Sporting Madness

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 ...

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to." - J.R.R. Tolkien "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." - Hunter S. Thompson My writing life's been an unusual journey, which is probably true for many writers. My parents have been heavily involved in the journalism industry for decades, but I wanted nothing to do with it growing up. I always loved sports, but I wasn't particularly interested in writing about them either. When I went off to school at Queen's University, my plan was to become a chemist; I was more concerned with compounds and formulas than vocabulary and turns of phrase. That all changed thanks to the Queen's Journal , the campus paper I knew I wanted to be a part of soon after reading it for the first time. At first, I wanted the news and politics beats everyone else was interested in, bu...

There's been some interesting discussion lately about the prominence of ESPN's Bill Simmons from the likes of Paul Oberjuerge and Jason Fry . I've got some of my own thoughts on the topic, a few of which I talked about in my last post on Simmons , but I think there's room for a bit of a more detailed discussion on the successes and failures of different writers in attracting certain audiences. I prefer working with data to making wild guesses, though, and that's where I could use your help. When I think of broad-ranging sportswriters with substantial mainstream profiles, three in particular come to mind: Simmons, his ESPN counterpart Rick Reilly (formerly of Sports Illustrated ) and SI 's Joe Posnanski . I'm sure there are others out there, but these guys struck me as useful for a survey because they have similar profiles and exposure, but approach writing in very different ways. I've got a quick survey below on your impressions of these writers, an...

To me, one of the most interesting things about sports today is the shift in how they're covered. That's not just about the expansion of blogs, as newspapers, radio and television have changed dramatically too, but blogs have played a substantial role in changing the landscape. They've given exposure to people, issues and concepts that were largely ignored before that and might never have made it big otherwise . That isn't necessarily entirely good and not all of these changes have been positive (for example, I'm not sure we're better off for seeing naked pictures of athletes or hearing about their drinking habits), but I'd argue that some of them have been; I love a lot of the statistical analysis that's largely expanded thanks to blogs, and I love that there are different perspectives on sports being presented. Blogs really have revolutionized sports coverage, and other mediums are picking up on that; most TV and radio stations and newspapers have thei...

Like many of you out there, I watched the final episode of "The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien" earlier this evening. I thought Conan gave one hell of an exit, particularly in the montage set to the glorious Cheap Trick song "Surrender", his final speech and the final song, "Free Bird", featuring Will Ferrell , Beck , Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, Ben Harper and the Tonight Show band. You can check that out below: It was a sad moment for me. I thought SB Nation 's Andrew Sharp summarized a lot of it well in this piece ; part of the reason many people empathized with Conan was he seemed like such a likeable, modest guy, especially compared to the likes of his predecessor and successor, Jay Leno , whose picture may be found in the dictionary under "Ego". To see a guy like that jerked around and eventually destroyed by a corporate machine isn't a lot of fun. As mentioned above, the final show was great, though, and it was fun talkin...

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Las Vegas for the Blogs With Balls convention and had a great time. There was so much that came out of it that was worth writing about, as evidenced by all the great pieces that have showed up in the blogosphere on the conference since then. You can find most of the recap pieces linked at the official conference site here , and you can also look at parts I , II and III of my series if you're interested. I've been working on a final piece from there since then, but haven't had time to put it up yet, and in some ways, that's probably good, as it gave me time to reflect on it. This is the last official part of the Feat, Loathing and Blogs series, but I'll certainly be touching on some of the panelists' remarks and some of the things that came out of the conference more briefly in future posts as well. This series isn't just about conference recaps, but rather where the sports blogosphere may be going, so I hope it's st...

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...