Sports Bloggers in the Press Box

No wonder the reading public is shifting to blogs.

 

Is it just me or does Zagoshe seem a little bit immature? He comes off like a 23-year-old at a small town daily that thinks he is way above the rest of the world.

 

To be honest, I've found (generally speaking) that the ones who are anti-online, don't "get" online or look down on the new media are the old-timers.

 

Do you really not know the difference between a license and referring to someone's professional credentials?
If you don't, we have a lovely bag o'hammers for you as a parting gift.

 

Yep, you nailed it right on the head.

Actually I'm a Joe Fan Boy with my own blog and I'm damn mad that the only people who take me seriously are the 8 buddies who read my blog.

And I'm even more mad because I went on this site for journalists and made all kinds of ludicrous claims about my blog having "hundreds of thousands" of readers and then made all kinds of silly assertions, like reporters from the old boy network of newspapers are fat and lazy and frankly aren't any more talented than my friend flicka, who does a blog about baseball teams that isn't edited, abides by no journalistic standards and is mostly cut and paste and links to old boy newspaper sites, but it does have creative concepts and cool pictures.....I just can't understand why nobody takes me or my alter egos seriously.....

 

Dooley -- I think that would be very interesting to see if a newspaper could survive being net-only and relying on paid subscriptions. I would suppose that having a base of subscribers would help with setting ad rates, but I just can't see how that would work, not with so much content available for free. That, to me, is the greatest challenge of newspapers and media outlets -- figuring out a way to make the internet highly profitable.

 

The first announcement they make in the press calls it a "working" press box. So this thread would seem to hang on the meaning of "work."
To me, work means you're getting paid for what you're doing. I spent the afternoon digging large rocks out of a section of my property. Difficult, yes. Work, no. I did it for my own demented gardening reasons.
How information gets transmitted is not the issue here. The question is, does something think highly enough of the information producer to pay them for their time and trouble. Obviously, someone blogging for the Washington Post fits that bill perfectly. I'll go further and say that if those dipstick Redskins fans were getting paid to blog by Danny Snyder, then they pass the test, too. They're professionals. Professional whats is another thread in the making.
If you are merely an observer, student, fan, or plain old really good writer who loves a sport and has an online forum for which you don't get paid, then you do not belong in the press box. That doesn't make your work invalid. It doesn't mean I won't seek it out. It means you don't belong in a place that is set aside for people who are earning a living.
I have a sports blog. I write when I have something to say. I make no money. I also have a gold BBWAA card that lets me into any baseball press box there is. I have never used it, and I won't unless someone pays me to go write about baseball.

 

yes Michael_Gee but I think it has more to do with accountability. It's not like professional landscapers are the only people who can use gloves and shovels to remove rocks from property, they're just paid to do it. The reason they're paid is because they do what they do well and have something to lose if they do it poorly.

It's the same with journalists and bloggers. I think bloggers should be privy to interviews and the press box if credentials aren't in high demand, but without the accountability that comes with being employed for your work, they shouldn't be given equal priority compared to a professional journalist. Bloggers do good work, tend to think outside the box and do provide a break from the pack journalism that sportswriters are just as vulnerable to as in other beats. I think SIDs and the field benefits from their being around and should facilitate blogging as long as it's from a quality blog that's well-done, but not at the expense of those with deadlines and editors to appease.

 

This gets back to the chicken-and-egg argument, though. If you can build up an audience to pay you (or advertisers to pay you) in part on selling your strength on game coverage, or whatever you bring to it that nobody else does, then how do you get a credential?

To me, "working" means "working," whether you're getting paid or not. What about someone from a college paper who isn't paid to write? What about when Michele Kaufman gets her students credentials for a game -- they're not paid, right? What about the fucknuts who work at a "legitimate" organization yet somehow spend the whole game back-slapping, eating pretzels and doing anything but working? And why give the NFL-owned blog a leg up on the independent blog, just because its writers are drawing a salary? As a journalist, wouldn't you rather that seat go to someone who doesn't have such a vested interest in the organization?

Perhaps the word "blogger" is the problem. Maybe a sub like "independent journalist" would be better. (That could cover freelancers, too.) Honestly, I would guess that most of us wouldn't notice where the person next to us was from as long as that person appeared to be working, and wasn't there making an ass of himself or herself.

 

Oh, c'mon, how many frickin' bloggers are recalibrating sliced bread for a new millennium? Most are really little more than columnists, and that can be done from the stands or at home. And hell, since a lot of blog apologists on here have dissed the value of access to the athletes, why the hell should they even seek the access?

And as I've said before, page hits is so dependent on so many things, the vast majority of which has nothing to do with quality.

 

So wait...

You (the collective, bloggers-shouldn't-get-into-the-press-box you) are arguing that access is essential for learned writing, yet someone who is a quasi-columnist doesn't really need it anyway.

So why is it people get so upset Bill Simmons or Jay Mariotti writes from home? Why should Bill Plaschke bother showing up somewhere? In fact, why should anyone who isn't writing a game story on deadline be on a press box? It's all on TV anyway, right? That would clear up a lot of room! And leave more hot dogs for you!