The Ringer has relaunched using Vox’s Chorus

What you see today is, as before, a website—but hopefully one that is a more readable, more navigable, better organized, and more coherent experience. This site is a passion for everyone employed here, and its usability is paramount. We want to keep growing, and to keep pushing ourselves to write and produce stories that are unique, irreverent, unbound by the conventions of the web’s worst practices, but also be pragmatic about how to have the most fun covering sports, pop culture, technology, food, Game of Thrones, the NBA, and yes, even politics. We think this new site will help us do just that.

It looks way better than the old one.

Recode sat down to talk with Bill Simmons about first year of The Ringer, ESPN, and his canceled HBO show:

We talked to Yahoo. We talked to Vice a little bit. But the thing about my ESPN experience — that I was terrified to replicate — was you align yourself with somebody — and really, you’re aligning yourself with one or two people — that just believes in you and your idea and what you do. If those people go away, or those people change, now you’re stuck with different people who might not believe in what you want to do. I just didn’t want to go through that again.

It sounds like his podcasting network, for the most part, is what’s bringing in the money while the website continues to find its footing. That fits my own habits: I don’t read the website at all, thought the TV show sucked, and listen to quite a few of the podcasts.

If you’ve listened to more than a handful of episodes of Encore you’ve heard me rant about the movie Draft Day at one point or another. Riley McAtee, at The Ringer, breaks down the trades in that abomination of a movie and there’s just no way I can’t share this:

But the Browns’ owner (a how-did-I-get-here Frank Langella) wants Weaver to make a splash in the draft, and he’s infatuated with Bo Callahan, a quarterback widely expected to go no. 1 overall. And why wouldn’t he want him? A linebacker or a running back can’t SAVE FOOTBALL IN CLEVELAND. So when Seahawks GM Tom Michaels (Patrick St. Esprit) lays out a deal that would give Cleveland the no. 1 pick, it’s Weaver’s chance to … you guessed it: SAVE FOOTBALL IN CLEVELAND. By the end of the movie, Weaver’s made three deals and numerous other decisions. But did he SAVE FOOTBALL IN CLEVELAND? Let’s grade every major draft-related decision in the movie to find out:

This movie is worth watching just to prop up your local liquor store’s monthly take.

Speaking of The Ringer, here’s Lindsay Zoladz, writing about the idea of the “surprise album” release:

“Surprise” is pop music’s latest fetish commodity, a new but widely accepted virtue in an industry desperately trying to adapt to the demands (and attention spans) of the digital age. The album promotional cycle used to be pretty uniform: Announce the release date a few months prior, send a single to radio, and tour once the album comes out. But these tactics have now been replaced by, say, obtuse teasers that often feel like perfume ads directed by Terrence Malick and promotional hieroglyphs graffitied onto urban sidewalks (and which often, in the case of Arcade Fire and more recently Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, result in apologies).