Why do sportswriters resent blogs?

If this job were as easy as some people think it is, I'd be good at it.

 

What job? Blogging or sportswriting?

 

Peter Gammons has a blog.

Buster Olney has a blog.

Jayson Stark has a blog.

In fact, ESPN.com has a tab dedicated to its blogs.

Aaron Gleeman has a blog.

Ben Maller has a blog (that has apparently just been pulled into the FoxSports.com site).

BadJocks.com has a blog.

Baseball Primer has a blog.

I guess that Minnesota guy hates all them.

 

Too. Damn. Easy. ;D

 

I'm betting Gammons, Olney and Stark were told they had to do a blog.

ESPN.com's blogs do not mark it as a beacon of journalistic quality.

The other ones, I do not care about.

 

Olney's blog is one of the best baseball columns you can find, blog or no blog. Who cares if these guys were told to write blogs -- the point is that they do.

 

Well done, sir.

 

If Olney was told to do one, he sure seems to have taken to it. The guy has to put hours into it every day.

I like doing it on our newspaper Web site. It's like my little corner of the WWW every day.

But I think the initial poster is referring more to fan blogs or layman blogs by people who either do it for the hell of it or try to make a go of it for some payoff down the road.

I pointed this out on another thread, but Time had a good story last week about volunteerism on the Web (specifically about Wikipedia, but could apply to blogs). The thrust was that the next 10-20 years will tell whether people really want to continue to be writers for free, or whether they'll begin to get bored with it like any other passing fad hobby. Except for the really good ones like Gleeman, it's a lot of work for a small audience, and that will get to anyone except the most dedicated blogger after a certain period of time.

How those next 10-20 years turn out, of course, will have a big impact on our industry and the people working in it.

 

Oh, I think it might be more than a passing fad when Joe Sixpack realizes he can draw an audience without putting in four years of college and working his way up the ladder to do it.

 

But there will always be a limited number of spaces for people who can draw an audience. The audience, ultimately, is finite.

 

It won't take 50,000 readers for a blogger to get the rise in his Levis out of it. All he needs is to have 10 people tell him he's smart.

I really equate this with the Wikipedia thing ... except that I love Wikipedia.

The thing about Wikipedia is, you can use it all you want, but don't cry if you pick up misinformation along the way. The pressure to be accurate isn't as formalized as it is at Brittanica.

Same thing with blogs.

And really, if anyone wants to draw a parallel between what Peter Gammons does with a blog and what my Aunt Susan does with a blog ... well, that's their little piece of misinformation.

 

Your Aunt Susan does a blog? Did she post any pictures of herself?