Just because Bill Simmons signed a deal with HBO last summer for a talk show doesn't mean that he's done contributing to digital journalism.
The founder of Grantland, which was acquired by ESPN before the Worldwide Leader in Sports fired Simmons last May, took to his Twitter account on Wednesday morning to announce his new website's name — The Ringer.
My next website is called The Ringer - launches later in 2016. Check out our logo & sign up for our newsletter at https://t.co/EgdH3mnlbC.
— Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) February 17, 2016
Logging onto www.TheRinger.com shows off that logo that Simmons alluded to with his tweet, while also allowing users to stay abreast of the new site's updates and announcements.
The birth of the website sheds light on a series of events that followed ESPN firing Simmons back in May 2015. On the debut of the Bill Simmons Podcast on Oct. 1, 2015 the sports personality didn't waste time throwing darts at his former employer, ESPN, over the way the network covered the NFL's Deflategate issue involving Tom Brady and the New England Patriots.
"It's hard to come away from that and not think that ESPN is in the bag for the NFL, because they were," Simmons said on the podcast episode, referring to the network extending its television rights deal with the NFL for $15.2 billion in 2011, stretching its ability to air games through the 2021 season.
Nearly two weeks after that October podcast, four Grantland staffers resigned from the site to work for Simmons in some capacity, presumably at HBO, The Ringer or both.
That busy October month ended with ESPN shuttering Grantland, with the Worldwide Leader in Sports' president John Skipper vowing that his decision didn't have anything to do with Simmons.
"I made the decision," Skipper said during an interview with Vanity Fair at the time. "There was no influence from [ESPN corporate parent] Disney on this. And I made sure that I divorced my feelings about Bill [Simmons] from this decision because I would never let that affect the people who are there."
He added: "In the weighing of a decision like this, you look at the resources, the time, the energy necessary to do this well and balance that with the things you get from it. This was never a financial matter for us. The benefits were having a halo brand and being Bill Simmons related."
The Ringer's website also shows a logo for Channel 33, the first podcast from the Bill Simmons Podcast Network.
It will be interesting to see if The Ringer follows the longform feature style of sports and pop culture journalism that helped make Grantland popular.
