Monthly Archives: December 2008
ESPN Looks to Trump MLB Network
It looks like ESPN is attempting to take some of the thunder away from MLB Network, which is set to launch Thursday. From ESPN PR:
ESPN Classic will feature a classic Major League Baseball game every Monday night (generally at 8 p.m. ET) starting January 5 and continuing to the start of the 2009 regular season. The series, which will celebrate the 20th season of MLB on ESPN, begins with the re-airing of ESPN’s first-ever MLB telecast – Baltimore at Kansas City (April 9, 1990). In addition to the weekly Monday telecasts, ESPN Classic will present nightly classic MLB games at 8 p.m. the week of March 30 leading up to Opening Night on ESPN (Sunday, April 5).
With MLB Network surely to air classic games, is it a coincidence that the WWL looks to do the same? Also, some of the games listed on the ESPN schedule are ones not originally broadcast by the network. Wouldn’t you think that MLB would have control over those re-broadcasts for their own channel? ESPN must be working under an old agreement with the league.
Smart move ESPN. A little tawdry. But smart nonetheless.
Another Day, Another Sports Blogger Fired From Day Job
Cameron Frye, a blogger (with a classic name) covering the Boston Bruins for Comcast Sports Net, got a decidedly unwelcome Christmas present this year: a pink slip.
Frye was recently published in Deadspin.com’s “Waxing Off” feature where women bloggers and writers are welcome to discuss issues regarding sports or working as writers. It’s a fine feature, but it tends toward the racier side of things–mostly because it’s Deadspin–and just such a post got Frye in hot water with her bosses at CSN.
This isn’t the first time a blogger got into heat at their day job because of what they wrote online. Michael Tunison, also known as Christmas Ape at Deadspin and Kissing Suzy Kolber, the two major sports blogs that he writes for, lost his job as a Metro reporter for The Washington Post because of posts he made online.
Now, sports always has a section of its fans that enjoy, let’s say, an unsophisticated joke or two now and again. And I have no problem with people who write stuff like that. It’s incredibly hard to write funny and many of these people are very talented, regardless of how PG their writing may be. But you have to mesh that with your day job, especially if you’re a journalist and you write for a living. Now, Frye informed her boss that she was writing for Deadspin, but what she published on there would never fly on CSN’s website. It just wouldn’t. Same goes for Tunison and WaPo’s website.
There’s a reason I put my full byline on everything I publish, both in blogs and in print: I want my name to be associated with everything else I do. I can’t write one way for a private blog, another for a sports blog, and then keep the raunchy jokes under wraps when I put on my reporter hat and get printed on paper. Not anymore, it just doesn’t work like that.
Deadspin explains the situation on their site here. Frye is now working for BarstoolSports.com and told her side of the story. Or you can view the original Waxing Off entry by Frye and judge for yourself.
A healthy dose of (NSFW language) warning on those links, of course. But if you didn’t write it, I doubt it’s anything to get you fired over.
Cuban’s Plan to Save the Sports Page
I gotta hand it to Mark Cuban, he likes to think outside the box.
Case in point; Cuban wrote on his blog last week why he feels it’s important for the local newspaper to retain its viability for the sake of their professional sports teams. Cuban claims that most fans are of the casual variety and they tend to follow their team via the print media. He also contends that with the drastic cuts facing the newspaper industry, combined with more boilerplate coverage, these fans are getting short changed.
But Cuban is not just complaining about the impending end of print, he has a solution to save it:
NFL Week 17, With Local Media Links
Here we are…the final week of the NFL season. Here is the schedule, along with our links to the local media covering each team…
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28th
St. Louis at Atlanta 1:00 PM FOX
New England at Buffalo 1:00 PM CBS
Kansas City at Cincinnati 1:00 PM CBS
Detroit at Green Bay 1:00 PM FOX
Tennessee at Indianapolis 1:00 PM CBS
NY Giants at Minnesota 1:00 PM FOX
Carolina at New Orleans 1:00 PM FOX
Cleveland at Pittsburgh 1:00 PM CBS
Oakland at Tampa Bay 1:00 PM CBS
Chicago at Houston 1:00 PM FOX
Jacksonville at Baltimore 4:15 PM CBS
Washington at San Francisco 4:15 PM FOX
Miami at NY Jets 4:15 PM CBS
Dallas at Philadelphia 4:15 PM FOX
Seattle at Arizona 4:15 PM FOX
Denver at San Diego 8:15 PM NBC
GateHouse Media Sues NY Times Co. Over Linking
This has been an issue brewing for sometime in a number of different platforms, but it seems it’s finally come to a head. It’s not particularly a sports issue, but it’s certainly going to effect how blogs, especially those on major media websites, go about their business.
Gatehouse Media, a company which owns, according to Boston.com, 125 local newspapers across Massachusetts, is suing NY Times Co., owners of Boston.com and The Boston Globe, for copyright infringement relating to their hyper local aggregate news websites. (Think Google News with a local flavor)
You can read The Globe’s report, published on their Boston.com website, by going to this link. You can read GateHouse media’s filed complaint by going here, courtesy of Media Nation. MN also has linked over to the coverage of the issue by the Center for Citizen Media, who is doing phenomenal work unravelling the issue.
The suit relates to the practice by The Globe of reprinting the headlines and ledes of stories from newspaper websites owned by GateHouse, then linking to the full story. Essentially, it’s suing them for doing what blogs do every day.
Blogs, as I’m sure you’re aware, collect links from media sources across the web with their headlines and short excerpts in order to direct traffic there. The problem lies largely in the fact that these links usually shoot right past the front page of a website, where a person might see other articles they’re interested in and where the highest-grossing advertisements usually are.
GateHouse certainly has cause for complaint, but whether it’s enough cause for a judge to find in favor of them remains to be seen. This isn’t a legal battle that will be over quickly, though, and it’s not one limited to just these two companies.
The unseen third party here is actually Google, whose Google News site does exactly what the Globe’s hyper local web portals do, but on a larger scale. Depending on how this all plays out, the lawsuit could have far-reaching effects far beyond Massachusetts.
