Chain of Stools

By Joel Beck

Generally speaking, people who truly despise writing tend not to become newspaper publishers. They are the people, after all, who are often left stymied when the time comes to scribble a few witty sentences inside a birthday card, never mind produce an enlightening and informative print publication.

Then again, David Portnoy isn’t your typical newspaper publisher — and he certainly never set his sights on publishing a newspaper that resembles anything close to enlightening or informative. If he did, you wouldn’t hear him say things like this:

“I hate writing. I always have.”

Or this:

“If you send us an article and we think it’s good, we’ll publish it and we’ll ask for another one. If you do that three times in a row and we think it’s worthy of going in, you can have your own column.”
Or especially this:

“If people want to threaten us with lawsuits, I really don’t care. As long as it’s interesting and I think it’s funny, it goes in the paper.”
Something tells us Joseph Pulitzer might have set his standards a little higher.

By his own admission, Portnoy is no Pulitzer, nor does he aspire to win one. Nevertheless, the 28-year-old Swampscott native has embarked on an unexpected career in journalism with his creation of Barstool Sports, a free biweekly sports and entertainment publication that first appeared in newspaper boxes in Greater Boston in August 2003. It’s a career path that Portnoy certainly never envisioned when he was growing up on the North Shore or when he was working in sales for a Boston research and consulting firm prior to Barstool’s launch.
Known primarily for the full-color photos of scantily clad women featured on its covers, Barstool Sports fancies itself as more Maxim than New York Times. Using the mantra “By he common man, for the common man,” the paper has an unmistakable appeal to the blue-collar, 20-something crowd, with article topics ranging from which Red Sox players would fare the best in a bar fight to the 10 greatest Nintendo games of all time. One issue even included a 1,400-word piece on why it’s foolish to wear sunglasses during a poker match.
But if Portnoy’s goal was to create a publication unlike any other, he may have accomplished just that, albeit for reasons that some may consider, shall we say, journalistically questionable. For starters, spelling and grammar don’t appear to be the paper’s top priority and while most of his own articles are at least proofread before the paper goes to press, Portnoy readily admits that many of Barstool’s articles are published exactly the way they come in — unedited.

“If someone put `Barstool Sports sucks’ right in the middle of their article, chances are it would get published,” says Portnoy.

Moreover, the 1995 Swampscott High graduate may very well have accomplished a journalistic first when he began writing and publishing fake interviews with local sports figures. Granted, the segments are meant to be somewhat satirical in nature, but honestly, how many other newspapers would have the gall to pose questions they’d like to ask Nomar Garciaparra, only to subsequently concoct the answers they think he might give if he were under the spell of truth serum?
“I think that’s legal,” says Portnoy, again with a straight face.

Still, having amassed a cult following of sorts as evidenced by the ever-growing membership on Barstool Sports’ online message board — where some of the paper’s die-hard fans browse under pseudonyms such as “Schilling’s Right Ankle” and “Eck’s Porn Stache” — and a circulation of about 30,000, Portnoy says he couldn’t be happier with the direction of his paper. It is, after all, exactly what he intended it to be: a paper by the common man, for the common man.

Not bad for someone who doesn’t even like to write.

“I look at the paper as something that I would pick up and read,” he says. “I think I’m pretty typical of our audience. It was designed for myself and my buddies, and so far, people like it. It’s all geared toward what I like.”

Let’s get it started

If Portnoy had to do it all over again, there are a few things he would do differently. For starters, he’d get a better air conditioner.
Ideally, Portnoy would work out of an actual office space, but for now, he continues to produce Barstool Sports in the suffocating heat of his Allston apartment, where there are days when his writing time is actually limited to how long it takes before his air conditioner blows a fuse in his building.
Financially speaking, Portnoy would have obviously preferred not to have gone into quite as much debt to start his venture, which he says is finally turning a profit nearly two years after its initial launch. Even though he says he was making decent money at the sales job he landed out of college, Portnoy knew he just wasn’t a 9-to-5 kind of guy.

“I always knew I wanted to try my own thing eventually. I just couldn’t imagine doing sales for the rest of my life,” says Portnoy, who ironically says that selling advertising, not writing, is still the hardest part of his daily workload. “I wasn’t remotely interested in it, so I knew I wanted to try something that I liked.”

As it turns out, gambling happened to be one of Portnoy’s greatest interests, so he quit his sales job in search of a way to break into the entertainment casino industry. Upon discovering that getting a foot in the door of that industry wasn’t nearly as easy as he had hoped, Portnoy eventually realized that a physical paper — basically a gambling rag — where casinos could advertise would be a step in the right direction.

