The Bill Simmons Grantland endeavor continues to grow, and the latest addition is… Norm Macdonald?
The comedian has joined the staff of Grantland as a golf writer, a topic he's very familiar with (assuming you remember that the basis of his Twitter War with Rick Reilly last March was golf). Macdonald already has a pair of columns up on the site, one that focuses on the 2013 PGA Tour season, and one touching on getting back into sports betting after taking a couple of years off.
Macdonald, a former anchor on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, briefly hosted Sports Show with Norm Macdonald in 2011, which was essentially a sports-themed Weekend Update and was canceled after its first season. The two columns Macdonald has written thusfar seem pretty informed, and aren't chock full of Macdonald's typical dry, biting humor. I'm sure the comedy will come in time as Macdonald gets acquainted to his new role.
Grantland has also made a more mainstream hire for the new year, luring Wesley Morris away from the Boston Globe full-time. The Pulitzer Prize winner has contributed at Grantland in the past, with his latest piece being a monstrous article about potential Oscar nominations.
Macdonald and Morris could not be more different figures, yet both seem like they'll be great full-time fits at Grantland. Both hires also speak to the influence of the internet on mainstream media and the juggernaut Grantland is slowly becoming. What does it say about print media when a Pulitzer Prize winner leaves a huge newspaper in one of the country's biggest markets to write for a website that just hired a comedian (that loves Frank Stallone jokes) to write about golf for them?
[Golf.com]
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