ESPN will introduce its first big attempt at historical fiction this week, a digital project based on one of baseball’s greatest teams and packed with prose, photos and even “tweets” from the past.
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Myles Thomas was a teammate of Yankee greats Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth.
Photo by: MARK RUCKER / TRANSCENDENTAL GRAPHICS, GETTY IMAGES |
Douglas Alden, a former ABC and ESPN producer and a founding member of the Classic Sports Network that ultimately became ESPN Classic, will spearhead “1927: The Diary of Myles Thomas,” a historical fiction treatment of the 1927 Yankees through the eyes of Thomas, a real-life journeyman pitcher on that famed “Murderers’ Row” team featuring Hall of Famers Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Tony Lazzeri.
The project, which will be featured exclusively on emerging digital publishing platform Medium, will include fictional daily diary entries composed by Alden in Thomas’ supposed voice and from his perspective that chronicle the record-setting Yankees season. Those diary entries will be joined by historical essays, several thousand fictional tweets that seek to provide snapshots of that year as if Twitter existed then, photos and original illustrations, and links to actual New York Times game stories and box scores from that 1927 season. The diary entries will follow the current calendar in sync over the next six months.
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The project will mix fictional diary entries, visuals, and links to period stories.
Photo by: ESPN & MEDIUM / ILLUSTRATION BY RODOLFO REYES |
Beyond baseball, the project’s content will also veer heavily into jazz, race, culture, religion, Prohibition and other elements of the Roaring ’20s that represent a key period in modern American history. “1927: The Diary of Myles Thomas” is several years in the making, and derived in part between brainstorming between Alden and ESPN President John Skipper, who previously ran ESPN The Magazine and retains an affinity for long-form content.
“If we’re successful, we will have basically given birth to an entirely new form of storytelling: real-time, serialized historical fiction,” Alden said. “That’s a very exciting prospect, and we believe this is a very unique experiment we’re undertaking.”
As opposed to positioning this project on any of ESPN’s own platforms, “1927: The Diary of Myles Thomas” will appear on Medium, a socially oriented online publishing platform created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams in 2012 that is growing rapidly in popularity and features a mix of professional and nonprofessional content. ESPN, as well as publishers and content creators such as Bill Simmons, Discovery News and Travel+Leisure, have increasingly shown interest in leveraging the platform. A devoted section on Medium to “1927: The Diary of Myles Thomas” is being established.
The project does not include a TV component, but ESPN is still holding open the possibility of televised segments as the season unfolds.
“We looked at a lot of approaches in terms of how to publish this, but in the end, we felt that it was appropriate to not confuse this with the regular journalism of ESPN.com and give it some breathing room of its own,” said Patrick Stiegman, ESPN vice president of global digital content.
Stiegman said turning “1927: The Diary of Myles Thomas” into a book was also considered.
“The conceit of a book was interesting, but that would be simply one-dimensional,” he said. “What’s so interesting about this project is there are multiple points of entry, over the course of the entire baseball season. Different forms of text. Photos. Social media. And people can follow along all year, and take in everything, or jump in at various points.”
A revenue model around “1927: The Diary of Myles Thomas” has not yet been fully developed. Stiegman called the project “an investment in storytelling,” and said ESPN’s ad sales team is interested in selling around the project. But he added, “We haven’t focused heavily on that part of it” to this point. Medium, though now generating more than 5 million unique visitors a month, has yet to fully define what its intended revenue model will be.
The “1927: The Diary of Myles Thomas” project also includes contributions from John Thorn, MLB’s official historian, who joined the effort early last year, and Steve Wulf, a veteran baseball scribe and senior writer for ESPN The Magazine.
