Media lessons, Cuban style!
Everyone’s favorite professional owner Mark Cuba - what? You don’t like Cuban? Well we do. He went to IU, he responds to our e-mails, and he actually cares about his team’s performance, not just its profitability.
Anyway, Cuban’s blog is an extension of that entertainment, and Mark is talking media shop in his last two posts over there, extolling all the virtues of blogs in comparison to newspapers.
This interests us not only because it’s Cuban speaking, but because we kinda pull double-duty in this area; we manage this little blog here, and we aspire to careers in the newspaper business, working for The Man.
Cuban’s most interesting point is that newspapers - available via the Web - are the best spot to go for in-depth coverage of any specific large-market team, especially when that team is in the playoffs. ESPN.com and wire services, Cuban says, maintain their boring, generalized regular-season coverage.
It’s true. If ESPN didn’t have their columnists to illuminate our lives on a daily basis, very little on the site would be of any real interest. For the passing fan, it’s fine, but for anyone desiring serious detail, the formula doesn’t work.
Leave it to Marky Mark - so sexy in that photo - to point it out.
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Just to continue discussion…..
I agree that if I were seeking specialized coverage, the local sports section is the way to go. But for many people, on a Saturday night when they seek to find out who won a variety of sports events on that afternoon, ESPN.com will continue to be the site they visit. I believe that this is the niche ESPN seeks to serve, not to be specialists, but to give you a quick glance at every score you could possibly want to know. Is it boring? Yes. But most informative things are. The key word in the 2nd paragraph is entertainment. Personally, I’m not entertained by reading newspapers such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. However, I still read them because I seek to be informed on a variety of issues. Who wants to talk sports with someone who only knows about Chicago sports teams? It is important to have a wide-range of knowledge. This is why those papers will continue to survive.
For now, blogs serve as an unedited, unverified, “this is how I feel” type of outlet. I am entertained by blogs everyday, including this one, but when I want a trustworthy news source, I refer to sources such as the AP wire. Blogs are like dessert, a nice finishing touch on the real meat and potatoes (mainstream media).
And kudos to E for stepping up his journalistic effort from his poor showing earlier in the week.
PMK -
In the second paragraph, I meant “entertainment” only in the sense that Mark Cuban entertains me. I didn’t mean to imply that sports news was necessarily entertainment (the waters get murkier and murkier from there, so let’s just stay away.)
But I understand your point - ESPN (and Yahoo, and FoxSports, etc.) are the places to go for broad, generalized coverage of events. I think Cuban’s point (I think) was that if you really want specialized coverage you can get it - and it’s only the matter of seeking it out a little bit more than just entering http://www.espn.com into your address field. That specialized coverage is available on every team in the playoffs (or NCAA tournament, for example), just by searching out the newspapers that cover those teams in depth the entire year. That’s the glory of the web - you can get a newspaper’s specialized coverage without ordering a subscription to that newspaper, and you can digest it in relatively the same amount of time as you can get a look at ESPN.com and a few blogs.
That was the Benefactor’s point, I think, and I kinda agree. Maybe it’s just newspaper bias, or the fact that I hate how ESPN dominates sports opinion so much, but I like the idea of checking out the Dallas Morning News for Mavericks coverage and the L.A. Times for Clippers, etc. After all, those are the papers whose business models thrive on local coverage - it’s only natural they’d know those teams the best.
I agree most everything in both of your posts, I was just elaborating on the discussion and offering another point of view.
PMK should read Marshall Mcluhan regarding the “difference” between entertainment and information regarding media.
I’ll add it to my summer reading list…
[…] We’ve gushed about our love for Mark Cuban before on the Postmen. We’re frequent readers of his blog which touches on a whole range of stuff, from technology to his Mavericks. Lately, Marky Mark has been blogging to the max about something very near and dear to our heart – the practice of journalism and sportswriters. […]