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Posted in SPORTS by Joel Gillespie on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 8:00 am

We have seen the future of sports journalism, and it doesn't look much like your granddad's fedora-adorned purple prose. Deadspin has had a huge effect on the sports media landscape in the six years of its existence, and as of Monday, it has a new Editor-In-Chief.

Tommy Craggs, who once roamed the halls at Urbana's University High School, becomes the second Deadspin EIC with Champaign-Urbana roots (founder Will Leitch grew up in Mattoon and graduated from the U of I). (Read a full profile of Craggs from 2009 here.)

While speaking on the phone last week, Craggs did everything he could to poor-mouth his new role at Deadspin. "I don't think I'm very well-equipped for the job, but our staff is big enough now that it's too big to fail," he noted. "The staff is so good and so smart, the site just runs itself."

He was also quite modest when discussing his ambitions for the job. "It wasn't anything I really thought long and hard about until [outgoing Deadspin editor-in-chief] A.J. [Daulerio] took me out for a beer and said, 'Do you want to take this?'" said Craggs, who was promoted from Senior Editor. "Essentially, the jobs are the same, I just have to deal with budget and do all these things that I'm generally terrible at, like communicating with other human beings."

Craggs interviewed for a job with ESPN spin-off site Grantland last spring, but ultimately decided to stay at Deadspin, after a saga which involved Daulerio sending a man in a pink gorilla suit to interrupt his job interview. Seriously. Craggs subsequently wrote a column entitled "Why [site namesake] Grantland Rice Sucked."

"The Grantland thing, that was bound to go sour at some point, whether it was when it did actually go sour or when I was on the job," Craggs said. "It was not meant to be. I'm much more well-suited to Deadspin: temperamentally, stylistically, in every way. The person who would have been my Grantland editor, when he first broached the subject of me coming on, I'm sure I sounded like a self-righteous prick, but I told him that I like to be on the side of the bomb-throwers, and that's Deadspin."

Deadspin got national-media attention in October 2010 when it broke the story of now-retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre's alleged cell-phone escapades. Favre sent cell phone pictures of his penis to an intern while he was a member of the New York Jets the previous season. Daulerio paid for the photos in question from a friend of the intern's, as well as an audio recording of voicemails left on the intern's phone by Favre.

Craggs was circumspect when discussing how he'd handle a similar opportunity. "There are some stories that – how should I put this? – I think I will use [the so-called scuzz-money marketplace] just as frequently as A.J. did," he offered. "There are certain stories where that's the only way to crack them, like the Favre story. I don't have any qualms about it. My J-school professors would hate to hear this, but there aren't any ethical reasons not to do it. The scuzz-money marketplace is still in play."

Throughout his career, Craggs has been unafraid to call bullshit (heck, sometimes he'll do just that twice in a headline). His no-nonsense approach fits Deadspin extremely well, as he said, and it will be fascinating to see in what new directions he takes the site.

[Ed. note: I'm expecting a response to some additional email questions from Mr. Craggs this morning. I'll run those as a Q&A tacked onto the end of the article when they arrive.]

UPDATE (12 noon, 1/11/12): And here it is.

Smile Politely: How's your first day as editor going? Any big surprises? Did AJ leave any unwelcome items in your desk?

Tommy Craggs: A budget.

Smile Politely: How much would you pay for photos of Tim Tebow's dong?

Tommy Craggs: Maybe it's best that I not name a price. (It's a seller's market right now, in any case.) It's our own fault, of course, but I've always thought that bit about our paying $12,000 for Brett Favre's penis was a slight mischaracterization. We paid $12,000 for a story in which Brett Favre's penis figured somewhat prominently. Without the rest of it--without Jenn Sterger's testimony, without (most importantly) the voicemails--it would've been just another sad penis on the internet.

Smile Politely: Of all the people that you've written about, who got the most upset with you about it, either directly or indirectly?

Tommy Craggs: People I've written about? Yahoo's Charles Robinson, I guess, which is a little awkward because we have a number of mutual friends, and I've liked his work for a long time. The back story is that I wrote something critical about the tropes of NCAA scandal reporting (the stuff Charles does) in the wake of the dumb OSU autographs-for-tats thing, whereupon I was baited into a bloviating Facebook back-and-forth with Charles. A few months later, Charles broke the big Miami hoo-hah in which we learned that, thanks to the largess of an especially reptilian booster, a number of Hurricanes football players were spending more time on a yacht than all the Buckleys combined.

I hated the story for a lot of reasons, and one of them was that I thought Charles was looking at the scandal--and pay-for-play scandals in general--through the wrong end of the telescope. The petty violation of the NCAA's amateurism rules isn't the problem; the problem is the rules themselves, the very existence of a governing body dedicated to preserving a Potemkin amateurism. Anyway, I published our Facebook exchange in which all these high-flown arguments were joined with some choice blowjob jokes, and the end result is that Charles now thinks I'm a "self-fellating dickwad," which is probably true in spirit even if it is anatomically impossible.

Smile Politely: You don't seem to be a big Twitter user. Thoughts on the medium?

Tommy Craggs: I think Will Leitch had the last word on it here. I have nothing against the medium. I'm just painfully shy, and putting 140 characters on Twitter is nearly as mortifying to me as doing 10 minutes in front of a brick wall at the local Ha Ha Club.

Smile Politely: Any plans to diagram Mitt Romney's candidacy on a basketball whiteboard?

Tommy Craggs: Please. Basketball? Mittens does not do basketball metaphors, OK? Mittens does lordly disdain, and that's it. The day Mitt Romney drops some hoops on us is the day Kwame Brown comes out with a mortgage-relief bill.

Smile Politely: Any advice to a hyper-local, college-town site such as ours?

Tommy Craggs: Fewer interviews with self-fellating dickwads.

Smile Politely: Anything else you want to pontificate about?

Tommy Craggs: Brandon Paul. Holy shit. That three he hit with the Craft dude in his shorts was something, but I loved the block on Sully on OSU's next possession--the one he sent off in the general direction of Effingham--and I really loved the shit-talking he did afterward. It's been a long time since the Illini had a fuck-you game like that.