SB Nation is owned by Vox Media, which also created The Verge, a site covering digital culture, and Polygon, a gamer review and news site.
"We looked around the Web and we realized there was a race to the bottom, if you will, with a lot of content," says Jim Bankoff, the Vox CEO who hired Stout.
Bankoff was an executive with AOL in the 1990s and helped advise Arianna Huffington as she was launching The Huffington Post. He says many online aggregators focus on lists and photo galleries to the exclusion of reported pieces.
"Part of why Web content became shorter and less substantive was that publishers believed in order to have a successful digital business model, they had to produce things as quickly and as cheaply as possible," Bankoff says.
Bankoff decided to dart in the opposite direction at SB Nation.
"What we've found at Vox is that long-form stories are incredibly attractive to advertisers," Bankoff says. "People are spending a lot of time with them. I think on average it's about 17 minutes in our case, and sometimes much longer than that.
"And such a glut — and such a sea of stuff on the Web that is often not substantive, often is quick 'listicles' or even worse, we find that advertisers are flocking to quality and trying to get it where they can."
Vox is by no means the only new-media publisher betting long. The viral website BuzzFeed, which posts adorable animal and baby pictures by the cartload, also published many lengthy pieces toward the end of last year's elections. One was a reflective article by the political reporter McKay Coppins about his experience as a Mormon covering the nation's first Mormon major-party presidential nominee.
Older news organizations are finding new ways to tell stories, too. The New York Times received widespread accolades for the sophisticated marriage of narrative writing, video, photographs, maps and graphics it deployed to tell the story of an avalanche in Washington state in February.
The Wall Street Journal has posted not just hours of daily video but lengthy video treatments — effectively documentaries — on complex issues such as corruption among elite Communist Party leaders in China.
Reuters and Bloomberg News have beefed up their enterprise reporting and hired many experienced newspaper reporters. Some not-for-profit news sites have surfaced as well.
None of this activity replaces the watchdog reporting that was lost at state capitals and city halls throughout the country because of the hollowing out of major metropolitan newspapers, though some not-for-profit news sites have surfaced to try to fill the gaps.
Last month, the Pew Research Center issued a report that, if it were a Dickens novel, would have carried the title Bleak House for its depiction of depleted newsrooms filled with exhausted, demoralized reporters and editors.
The report perceived few positive trends on either the journalistic or the revenue side of the equation, though it noted new income from metered pay walls that require repeat readers to pay for access to online content. But Slate's Matt Yglesias took issue with the underlying and largely despairing conclusions of a time of constricted ambitions.
The American news media, he wrote, have "never been in better shape. ... Almost everything you'd want to know about any subject is available at your fingertips. ...
"Best of all, today's media ecology lets you add depth and context to the news," Yglesias said. He wrote that the report mistook the desires of journalists for the appetite of online readers.
Yglesias' essay triggered a sharp response. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf said Yglesias had missed the central component of American journalism: accountability.
"How well does it provide citizens the information they need to govern themselves?" Friedersdorf wrote. "How effectively does it fulfill its role as a watchdog? Judged accordingly, the verdict is a lot murkier."
Banaszynski sees some hope, however, for the textured reporting and deep dives to which she has dedicated her career.
"When I go online, there's all of these little pockets of passion that have sprung up that are creating homes for it that never used to exist or at least were harder to find," Banaszynski says.
SB Nation's Stout says he doesn't care whether his bosses' motivation is commercial or journalistic. All he cares about, Stout says, is their willingness to let him publish the kind of writing he thinks is worth reading.