On Blogging
Yesterday was quite a day in the blogosphere. Monday night, Will Leitch of Deadspin, King of the Bloggers!, appeared on Bob Costas NOW, which oddly enough included very little about modern feminism. The town hall panel consisted of Costas, NFL wide receiver Braylon Edwards, Leitch, and, author of Friday Night Lights, H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger. I have actually read one of Bissinger’s books, the well-written, but intellectually disengenuous "3 Nights In August." Bissinger basically took a "Hey you kids, get off my lawn" approach to blogging. He went bonkers! Watch it for yourself. Video of this ambush is available here.
Much discussion has taken place about this. We here at the California Golden Blogs don’t want to be left behind. We have opinions, too! Lots of opinions. Marshawn is God. Nate is dreamy. Soylent green is made out of bloggers! We got in a bit discussion and decided to turn it into a roundtabe.
TwistNHook: I really appreciate Bissinger’s honesty. He just laid it all out there. "Leitch, what *is* your mother’s basement like?" But he’s not alone in this. A lot has been made recently about uninformed bloggers slowly killing credentialed sports writers. Hell, even this site has been on the bludgeon end of the "bloggers are clueless fools!" stick not too far back.
Yellow Fever: Bissinger isn’t the only person who hates blogs. Marc Cuban, owner of the Mavs, attempted to block bloggers from the locker-room in Dallas. Then, the NBA forced him to relent. Marc Cuban got all pissy. Here’s what he had to say:
"What sports blogging has become, in most cases, is the internet equivalent of Talk Soup or VH1’s "Best ….. " series. On Talk Soup a host throws out witty comments about some TV show. On VH1, a series of guests throw out their comments about some video relevant to the show’s topic. If it is witty enough, the show draws an audience.
On the net, the most popular sports bloggers do the exact same thing. They troll the net looking for other people’s work and then throw out some witty comments or a simple rant to complement a link to that work.. Or they sit in front of the TV and throw out posts/comments about the game."
Ragnarok: Cuban’s view of blogging seems to stem mostly from his interactions with Deadspin’s Will Leitch, which have not been positive. And, to be honest, his views on blogging, when seen through the Deadspin prism, seem right on. Deadspin is not the place you go for in-depth analysis of, well, really anything. It’s a fast paced smorgasbord of hilarious links and potentially libellous comments. As a excited participant in many Yahoo! Fantasy Libel leagues, I love Deadspin.CBKWit: Look, we love to be as hilarious and libellous as anybody else. But Marc Cuban is wrong if he thinks all bloggers are like Deadspin. There are legions of dedicated bloggers (and even vloggers!) all across the blogosphere that, in this humble bloggers’ opinion, are doing better work than credentialed sports writers. I’m talking about the people like Lookout Landing and Athletics Nation. They go deeper into the game than I’ve ever seen, showcasing an unrivalled level of passion for their teams. It is about the democratization of information!
TwistNHook: It used to be that sports writers were the undisputed kings of the land. People didn’t have the basic level of access to the games they do now. Television didn’t exist or was in its infancy. Games were on in the middle of the day when people were at work. If the game was on the West Coast, you’d get results two days later! And people wore an onion on their belt. It was the style of the time!
Maybe you’d get a box score and a basic write up of what took place. But the sports writers were there. They were watching all the games. They were riding the trains. The box score said Player X went 0-4, but why? Were they 4 hard hit balls that happened to find glove? Were they 4 brutal strike outs? Was the player slightly injured? Did the player have a mechanical problem? Sports writers were the only means for regular fans to get deeper into the game like that.
HydroTech: It’s not nineteen fifty perfect anymore (I have to say perfect, because the Kaiser stole our word for two). Grass isn’t as comfortable as it once was. And you can’t get 5 bees for a quarter. Now, independent of the newspaper, fans get nearly unlimited access to the game. You can watch any game you want at any time on your choice of medium. Why listen to what Ray Ratto has to say about the game when you can listen to people who follow the team’s every breath? Ray Ratto has to follow a dozen sports teams as well as possible. AthleticsNation doesn’t care about the Sharks, the Sabrecats, the Niners, the Raiders, the Warriors, Cal, Stanford, and the Giants. All they care about is the A’s. Who can give you a fuller picture as to the successes and failures of the A’s than that?
As things have progressed, we’re seeing the last throes of the sports-writer insurgency.
