Sporting Madness

Back in September, I headed to New York for another Blogs With Balls conference. The two I’d attended before, in Vegas and Chicago, were amazing experiences, and this one was no different; it was a great time, an excellent chance to get some intelligent perspective on where blogging’s going and a chance to hang out with some awesome people. I was just going through my files and realized I had a lot of notes from the BWB4 panels that I’d never posted, so here they are. First up, the first panel, Women Talk Sports. Note on the notes: these are in chronological order (as much as possible), but I couldn’t write down every comment from every panelist, so this is more of a "Highlights" piece than a full transcript . Panelists : Sarah Braesch , BlogHer / Draft Day Suit , Richard Deitsch , Sports Illustrated , Jemele Hill , ESPN , Tina Cervasio , MSG , Jane McManus . Moderator: Megan Hueter , Women Talk Sports . The panel started with a discussion of why women’s sports aren’...

We're going to be running plenty of panel recaps from Blogs With Balls' fourth edition (which I'm in New York City for) here this week, but the best moment actually came in the final panel of the day yesterday. Thus, to borrow from a famous quotation , "the last shall be first and the first shall be last". The most newsworthy moment of the whole day came from Josh Elliott , former ESPN SportsCenter anchor and current ABC Good Morning America co-host, who was on the final BWB panel ("Rising Stars") and candidly responded to my question about how he handles criticism of ESPN (along the lines of what I've delivered in a couple of pieces at The Good Point ). "I absolutely understand why people criticize ESPN," Elliott said. "It’s so pervasive and there are certain decisions it makes that are so terrible it sets itself up." Elliott was particularly bothered by his colleagues' reactions to his GChat interview with Deadspin ...