Nerd Fight: Bloggers vs. Journalists

I know that Jedboy's blog tends to be about movies and television, but I hope that you might allow me to steer this vehicle in a different direction today.

If you, like me and a great many other people, read sports blogs, there is a gigantic nerd fight taking place across the interwebs today.

Over the last few years, and especially in the last months, journalists from established newspaper, radio, and television outlets have been criticizing bloggers for being uneducated, uninformed, and, essentially, dumbing down America because of bad sports writing. In addition, a great number of very well-known sports personalities such as Bob Costas have the perception that bloggers, particularly those that write about sports, live in their mom's basement.

Last night, Bob Costas attempted to have Will Leitch, the editor of Deadspin.com, the most popular sports blog on the Internet in terms of page views, and a sports journalist named H.G. Bissinger on to discuss the state of the internet in sports media. (Bissinger, by the way, is the guy that wrote the book Friday Night Lights, the basis for the movie of the same name, which was the inspiration for the movie of the same name. Everybody with me so far?)

Costas asked Leitch some question, like "Is what you're doing news?", to which Leitch began to offer an answer. Leitch got in no more than fifteen seconds before Bissinger tore into him about how poorly written blogs are and how blogs are essentially tearing the journalist universe apart.

So, this is all a long way of me introducing my point for today's post -- why I, and many others, blog about sports, movies, TV, music, or whatever. While I tend to focus my energies on sports and TV, you can essentially substitute your favorites subject in and the essence is the same.

Sports are consumed by masses of people all at once. Although I may watch a Jazz game by myself or one or two friends, I know that thousands of people saw that same game at the arena and millions more saw that game at their homes. Those masses of people then talk about that game.

"Did you see that?"

"How awesome (or how bad) was our team last night?"

So millions of people are watching and talking about any given sports event. However, for all of those people, there are only a handful of journalists reporting about that event. I used to work for a university athletic department. During an extremely successful football season, there were maybe fifty reporters at most, from local and national outlets, covering a game. Millions of people watching with a small number of people with published opinions or recaps of those games.

What blogging gives me the chance to go is to discuss and digest a game (or movie) in the same environment in which I consume it. Rather than read one sports writers opinion from my local new source, I can get online, post my opinion, read opinions of others, and then discuss and comment on those opinions. Sounds great to me. Do like that idea?