Great post on the validity of blogs as viable media...

But I’ll forever miss Farnsworth and the PI :(

but then, Claire was (is) still at the top of his game, and loved bringing us the news— and asking the tough questions. He was great on the Hawks Round Table on KJR, hope that continues for as long as possible.

But for every Claire or Geoff Baker or Larry Stone who bring top effort and ingenuity to the way they look at the game and team they cover, there is a Woody Paige or Jay Mariotti who stopped being journalists years ago and are more worried about tv time than media integrity, or a Jim Stone who never strays from the party line…

I’m not sure I would have excelled at the dry fact taking the medium’s become. I certainly couldn’t use vulgar conjunctions like “medium’s” or idiomatic hogwash like “there’s no jobs”.

I’m not sure I get the war between bloggers and journalist. Truth is, I think we’re all going to have to revise our expectations on making writing a job, and I don’t think anything is to blame but progress. I do this because I love sports and blogging keeps me writing and one summer a couple years back, when I took a break, I learned I need the writing, the work to feel sane. I think maybe all the hostility is a creeping feeling that this work, these thousands of unpaid hours will never amount to that dream job. (And what a dream job really. To think I would do this to work rather than work to do this.) I get that, but it’s like something I said to someone close to me who a few years back was debating whether to pursue acting or law: If you love acting and need nothing more than to act to be happy, do it because you’re inexhaustible and sure to succeed. But if you want to be a famous actor, and act to be a famous actor, you’re almost certain to fail because you’ll become discouraged and tire. He pursued law.

Anyway, I’m rambling on and should get back to what I was writing.

People losing jobs is never something to celebrate but progress certainly is. We’ve gone from fluff pieces written on deadline to fit a word count to writers like John, Doug, Dave, Matthew, Henry Abbot, the KSK guys, Orson Swindle, the list goes on. People with actual talent taking the time to write and work on specific things they love. DMZ doesn’t have to pretend to know as much about college football as Matt Hinton does, he doesn’t even have to pretend to care. Meanwhile Jim Moore is picking a sport at random to write this weeks column about.

Instead of the blowhard story about why Vernon Davis’s behavior is unacceptable and demonstrates the moral decline of America we get a well reasoned piece from someone who watched the game. The pseudo-psychology mentioned stems from one source, newspaper writers who cover for not actually knowing the details of a game or a team (and how could they, they’re tasked with being responsible for everything sports) by ranting and raving about the “right” way to play and the intangibles of leadership. While they get on their social commentary soap box sites like FO are developing analytic statistics to understand the actual contributions of a player, shockingly leaving charisma out of the equation.

Newspapers haven’t been a supply of quality analysis for as long as I’ve been reading them. Their only redeeming quality is access and more often than not it becomes a part of the problem. Writers indebted to the player with the quote warp their stories to stay in the good graces of the team. When people can get better written, higher quality material written in live time and for free their expectations change. The newspapers answer to this wasn’t to improve their product but to also put it online and for free. When you have a low quality product in a highly competitive field and your answer is to employ a broken business model your time in the world has come to an end.

The only thing is, someone has to do the reporting, rather than linking and analyzing. Bloggers are easily capable of doing it, they just need the press pass and the time afforded to do the legwork (funding).

Doesn’t mean the old papers are better, because of the press pass. Just that with the whole paradigm shift that’s occurring, someone’s going to have to get into the lockerroom and attend the press conferences, for any class of sports media coverage to have anything to talk about. And I firmly believe that will happen as papers stop printing, fold, or go strictly online.