Michael Silver leaves Sports Illustrated for Yahoo Sports

Sports tastes should be well reflected here.

Music.... way different ball of wax.

 

Yahoo's problem.

They'll never supplant Google as a search engine.

They'll never supplant ESPN as a sports site.

 

I have an office crammed with books on writing. I have every BASW book. I have file folders stuffed with Internet printouts of great sports journalism.

And I think I have read one Yahoo! Sports story in my life -- something Wojo did during the NBA playoffs. I know Charles Robinson is talented from his day at the Sentinel, but I wouldn't even know where to go to find his work. And I'm on Yahoo! every day checking my fantasy baseball/football/basketball team.

I dont really know why that is. I guess Yahoo! just doesnt register with me as a great writing/news source. Maybe I've spent so much time using it as a fantasy destination that going there to actually read something is like going to Wal-Mart to buy a suit. You cant question their talent. And I would say that Silver's hiring means they have grand plans for the future. Hopefully, I'll notice.

 

All true.

But yahoo is the only one that's a combination of:

- quality (and free) fantasy sports
- a very good search engine
- A front page with easily accessible news headlines/movie showtime information/auctions/Web site hosting/top searches listing
- A quality stable of in-house journalists in the sports department, their work all available for free

Yahoo! is pretty much one-stop shopping, and a great place to begin one's Internet day. It's been my home page for years.

 

Ditto

 

Well, there's definitely some great writing going on there. You mentioned Charles Robinson, so I went and looked at some of his stuff from his days at Yahoo. Lots of good stuff.

Check this piece out, from after New England's last Super Bowl win. I suspect it was written from the locker room that night. Fantastic work and a great angle from a crappy environment (I've never covered a Super Bowl, but I have done an NBA Finals championship locker room, and it's a bitch trying to get original material. Super Bowl has to be worse.)

Anyway, if this had been on the wire, I would have picked this up and run it in our post SB package. So maybe that speaks to Yahoo's problem. There's really no way to know what they are writing unless you go there and see it, or they pimp it out to AP.

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=cr-belichick020705&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

 

Yahoo Sports needs a concentrated TV ad campaign.

 

This could very well be fixed by now, but as of a few months ago, Yahoo Sports' articles weren't immediately linked to Yahoo News searches. I can't remember what the topic was (it will come to me eventually), but I was doing some research on a developing news situation and used the Yahoo news search engine to look for articles about it. I found a few articles from newspapers, but a link to the Yahoo Sports story that was breaking the story wasn't offered. I found out about it from somewhere else.