Bloggers might kill sportswriting, but athletes will help.
Tuesday’s episode of Bob Costas’ “Costas Now” show on HBO featured a round-table discussion with Costas, old-school sportwriter Buzz Bissinger, NFL player Braylon Edwards, and Will Leitch, founder of Deadspin, a major sports blog. Bissinger pretty much went crazy and attacked blogs as sandboxes for crass, uninformed idiots - which they often are. You can watch the segment here. He starts ranting at about the 14:05 mark.
The underlying premise was that blogs are killing the craft of traditional sports journalism, which of course scares traditional sports journalists like Bissinger and Costas. That premise is correct to a large extent, but it misses another major factor: that the athletes themselves will play a role in the demise of the sportswriter by using those same tools to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of the information and talk directly to fans.
Here’s an example:
Earlier this year, there was a big to-do about how the Red Sox players were threatening to boycott their Opening Day games in Japan unless the team’s clubhouse staff received the same $40,000 bonus promised to the players. Every sports media outlet covered the story, but no reporter could possibly explain the players’ perspective as well as Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling did in this blog entry.
If they write like that, athletes will do more than pictures of Matt Leinart partying to make sportswriters obsolete .