There’s a great line in the film Bill Durham which has never left our minds as educators, historians, and journalists: “… the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap.” After 32-year professional careers as educators, historians, and journalists, we know we are never part of the story—any story—that we teach, analyze and contextualize, or report. This seems to be a lost dynamic now, however, these days.

At some point in the mid-1990s when ESPN on-air personalities starting overshadowing the news itself with their self-promoting catch phrases—you know what we’re talking about—it became more common for sports journalists to try to promote themselves. Whether it was a clown like Dick Vitale or a blowhard like Jim Rome, somehow these idiotic personalities started dominating the headlines—instead of sport itself.

Perhaps we can lay this all the feet of John Madden, but we prefer to blame the Internet as it turned Andy Warhol Theory into something new and surpassing. As sports journalists also started losing their objectivity in order to retain (the shallow) audience, a strange mixture has developed in the sports mediot universe: national loudmouths and local hacks. This bring us back to Sontag and self-indulgent crap.

The Athletic provides Sontag-like sports journalism these days under the pretense of being “quality” journalism; with the New York Times brand behind it, too, it gains legitimacy in assumed reputation of journalistic integrity. Yet the content of the website is full of first-person singular and constant self-injecting prose which fits the Sontag label dropped in 1988 by filmmaker/screenwriter Ron Shelton.

It’s almost unreadable, which is too bad because many of the site’s writers used to be respectable journalists when they wrote for metropolitan newspapers in the past. Even looking through the comments on articles, there are laughable comments praising the writing by readers who do not know what good journalism actually is. This is something we ironically blame on the blogosphere—as we basically have a blog here.

We also have to consider that maybe we are dinosaurs now, relics of the twentieth century and not with the current times. Perhaps that is the case, and we re-emphasize that position with the Boomer-like lament that “things were better in our day!” Modern audiences don’t want what past audiences wanted: mental-health challenges of the twenty-first century mean we seek short-term gratification more than anything.

Here today … forgotten tomorrow—until rediscovered and criticized by posterity: that’s Susan Sontag and The Athletic.