That, essentially, is how Barstool Sports was born. It cost Portnoy roughly $20,000 to start the paper and he went into even more debt just to keep it afloat that first year, when most of the articles and advertising were centered around casinos and the gambling industry.

Over time, however, Barstool Sports slowly evolved from a black-and-white, four-page gambling rag to a full-color, 16-page sports newspaper with beautiful models donning the front cover.

(Incidentally, the first Barstool Sports model was a friend of Portnoy’s girlfriend who had to be coaxed into posing. Now, Portnoy says he has models calling him to be featured in the paper.)

While Portnoy says he’s somewhat surprised at how quickly Barstool Sports has taken on a life of its own, he never doubted that there was an audience for this kind of publication.

Even if some of his friends may have had their doubts.

“A lot of my friends talked about doing this with me, but when push came to shove, they didn’t have the guts to stand up and do something about it,” he says with a wry smile. “I think a lot of people had the dream of doing this, but when you actually put the money down, it’s kind of a different story.”
Being in debt certainly hurts, but Portnoy estimates that he’ll be able to break even within the next two years and from there he hopes Barstool Sports will really take off. In fact, he has even secured a weekly, one-hour radio show on WWZN 1510-AM “The Zone,” which means he and a handful of Barstool writers primarily discuss the topics found in the latest issue of the paper. Last month, Portnoy and friends spent nearly a half-hour staging a mock fantasy draft of which stars on MTV’s “The Real World” they’d want on their personal all-star team.

While Portnoy is actually paying WWZN for the airtime, he says it’s all part of Barstool Sports’ ongoing growing pains.

“Right now, it’s not hurting,” he says. “As long as it’s not hurting, we’ll keep doing it.”

Making friends

You get the sense when talking with Portnoy that if he just toned it down a little bit, he wouldn’t get into quite as much trouble.

Having already been threatened several times with lawsuits — including once from a mother who never gave permission for her young son to be photographed with one of the Barstool Sports models — Portnoy’s conversational style of journalism has a way of rubbing people the wrong way.
Take Bill Simmons, for instance.

Portnoy is the first to admit that Barstool Sports was largely influenced by Simmons, a Boston native and ESPN.com feature writer whose long, pop culture-influenced style of writing has earned him his own cult following and pseudo-celebrity status. Early on in Barstool Sports’ life, Portnoy tried to contact Simmons not only for a possible interview, but also to pick his brain as Portnoy embarked on his new career.

But after repeated phone calls and e-mail requests, Simmons eventually denied Barstool Sports an interview, saying — according to Portnoy — that he didn’t like too much media exposure. It was an explanation that rang hollow with Portnoy and he wasn’t afraid of saying it — in print or in person.
“I think he’s a fraud and a total sham,” says Portnoy. “But I still think he’s the best writer I’ve ever read. If I saw him walking down the street and he said he’d write for us, I’d hire him in a second.”

Quite simply, that’s Portnoy’s style. He brings a say-whatever-is-on-your-mind approach to Barstool Sports and then worries — or doesn’t worry at all — about getting in trouble after the fact. No, it’s not conventional journalism, but as he freely admits, he never really intended to create a conventional newspaper. In the beginning, it was simply a gambling rag and in many ways he stumbled into journalism purely by accident.

Regardless, he likes what Barstool Sports has become, which he believes is an entertaining newspaper for the average Joe. Still, as the paper’s popularity continues to grow, Portnoy knows there will be more and more critics looking to bring his fun to a crashing halt.

“That will be the downfall of Barstool Sports,” he says. “The bigger we get, the more people are noticing that some the stuff we do isn’t so traditional.”
Fake interviews, anyone?

In addition to the criticism he’s taken from traditional media sources, he also has been lambasted by feminists who take exception to the pictures of half-naked women on the paper’s cover. There have even been those who liked the paper better when it was a gambling rag and would like to see it return to that type of format.

Still, Portnoy isn’t in this business to please anyone in particular and he says the minute people start to take his newspaper too seriously, they will be making a big mistake.

“We’re not trying to trick anyone into thinking that we’re CNN,” he says. “Everything we write is clearly opinion pieces and we’re not trying to portray it as truth or fact.

“If someone thinks they’re picking up The New Yorker when they see our front page, then they have some serious issues,” Portnoy continues. “If you take anything we say too seriously, you’re probably going to quit reading it sooner or later. It’s a light read and it’s supposed to be fun.”

E-mail reporter Joel Beck at jbeck@cnc.com.