Sports Illustrated layoffs

That seems ... untrue.

Fans want big mighty swings of emotion. So they attach great stakes to mundane choices and decisions. And lots of reporters kind of do as well.

Fans’ sense of who has the axe to grind or who is in the bag is mostly bad, unless the reporter is just a fucking goober.

 

It’s completely true. Fans don’t hate AP stories about their favorite basketball team any More
Than they hate box scores.

 

Considering that these "fan" sites pale in numbers compared to professional sports journalism sites makes me wonder why anyone would think the fan sites really have a shot.

 

I assume many would if they read them consistently. I bet if my paper just ran the AP story from local college's big game this weekend, it would get us pilloried. A few years back, the AP had a quick story about a local coach getting mad at a clock operator at a rival school. I assume the rival fans were mad at that story.

But in the end, most people don't hate what they barely consume. (Have received a fair amount of complaints to the golf and NASCAR AP writers in my time)

I's an interesting sidestep. That people don't hate individual stories likely comes down to the fact that if they like a team enough to get mad, they probably consume very few AP stories. AP stories are to a degree wallpaper. It doesn't say much about axes to grind or carrying water because fans probably know very little of the operation of the AP at all.

What's more interesting is that the AP is attached to two of the most irrational displays of fan hate, but in each case, it's run through a bit of a lens. If you want to see fans misplacing any sense of bias against coaches and programs, look no farther than the mentions of any AP poll voter on Sunday. Beyond that, a favorite past time of fans is finding ESPN-shortened headlines in the right rail or in tweets that shortchange their teams (they said MY TEAM "held on" in a 10-point win, but Big State kept rolling with a 10-point win. BIAS!). The stories are generally AP or wire, but once you attach ESPN to something, that bias detector goes off like a metal detector in an iron mine.

Anyway, fans tend to have at best a so-so feeling of who is carrying water or has an axe to grind, and their feelings on which of those two is preferable swings wildly.

 

That Maven put COO Bill Sornsin -- a former Microsoft techie from the Scout.com days and douchebag conservative who thinks money equals charisma-- to do that recruiting video -- says a lot about how the C-suite see themselves. Sornsin, whose geek roots run to having been a high school marching band tuba player, has blamed "New York writers" for the bad press Maven so richly deserves.

 

Oh, they hate it. They definitely hate it.

 

Well, there are fans and there are fans.

Mostly when we talk about the ones we hear from - the tweets, the emails, the letters, the phone calls - we're talking about a relatively small but aggressively lunatic part of the fan spectrum.

I've been a sports fan all my life and it never once occurred to me to write an angry letter to an editor or call in to a radio show or challenge a columnist or reporter on Twitter.

 

I've got dibs on being the William Weld Maven.

 

They’re going to be 12 years too late with the SI politics swimsuit issue with Sarah Palin on the cover.

 

They could even start a magazine or website that covered political news. I've got a great suggestion for the name: Time.