OT: Derek Jeter on why he created The Player's Tribune
He wanted to give athletes a venue for first-person storytelling where they wouldn't be afraid of someone twisting their words for headlines:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/15/derek-jeter-on-why-he-started-the-pla…
My experience with the content on The Player's Tribune is positive; I've read some interesting stories and the first-person aspect has both made those stories better and set it apart from much of the other media content.
Judging by the number of contributors and athlete-investors, I'd say they think it's doing well too.
He wanted to give athletes a venue for first-person storytelling where they wouldn't be afraid of someone twisting their words for headlines:
If he was really being honest, he'd say that he wanted to give athletes the ability to give 4 or 5 general points to a ghostwriter, and then the ability to have 100% final cut on the article
You can see the list of Editors on their masthead. https://www.theplayerstribune.com/the-team/
This is part and parcel for all publications though. Editors, while vital to the process, are never really identified. Even the greats like Bob Woodward had an editor (their role is still vital, just different tasks).
This is one of my favorite Players Tribune articles.
https://www.theplayerstribune.com/dion-waiters-miami-heat-nba-is-lucky/
If I were to guess, the junior editors would be there to transcribe (if it was a spoken transcript) and/or clean up basic grammatical issues, etc. The lead editors are there to cut anything superfluous and/or potentially put it in a quality framework. IE (and again I'm just speculating) Waiters "Casino" reference probably wasn't likely the first thing he started talking or writing about, but it was a good metaphor that worked as a solid "columnist" style lead.
Overall though, it's a quality article and representative of what I think the best case scenario is for the Players Tribune. It's a little raw, but not unreadable, and that's what makes it more personal and better than some twenty-something working out some personal issues in their life and projecting them on to Waiters while talking about their experience with him as opposed to keeping it about the subject matter exclusively.
The player himself both can be heavily involved during the editing itself and also can refuse to permit publication until he agrees that "this is exactly what I'm thinking and how I feel."
I actually prefer that the writing be very well-written, even if it requires "heavy editing."
Excellent writing style communicates more clearly and effectively.
The articles are so choppy. It's almost unreadable.
Even Jeter is worried about fake news.
Even if the Player's Tribune isn't always Hemingway-level writing it's not appreciably worse than 95% of sportswriting from actual sports writers and tends to contain more interesting content than rehashed quotes baked into some shite article that Mitch Rosenberg already wrote fifty times over, and badly at that.