully they’re articulate with whatever questions come their way, but that’s not always the case. “These athletes come off the field or the court, often adrenalized by performance, and have a microphone stuffed in their faces,” Robertson said. ![]() “And I think he’s also really interested in the site’s model and its place in the media landscape.” That model, essentially: cut out the middleman, also known as a reporter, and let the subject lead the way. “Kevin is very passionate about creating,” Jessica Robertson, the executive editor of the Players’ Tribune, told me. It also gave the Players’ Tribune its biggest day of traffic so far: more than three million unique visitors, which is about what the site usually gets in a month, and is better than the average day on. The choice angered a lot of basketball fans, particularly those in Oklahoma. ![]() He opted to join the Golden State Warriors, who, after winning a league-record seventy-three games last year, edged Durant’s Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference Finals, before narrowly losing to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the N.B.A. “I understood cognitively that I was facing a crossroads in my evolution as a player and as a man, and that it came with exceptionally difficult choices,” Durant wrote. Durant used three hundred and fifty-one words in the story to reveal which team he’d chosen to play for next season. The two most popular Google searches in America on the Fourth of July were “July 4th” and “Declaration of Independence.” The third was “Players’ Tribune.” The popularity of that last search was the result of a story written by Kevin Durant, the National Basketball Association’s 2014 Most Valuable Player and the deputy publisher of the Players’ Tribune, a not yet two-year-old online publication run by professional athletes who wish to tell their stories in their own words. This week, in a story for the Players’ Tribune, Kevin Durant revealed which team he’d chosen to play for next season. ![]()
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