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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
It takes a really big #### to admit when he’s almost wrong…
Q: The internet is agog over the HBO special. When you walked off the stage, did you have any idea of how big of a deal this would become? Did your cell phone blow up, and your inbox get clogged? And what was the overall reaction from friends and colleagues you spoke with? And what’s your reaction to the masses who think that you and Costas - longtime friends - were in cahoots against Will Leitch?
The initial reaction was quite positive, more than quite positive from those I immediately spoke to–fellow panelists and members of HBO with the exception of Costas (Bob was friendly but muted in his response to my performance. He is one of the most thoughtful people I know and I think he was mulling that I had gone way too far.) What I began to realize by the next afternoon is this: What the fellow panelists thought (at least the ones I spoke with) were not remotely a representative group. When I came home from New York, my wife simply told me that I had been over the top and undignified. Then I started reading emails sent to me. The majority were predictably vindictive — ########, ###########, #########, windbag, ugly, stupid, etc. But what struck me far more is that many of the emails were smart, not laced with personal invective, and made cogent points about sports blogs and the Internet. It was also abundantly clear that I had disappointed people who had been fans of my work. That hurt terribly. They were also right.
Thanks to Dodger Thoughts.
Repoz
Posted: May 06, 2008 at 07:51 AM | 38 comment(s)
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"########, ###########, #########"
http://sportslocker.blogspot.com/
I mean, good lord, how did Bissinger not make that connection? The example given to him was listed as "K.C. Star Columnist Joe Posnanski". Don't most major (and minor) dailies maintain a blog section attached to the sports area of it's online publication these days? Sometimes that's where a lot of the best information is found.
Boog Sciambi post.
plus find room in your mother's basement
I suppose when you read a lengthy post on a fairly well-trod site about your obsession with ####### horses, it's probably hard to rid yoursel of some of your negative views of bloggers.
This is a new one on me. Heard "#########" a lot.
I think ########### may be a kind of compliment. I'm a city guy and horses kind of spook me. No way I'd have the courage to try to screw one. Hats off to the guys who will risk a swift kick from a mare in that region of the body.
I disagree. It sounds like he has a natural distrust of blogs that he can't entirely get over, but the apology seems sincere and also very self-aware.
I doubt that very many journalists who maintain a blog on the their newspaper's site consider themselves bloggers first, second, or last.
at the same time, guys like poz are bloggers to a great extent. as are insideresque types like John Sickles at minorleagueball.com. i'm guessing it's a generational disconnect, but it really shouldn't be hard to realize that 1) blogs aren't homogenous and 2) comments do not equal the bloggers viewpoints. and bissinger was probably sad when his lover died on the track down in kentucky. *sheds a tear* you just don't find that type of love among people anymore.
edit: i know this will never happen, but i would go wild with happiness if an admin of the site edited the nanny every few months to add and remove certain creative cusses from the filter. it'd be like a race every few fortnights to figure out if "####### enthusiast" would get nannied or if "monkey felcher" still worked.
It's like saying "I know Joe Reporter hosts a radio show, but I doubt he considers himself a radio show host." Who gives a crap what they consider themselves? They blog. They're bloggers.
It's like saying "I know Joe Reporter hosts a radio show, but I doubt he considers himself a radio show host." Who gives a crap what they consider themselves? They blog. They're bloggers.
I don't disagree with you. I'm just saying that I don't think most of those bloggers, JoePo notwithstanding, consider themselves bloggers, nor would they be heartbroken if their publication no longer wanted them to keep up a blog.
My sense is they enjoy having an outlet where they can "keep up with the Joneses" so to speak. In the era of 24 hour ESPN news and other online outlets, they can still compete to break stories. If something happens at 5:00 at night, they don't have to wait until 12 hours later to have their story hit the public. And they have an outlet for little tidbits that fans find interesting, but otherwise wouldn't make it into the limited inches of a newspaper, like observations from a practice session.
They might not consider themselves the "smear-merchants" that most people like Bissinger assume bloggers to be, but they're most certainly "bloggers", and they certainly don't in any way make it seem like a chore foisted on them by their editors. I get them impression that they enjoy writing for an audience. This gives them a chance to do that more. That's my anecdotal evidence. I'd love to hear yours.
Newspapers and other MSM outlets didn't adopt the blog format for some time, and often times the format seems forced. Sure, some writers do a really great job with it. Susan Slusser, who I think is a really great beat reporter, uses the blog pretty much only for breaking news. Other contributors to that blog mostly ask questions of the readers or link to other A's sites that have interesting posts. By and large, the format is redundant and is only really useful for the breaking news.
Didn't ESPN rebrand their columns as "blogs"? I don't read 'em because they're behind the wall, but are they similar to other sports blogs, with a comments section and lots of links, or are they mostly notes columns?
Anyhow, I'm not certain that my observation is correct, clearly you have had the opposite experience.
A lazy use of vocabulary is not exactly a hallmark of Buzz Bissinger.
