Bill Simmons, ESPN, and the New Writing Economy

It's perhaps fitting, given the shape of his career, that the news of ESPN's decision to fire Bill Simmons could manage to be both a surprise and completely predictable. (Yes, I know he wasn't technically fired but when your boss tells the nation's largest paper he isn't renewing your contract without first telling you then we're talking about something more than an amicable parting of ways.) Simmons, of course, is one of the pioneers of online writing, the man who did for sports writing what Andrew Sullivan and Ezra Klein have done for political blogging.