"You’re either with America or with Bill Plaschke"
YellowFever: FireJoeMorgan chronicles these throes hilariously within the baseball context. But it’s not just the never-ending wet T-Shirt contest between Billy Beane and Joe Morgan. Sports writers from Rick Reilly to Bob Costas have been pulling out the good old mama’s basement line.
Ragnarok: Right. But whose opinion would you trust between Ray Ratto and any any old blogger out there? or Ray Ratto and some blogger who just started a couple weeks ago? (Maybe Ray Ratto is a poor choice for a comparison here…)
CBKWit: Mainstream media’s problem with blogs is that, suddenly, rank amateurs are appearing in the same format as newspaper professionals, appearing alongside them on the internet, thus dragging down the level of discourse and their reputations in the process. This, of course, presupposes that people are idiots who have no ability to discern quality or credibility between websites, which, in most cases, is absolutely false (and rather insulting). This sort of argument would be akin to saying that people can’t tell the difference between things written in the New York Times and things written in the Penny Saver. Or perhaps a poorly photocopied rant that the mailman wrote during his spare time and decided to deliver with the Penny Saver.
TwistNHook: My favorite part of Bissinger’s rant was when he started talking about his son. How he fears his son will be reading blogs. Like he’s going to walk in on his son reading Burnt Orange Nation and scream "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! WHY COULDN’T IT HAVE BEEN PORN????"
HydroTech: Are we really going to end this on a porn joke?
TwistNHook: I can’t see why not?
Fin.
Sort of implicit (or not, I suppose) in all of this is that the quality of mainstream sportswriting is really not good at all. There’s only a few newspaper or magazine writers that actually produce interesting content or analysis. And it’s few and far between.
It’s tough to write meaty things at a fast enough rate to keep up with the rate of games per week. It’s just not possible, and in response sportswriters keep pumping out crap to fill space, but act as if it’s the MOST IMPORTANT WRITING ever or something like that.
Instead of reading that, I prefer to read blogs, which generally don’t try to pass themselves off as high-level analysis (except for your posts Hydro! Don’t stop, they’re awesome!); it’s more like reading something that you’d say anyway at a sports bar or friend’s house. Also, I follow a liveblog for baseball games, and since it’s fans posting, I feel almost as in the game as if I were watching it (which I can’t, stupid MLB rules).
That’s a good thing to me seeing as I don’t live in the Bay Area and it’s nice to converse with fellow fans. Keep up the good work guys, thanks!
Comment by Ben — May 1, 2008 @ 10:56 am
there’s a BIG difference between general sports entertainment blogs and fan specific blogs.
1) Fan blogs are self policing.. its hard to defame or slander a player from your own without major push back from the fans… its much easier on Deadspin.
2) Fanblogs are for the FANS! The whole idea behind it is to give the fans a chance to participate and feel a part of a community.
–> Bissinger is right however, flamewars and paparazzi material increase hits and so Deadspin admins love it, its true… isn’t there something wrong with that? You hurt real people for more hits… and the justification is he’s rich/famous? That’s not helping anything. Less Deadspin and more fan blogs.
Comment by danzig — May 1, 2008 @ 11:26 am
That is the problem. Bissinger hasn’t read posts from some of the best written fan blogs (like AN and LL and BON). He is making these giant generalizations about what blogs are based off of the most popular one, Deadspin.
It’d be like me saying that all books are terrible, because James Frey lied in his autobiography!
Comment by TwistNHook — May 1, 2008 @ 11:32 am
Exactly. The real conflict is not between newspapers and blogs but between legitimate journalism and tabloid-style rumormongering. To associate one with newspapers and the other with blogs is disingenuous, as both mediums are used for both purposes. Yes, blogs have made it easier for rumormongers to operate, but they’ve also made it easier for talented writers to try and become legitimate journalists.
If you say that Deadspin is destroying America (which it isn’t), you must also lay the blame at the feet of the National Enquirer and the E! network. Attacking the medium is missing the point.
Comment by ragnarok — May 1, 2008 @ 11:51 am
Don’t have much to say on the topic because it’s irrelevant. Mainstream media will either adapt to the decentralized nature of blogs or die. This is the nature of any business (like the RIAA to piracy/ITunes, Microsoft to open source, classifieds to Craigslist, reference to Wikipedia). Read The Starfish and The Spider and you’ll catch my drift.
Comment by Avinash — May 1, 2008 @ 2:33 pm
Is The Starfish and The Spider online and able to be read within 5 minutes during work? Because otherwise, I ain’t reading it!
