There has been more in the way of dumb slapfighting amongst the media covering UVA Athletics the past couple of days.
The latest involved a since-deleted thread on the message board of The Sabre that took pot shots at the dean of UVA sports media, Jerry Ratcliffe, linking to a tweet from Ratcliffe highlighting how the website has stopped listing his stories on its daily News Link.
“Apparently, The Sabre no longer lists any of my stuff on its News Link for whatever reason, but our audience numbers continue to soar. We’re having a record year in readership, so you’re invited to check us out,” Ratcliffe tweeted.
(Elon Musk calls it X. It’s not his, because he’s under water to the banks who loaned him the money to buy it. Once they take it back from him, it will go back to being Twitter. I’m jumping the guy, but anyway, it’s Twitter, so the things posted to Twitter are still tweets.)
I neglected, to my utter shame, to screenshot the message board thread, but the general thrust of the handful of people who use CB handles to hide from their employers that they waste their time all day on a message board was, Jerry got the Anthony Poindexter will be the next football coach thing wrong two years ago, he’s old, he should just retire already.
Kris Wright, the guy who bought The Sabre a year ago from Will Stewart, the owner of Tech Sideline, who had reached out to me first to try to unload The Sabre because the UVA fansite was losing gobs of money, took the post down, to his credit.
Wright explained why in a post on the board.
“Unfortunately, nearly every thread with Jerry mentioned now almost always devolves into arguments and some people making posts that violate the Terms of Service about him or his work or affiliated work,” Wright wrote. “Often, that leads to the whole thread getting deleted vs. taking out post after post as they occur. This thread will likely receive the same fate at some point. That makes it difficult for links to his site here. Jerry hired me at The Daily Progress and always has treated me well.”
Doesn’t explain why he would have stopped linking to Jerry’s stories on his News Link, but that really isn’t a big issue, for a couple of reasons.
First, I’m not giving away state secrets when I tell you, as the guy who helped Jerry set up his JerryRatcliffe.com website in 2018, after the Progress unceremoniously laid him off as part of one of the many cost-cutting measures they’ve been trying over there for years to try to stay afloat, that his site has been getting more than 100,000 page views per month, thus a million-plus a year, for the past couple of years.
Taking a peek at his internals, about 4 percent of his traffic was coming from referrals from The Sabre.
If he ever gets shadow-banned from Google for some reason, that would be a problem, but losing access to The Sabre’s audience is something that he’ll be able to survive.
The News Link thing never made sense to me anyway, just from a business perspective. Whatever the amount of time that Wright spends scouring the web for links to stories about UVA Athletics, if it’s 15 minutes a day, even, is time he could be spending working on his own content, and not giving people coming to his site links that will take them away from his site to go to other sites.
News Link was going to be the first thing that I was going to cut when I took over on Sept. 1, 2022, which of course never happened.
(We got within a few hours before Stewart pulled the plug to give Wright the chance to pull together the money to buy the site, and we backed out.)
Because News Link is still a thing, I don’t personally get any reason for animosity between The Sabre and JerryRatcliffe.com, but that said, hey, it’s Kris’s site to do with as he pleases.
You’d like to see everybody get along, but then there was that odd dust-up that got me caught up with Ahmad Hawkins, a former UVA football player, regular contributor to The Sabre and in game commentator for UVA Athletics, a few weeks back.
The fallout from that included, for me, threats of violence against me that ended up involving the police, and pressure from one of the sponsors of Jerry’s podcast, which I had been co-hosting, to be fired from the show, which was kind of hard to take, given that I had been co-hosting and producing the show for free for the past two years, but anyway.
Little of this makes any sense, but that’s the media business for you.
I always tell people that the best stories are the ones that we can’t write, because writing them would get us in trouble with somebody.
Well, here’s one of those stories, not that it’s going to get me in any more trouble – already banned from News Link, already fired from Jerry’s podcast – than I’m already in.
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Chris Graham
