The Ringer (website)
American sports and pop culture website
The Ringer is a sports and pop culture website and podcast network, founded by sportswriter Bill Simmons in 2016 and acquired by Spotify in 2020.
History
The Ringer was launched in March 2016 by Bill Simmons, who brought along several editors who had previously worked with him on Grantland, an ESPN-owned blog he operated from 2011 to 2015. At launch, The Ringer had a staff of 43 and focused primarily on sports and pop culture as content areas, with a few writers also working on technology and politics. HBO, the network on which Simmons hosted his weekly television program Any Given Wednesday for one season in 2016, was an initial investor in the website.
The website was previously published on the Medium platform. In May 2017, The Ringer entered into an advertising and technology partnership with Vox Media (owner of SB Nation), under which Vox would handle advertising sales, and give the site access to its in-house Chorus publishing platform.
Former Grantland writers who have since written for or worked for The Ringer include Mark Titus, Shea Serrano, Ben Lindbergh, Robert Mays, Andy Greenwald, Sean Fennessey, Chris Ryan, Mallory Rubin, Juliet Litman, Craig Gaines, Bryan Curtis, David Shoemaker, Ryan O'Hanlon, Danny Chau, Jason Concepcion, Riley McAtee, Joe Fuentes, Tate Frazier, and Amanda Dobbins.
In May 2018, The Ringer published a story by Ben Detrick about Bryan Colangelo, then the general manager (GM) of the Philadelphia 76ers, and his apparent use of various Twitter accounts to criticize players and defend himself. This led to Colangelo's resignation on June 7, 2018.
In August 2019, 66 of The Ringer's 90 editorial staff members voted to unionize with the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE).
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This entry incorporates text from “The Ringer (website)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.