Comment by TwistNHook — May 1, 2008 @ 2:37 pm
You can read a preview here cheapskate: http://www.starfishandspider.com/preview/04.html
Comment by Avinash — May 1, 2008 @ 6:42 pm
Wow, this interview seemed to cause quite the tremor in blog-ville, didn’t it? The folks over at Conquest Chronicles had a couple of pieces about this - one an official post and one a diary.
Speaking of which, when the hell is the SBN 2.0 thing happening here?
Go Bears!
Comment by SoCal Oski — May 1, 2008 @ 7:45 pm
Ragnarok, you’re spot on. This whole backlash against the blogs really leaves me bewildered because I’ve turned to blogs precisely so I could GET AWAY FROM the sensationalist rumor, innuendo, and overall crap that defines mainstream media journalism today. If I want mindless rants, I’ll tune in Jim Rome on the radio or open page 2 of the L.A. Times sports section to T.J. Simers’ daily drivel. If I want thoughtful analysis and commentary about the sports and teams I most care about, I turn to my favorite blogs–such as this one. And guess what…so do the athletes, GMs, agents, coaches, etc. themselves. Just a few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal (yes, I do read newspapers) had a fantastic article on the NBA blog, hoopshype.com, run by a handful of twenty-somethings from Spain. Those Spanish guys flat out provide better information than anything you might get from TNT, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, et al., even from their location half way around the world.
Comment by California Pete — May 1, 2008 @ 9:32 pm
SoCal Oski, SBN Techs are working on constructing the site. A placeholder already exists at www.californiagoldenblogs.com. Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of the techs, who are working on a whole host of sites at the same time. Although things are going a bit slower than expected, we are still very excited for the change and hope you’ll join us there.
Go Bears!
Comment by TwistNHook — May 1, 2008 @ 9:38 pm
Avinash, I looked at the Starfish and Spider wiki and am not sure it relates. I am guessing in your view, MSM is the spider and blogs are the starfish. But it’s not like if you destroy ESPN.com, the MSM just dies (a la the spider). MSM media is decentralized in a sense, just NOWHERE near as decentralized as blogs.
Comment by TwistNHook — May 1, 2008 @ 9:42 pm
The dinosaur just wants to blame the consumer for its own extinction. Bissinger doesn’t have a birthright to his readers. If they prefer the product offered by the blogosphere then tough nuts for old media. The notion that consumers are too dumb to know quality journalism when they see it is both insulting and entirely predictable.
Comment by Tony — May 1, 2008 @ 10:20 pm
Newspapers are the dinosaur in the room, not ESPN. ESPN will be around for awhile because it was smart enough to get into the coverage game–the NBA, college sports, MLB, Monday Night Football, and a thousand other sports now go through their distribution. It takes a lot to produce an actual sporting event, and no medium can replace HD telecasts and good cable output. Yet.
Comment by Avinash — May 1, 2008 @ 11:57 pm
Perhaps my choice of ESPN was not the best one as an example. You are right in the regard that ESPN probably is just as much of the future. Which kinda sux, but that’s neither here nor there.
But even if you were to destroy the New York Times, newspapers in general wouldn’t die. They are still generally decentralized just nowhere near AS decentralized.
Comment by TwistNHook — May 2, 2008 @ 7:15 am
I also read 3 Nights in August. Why do you think it was intellectually disingenuous?
Comment by Looperbear — May 2, 2008 @ 8:25 am
Firstly, I should note that I, TwistNHook, wrote that intro. Didn’t quite make that clear.
I felt it was intellectually disingenuous, because Bissinger clearly had an agenda. An anti-Moneyball screed (at least how he understood Moneyball). A book about a return to a halcyon age. Where Tony LaRussa was all that was right with baseball and modernity (i.e. his flawed view of Moneyball) was all that was wrong.
But like half the things Bissinger railed against were the direct result of LaRussa. LaRussa is almost directly responsible for the specialization of the bullpen as we know it today. And Buzz just goes OFF on that sort of thing.
He’s trying to cram a round peg into a square hole. When your protagonist is also, in reality, the villain, it’s hard to take Bissinger seriously.
Nonetheless, the writing is really good as far as the description of the games and learning about the processes for the players and coaches.
Comment by TwistNHook — May 2, 2008 @ 8:46 am
Thanks. I was just curious because it’s been awhile since I read the book and I remembered enjoying it.
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