Sporting Madness

The Blogs With Balls III conference took place last weekend at Wrigley Field. I was there, and I quite enjoyed it; there was a lot of good discussion around several key topics in sports media. Over the next few days, I'm going to be presenting recaps and analysis of all the different panels. Here's the first one: Panel: Going Local: Charting The Evolution of Local Sports Media In The Digital Age Panelists: Jim Bankoff of SB Nation , Enrico Campitelli of The 700 Level , TK Gore of Comcast Sportsnet Chicago , Jon Greenberg of ESPN Chicago and Dave Nemetz of Bleacher Report . Moderator: ESPN's Amy K. Nelson . Picture: Theme Song (unofficial): Tom Petty - Learning To Fly I chose this because it reflected both the small-scale beginnings of many of the panelists and their current lofty status (Bankoff and Nemetz both run massive sports networks, while Campitelli's site was recently acquired by Comcast and Gore and Greenberg are both prominent in the ...

In the first panel of the Blogs With Balls: Las Vegas conference, the focus was on athletes and their attempts to connect directly with fans. The second panel took up the rather broad topic of "The Future of Sports Media", but produced some really interesting discussions. It was moderated by Dan Shanoff of The Sporting Blog , Tim Teblog and DanShanoff.com . The panelists were Nathaniel Friedman (better known as Bethlehem Shoals ) of The Sporting Blog , The Baseline and Free Darko , Matt Ufford of Kissing Suzy Kolber , With Leather and Warming Glow , Kevin Blackistone of FanHouse , Around the Horn and the University of Maryland, and Amy K. Nelson of ESPN.com . It was a solid, diverse group. Friedman and Ufford both started off as small, independent bloggers (as did Shanoff to a degree, but he wound up with ESPN pretty quickly) who then made it big, while Blackistone's a former newspaper guy who's made the jump to the web, but is possibly most famous for his...