The history of sports journalism on the internet

This is something I do know about having left newspapers for Starwave in the mid-90s.

Gelman was the first editor of something called Satchel Sports, which was the project name before ESPN came on board. The folks you should talk to are Tom Phillips, now at Google, I believe, and Geoff Reiss, who is at Newsweek.

Danny DeFreitas went to MSNBC in 95 as well and was one of the first to see the Internet light.
John Marvel and Steve Miller were others that jumped early

Some of you might remember Danny and I speaking to APSE at the 1996 convention in Cleveland, where the old guard was against any recognition of the Internet within the organization. It was an interesting dialogue with Dave Smith, George Solomon and the two of us.

 

I say this without a hint of any retained bad feelings, and certainly not anything beyond, but there were a few colleagues across the country who actually seemed to stop considering me their equal in any sense after I jumped to the 'Net in August 1997. Nothing overt, and feel free to call B.S., but to me it was pretty obvious. And a couple of people on that list, I considered career mentors.

That has all changed now, of course -- and again, any bad feelings by me have long passed -- but there was certainly some of that "this is our club, and you're no longer welcome" going on in my mind back then.

 

Don't forget about broadcast.com. I moved to pittsburgh from cleveland in the late 1990's and it was a godsend. Then Cuban sold it, of course, and Yahoo ruined it. But I will always fondly remember listing to Cavs and Indians games streamed on broadcast.com.

 

Wonder how many of those folks have contacted you in recent years looking for jobs, i.e., lifeboats, from their listing li'l clubs.

 

Likewise, I bear no ill will toward anyone worried about their job at the moment. But it's hard not to notice that some of the people who were on here a few years back still trying to downplay the Internet, and those who shouted loudest against blogs, for that matter, are now the ones who have pretty much been left behind.

 

None of the editors who treated me "badly" (a relative term) have, but most were pretty close to the end of their careers and/or untouchable, so not worried about their futures.

Younger editors I have talked to in the past few years never looked down their noses in the first place. They were a little more open to new things, obviously.

Certainly, there are a couple of writers out there who at some point or another didn't seem to have much use for me at a professional gathering or social function or whatever -- I suppose because I wasn't "out there" with them -- who have been in touch. If they're good, doesn't really matter what happened then. It's human nature, to some extent, the whole writer/editor thing.

The most satisfying, oddly, is the small list of SID or public relations director types who either turned us down for credentials or made it really hard to get them "back in the day" and who now are coming around knocking on the door and wondering where their coverage is.