Tag: Jim Bankoff

Sports blogs are the best

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As I’ve been talking about all over this blog, traditional media is on the decline (here and here). Papers are on their way out and everyone knows it.  Ever since i was a kid, I’ve always loved the local sports pages but one thing I’ve been doing for the past few years is reading sports blogs instead of the local paper’s coverage. Why? Because there are a few benefits:

1) They are biased. Obviously, sports reporting for a local town are biased but they try to come off as neutral and objective.  They definitely aren’t and it’s nice to read a blog where the writer is unabashedly biased towards your team.  It gives them the freedom to speak freely and accomplish my next point

2) They are funny. Sports blogs aren’t afraid to rip someone down in a funny and often juvinule manner. This is sports, not world news

3) They are mean. I almost never read in a paper that someone is playing poorly.  If someone has a bad game, they don’t mention it – they only focus on who scored the points and why one team won.  They rarely go into the details of what was happening. They don’t give you a feel of the game.  Blogs will tell you straight-up what’s happening.  If you don’t watch the game, this is huge.  It’s as if you are getting a report from a friend (subjective blog) rather than a robot (objective newspaper).

4) They are passionate. These writers analyze the crap out of the team. They drum up stats that would only arise if someone was spending night and day thinking about the team. They compare players to supermodels, they conjure up theories about their pregame warmups.  They provide much more thinking about a team than a local beat writer.

5) They web-based meaning they link, embed, reference and do all the stuff that other web sites do. These are things that newspaper columns don’t do.  Having YouTube clips in a column makes it infinitely more readable.  Seeing sports is fun.  Linking to other points is a good idea.  These things doing happen with local columnists and it limits the usefulness of their output.

All of these things are why i love sports blogs and i’m also happy to see that my bud Jim Bankoff (Qloud investor/chairman) recently became CEO Of Sports Blog Nation (or SB Nation) which has a network of over 185 blogs covering almost every sport.  There’s a good article in yesterday’s WashingtonPost. These blogs and others like them are going to be my go-to for getting news (Twolves blog here) and you should probably check them out too.

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