Fair enough. I guess I just struck a nerve.
You are talking about the new guard (new doesn't necessartily mean young). Unfortunately, the old guard still exists, and it still represents the "power". Things seem to be changing as the old guards' base is rapidly deterioriating, but for now, the old guard still has the muscle.
#10: "When he spews his venom at "Bloggers" doesn't he realize that he's probably insulting colleagues and fellow Journalists."
And what's funny about that is he basically says that Poz only disagreed with Bissinger's stance on the show so as not to piss off his readers because he's a blogger himself now. Bissinger's response to that question was moronic through and through.
From #5: "Buzz and Costas and others of the like try to portray the internet as one single voice or perspective, one of lower intelligence and vulgarity" to #24: "When Bissinger talks about "bloggers," he isn't talking about every single person that maintains a blog. He is talking about amateurs that use blogs as their primary or only medium"
Basically he just wants to define out whatever doesn't fit the stereotype he wants to feed. If they have a job in MSM, they're disqualified in his mind from being termed "bloggers" no matter what else they do. If they're not obscene and vulgar, or if they use evidence and logic to support well-reasoned and researched claims, they're not bloggers regardless. If they don't live in their mothers' basements, etc. Shredder's (valid) points be damned. That way he can't be wrong.
I thought Bissinger's apology seemed sincere and well thought-out, but it also didn't make him look any less like a tool in my eyes. He grants that society as a whole is getting more dumbed-down and vulgar but still seems to think of "bloggers" as the enemy in that regard. He criticizes vicious media personalities for being attention-grabbing gasbags but when it comes to his own "vile beyond belief" rampage against Leitch says only it sprang from passion. You don't think he knows how many more people are saying his name today than they were last week?
And then his defense of LaRussa is simply despicable. I don't think any more highly of Bissinger than I did before all the apologizing. In fact, I wouldn't dismiss as a possibility that it was his intention all along to go way over the top on Costas, come to his senses he cools off and his wife tells him he was a jackass, and give contrite interviews to every internet media outlet that came calling.
Seriously? Despicable? LaRussa's alcohol problems surely can't be ignored, but are you really implying that Tony LaRussa is bad enough a person to not warrant a defense of his mistakes? Like Bissinger said, LaRussa is an amiable enough guy with fans and puts a lot of work and money into that ARF thing. No, Tony LaRussa isn't a model citizen by any means, but he's not nearly the kind of lowlife to whom a defense would be "despicable." That's an absurd implication.
One thing that I imagine gets at guys like Bissinger is that they more or less do all this work as journalists to fuel the medium that's taking them down. Most blogs rarely, if ever, do any actual reporting of their own. The top story on Deadspin right now is about a horse that went ballistic at a horse show in England. Deadspin links to another blog writing about it, FanIQ, where you can finally find the actual story which spawned the post, written by the BBC. My guess is that a rather large number of people didn't bother going through that process to get the original BBC article.
Now I'm not trying to be anti-blog here, but it just doesn't come as a surprise to me that a lot of traditional journalists hold a kind of contempt for what they see as most blogs- typified in their minds probably by Deadspin and the other sites of that ilk.
Not at all. The idea of defending TLR isn't despicable, I found the defense itself to be despicable: holding TLR responsible for his players is ridiculous, there's no possible connection between TLR's possible drinking problem and a culture of drinking on the team, LaRussa's already been held accountable for his mistakes so criticizing him for them is off-limits, he gets a pass because of his philanthropy. The way Bissinger went about defending LaRussa, and the arguments he made, are what I take issue with.
Ah ah. My mistake then. Apologies.
Would this be the 'following Brittney Spears around' reporting or the 'simply report what the White House tells you without challenge' reporting?
I never said anything about the quality of the mainstream media's reporting. By and large I think it's rather crappy, yeah. But they do report firsthand, unlike most blogs, which was my only point. That I can see where the frustration comes from when the reporting they do fuels the medium that's slowly replacing them. I don't necessarily agree with it (if they reported better they probably wouldn't be getting marginalized so much), but I can understand where it comes from.
Alpheus Felch was a great governor of Michigan, responsible for moving the capitol to Lansing. There's a town
in the UP named after him and a mountain range rich in iron ore.
What kind of felch guzzling swine would ban that?
Ockham's Razor implies a simpler explanation.
Really? It always seems the mainstream media is late reporting important news. Take the WTO as an example, which hit every other country in the world and led to gigantic protests before the U.S. Mainstream Media reported it. Warrantless wiretapping and telecoms involvement, again comes from internet first. That America has by far the highest prison population is the world, over 20% more than any other country - is known all over, except our mainstream media, until the NY Times finally reported it. The entire world and many business publications knew and reported that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, they had been decimated by years of sanctions, but the mainstream media stood its ignorant ground. America spends more on military than rest of world combined, but the 6 companies that own 99% of the media make profit from that, so they don't report it. Let's not even get into science information.
American mainstream media is simply not a good place to get accurate info anymore.
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