Pfft!

Where’s the fun in that?

Journalism as a whole is pretty much in the toilet and sports writers are the worst. Everything gets blown up, and if bloggers are “dumbing” things down, I think it’s about time we shoved ESPN back into Pandora’s Box. There’s no good reason for a 24 hour sports network, especially when six hours of their day is one show on repeat and another four hours of the day is the same five or ten stories regurgitated from a mildly different though oddly similar perspective.

One of my most favorite things in the entire world is the ESPN radio commercial for SportsCenter that has Mike Greenberg saying “Breaking sports news could happen any minute that’s why you NEED to be LOCKED IN to SportsCenter.” Really? Do I really need to be locked in? What if I have to pee? Or eat dinner? It’s a total joke.

For this guy to start spouting about bloggers, well, perhaps he ought to take a good look in the mirror, because quite frankly he’s a SPORTS WRITER. He’s writing about people playing games. I’d love to see some writers for Nature or Popular Mechanics come on and talk about how sports journalists are ‘dumbing’ down America, and further serving the glut that makes people dream about hitting a home run or scoring a touchdown instead of curing cancer or building a zero-emissions automobile. (ask some people what they’d rather do, win an MVP or a Nobel Prize)

Seriously. It’s easy to start judging people, and when you go down this road, you get into the most pretentious of discussions: that you are somehow better than other people. Not that I’m sure the saga of Barbaro belongs right up there with biographies of George Washington and Charles Darwin, but seriously, if “Buzz” wants to start getting into this discussion, let’s talk about what exactly it is that sports writers are contributing to the world.

Or maybe he’d prefer to just shut his trap and be glad that someone gives enough of a rat’s ass to pay him to write about grown men playing games for a living.

that even though he likes oysters there’s no reason he can’t enjoy snails every now and then. Meanwhile – nice job on the draft coverage and the site in general. One suggestion though – would you consider renaming it Firing Blanks?

I think there are two options for backlash like we saw from Bissinger. The first is naiveté. Perhaps Bissinger thinks that print media is fine and journalism as a whole is thriving. Therefore, there is no need for outsiders, for fans, to have their voices heard. I don’t think anybody could be that dumb though. That brings us to the second, and in my opinion, correct, option. Fear.

People like Bissinger and Colin Cowherd and all these others who have taken up the crusade against blogging, are afraid of change. Whether they want to admit it or not, the rules of journalism are shifting more than they have since the invention of the printing press, and this clearly scares them to death. You no longer need a degree in journalism or communications to make your opinion heard, you just need an opinion. As Leitch said, you can find blogs that offer nothing but potshots and profanity (by the way, Bissinger, if you are going on an anti-profanity tirade, don’t open with the line “I think you’re full of shit), but those blogs will not gain a substantial readership. Those that offer informed opinion, analysis, and comedy, will thrive.

It is easy for someone who is unwilling to take the time to become knowledgeable about a subject to generalize. Bissinger had one article, written for the sake of comedy, and put the entire blogosphere under that umbrella. Were I to do that, I could assume that all Pulitzer Prize winners were blathering dinosaurs who spit more than Lou Holtz, but I know better than that. Look around! There are a lot of sports blogs out there, and some of them do what they do better than the traditional media ever could. This place, for starters. I wouldnt define this as a “blog”. If you ask me, it is a compilation of Atlanta Falcons news, analysis, and discussion. I don’t need to browse several websites to find what I need, I merely come here. That, however, is the tip of the iceberg.

Take a website like Sunday Morning Quarterback. A level of analysis exists there that cannot be found in any newspaper, on any radio show, or on any TV network. Articles there, or at somewhere like Burnt Orange Nation, have left my jaw slack by the end in admiration of the sheer depth and breadth of information covered and knowledge compiled. No traditional media outlet could ever hope to compare. Bissinger may long for the days of WC Heinz column about a late summer day at a baseball game, or the prose of Grantland Rice a crisp October football game, but things like that are now being augmented by blogs. Now, if I want the best way to expericence gameday without being there, I go to any number of UGA blogs to see video of Larry Munson’s greatest calls or of Knowshon Moreno and new Falcon Thomas Brown doing the Soulja Boy all over the Auburn Tigers. And lets be honest-is there any syndicated columnist or talk show host who can make you laugh as hard or with as much regularity as Every Day Should Be Saturday? Best of all are the journalists who blog along with their columns. Without someone like David Ching, who covers UGA athletics, Dawg fans everywhere would not have nearly a fraction of the access to the teams that we love. Rather than throwing away press conference notes he would have no use for, he posts them for the benefit of us all. Why be afraid of something that makes the medium better? It is just as easy to find a well written blog that makes the printed word that much better as it is to do what Bissinger did.

This all boils down to fear of change. With the advent of the internet, a seismic shift has occured in all aspects of life. Shopping is different. The music industry is reorganizing. Why should print media be immune? Even other media outlets are embracing the idea that anybody can capture and comment on the news. Why else would CNN show video made by its users? Why would they encourage this if it were not helpful? At the very core of things, blogs compliment print media. Not all blogs have the access that a publication like the AJC could, but we can take the time to analyze and discuss in a way that could only be dreamed about in print. If newspapers were willing to adapt, they should put great bloggers like the ones I mentioned on staff. Embrace them and their outstanding work. Just because an opinion comes from the perspective of a fan does not make that opinion any less valid. I do not need a journalism degree to know sports. Some outlets are coming around, but not enough.

In the end, aren’t we, the fans, what it is all about? If we stop caring about our favorite teams, doesn’t sports journalism just go away? Blogs bring us closer to the teams we love. That is what matters most. It is a shame that people like Bissinger are too afraid of changeto see that.

I’d just like to add that perhaps the #1 thing that Bissinger is wrong about is his contention that most blogs are terribly written. There are a lot that fit under that category, but I’d volunteer that Deadspin, KSK, EDSBS and pretty much every single SBN blog are well-written and often very clever.

Though I’d like to see some sort of grand reconciliation, I recognize that even asking Bissinger to read a few of those blogs is probably too much.