At 56 and fully willing to admit that luck has been a helpful companion, Peter King probably doesn’t fit the standard perception of an Internet sports-media trailblazer. And the longtime Sports Illustrated NFL writer effortlessly self-effaces when discussing the origins of his long-running and overwhelmingly successful “Monday Morning Quarterback” column on SI.com.
“It was 1997, and my football editor asked me if I wanted to contribute some outtakes and leftover notes from my magazine stories,’’ said King, whose column nowadays has evolved into thousands of words about football, several hundred more words opining on ancillary topics coffee, beer, and travel, and draws nearly 10 million page views per month during football season.
“I don’t even know that he called it a website at the time,’’ King said. “Heck, I had just gotten an e-mail address at the time. So no, I can’t say I saw the Internet becoming what it is today. I was clueless. And I don’t know what it will be in three years.’’
But King, who like ESPN’s Bill Simmons and few others has found that rare and lucrative territory as sportswriter-as-a-brand, is about to get a headstart on where he hopes to be in three years and beyond. His stand-alone site, TheMMQB.com, launches Monday at 9 a.m.
It’s an idea that germinated in part from having options. His contract was up, and he was coveted as a free agent, particularly by NBC, for whom he already contributes on “Sunday Night Football.’’
“I was asking myself for about the past year, what do I want to do next, and this just emerged as a possibility,’’ said King, who signed a new contract with Sports Illustrated in March. “The more I thought about it, the more fun I thought I could have. So I asked Sports Illustrated about the possibility of something like this while my status was a little bit up in the air. I was fortunate they said yes.’’
Unlike Simmons’s wildly successful and wide-ranging Grantland franchise, King’s territory will be all NFL, all the time, featuring a staff that includes former Globe NFL writer Greg Bedard (“He could be a Paul Zimmerman-level star,’’ King said), former Jets and Giants beat writer Jenny Vrentas, and former USA Today reporter Robert Klemko. Yahoo! Sports’ Doug Farrar is expected to sign on soon, and there will be contributions from SI’s superb media writer,Richard Deitsch, and sports business expert, Andrew Brandt, among others.
There’s a tremendous amount of talent on board, enough to fulfill King’s stated quest of telling “compelling stories in new and interesting ways.” But he acknowledges there’s a lot of work to be done.
“We’re still trying to figure out a way to do fantasy football in an imaginative way. Are game stories smart? Is game coverage smart?’’ he said. “What we do know is that we’re going to do a lot of different things. We’re going to do video, we’re going to be social-media conscious, but at the end of the day, if we don’t tell the story in the right way, then you shouldn’t read us. We shouldn’t exist. I’ll have failed. So, that’s one of the things we’re trying to make sure we do above all else.”
