More The Big Lead-related nonsense

June 23rd, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

Most of the few hundred people reading this right now don’t give a fuck, but whatever, it still irks me, and it’s (50 percent) my site, so I’m going forward. TBL, in his response to Leitch’s scathingly accurate criticism of his comments in the L.A. Times this weekend, linked back to this post a couple of months ago. Back then, I wrote:

A larger point here, at the risk of looking like a dumbass in six months, is that as blogs further professionalize and gain legitimacy, bloggers should expect parallel increases in criticism and credibility. If you’re going to take the game to Yahoo!, AOL, ESPN, and everywhere else — if you want to be at the Super Bowl — you have to play by the rules. To do anything less risks losing everything before really gaining anything. (Which is not to say that blogs have to break news, just that if you fancy yourself a newsman and not just a commentator, you’ve got to get it right, and you’ve got to be transparent.)

Despite McIntyre’s either/or posturing after his link, I stand by that. What I meant to get across at the time was that if TBL was going to present himself as more than an outlet for opinion, if he was going to make himself seem like this tip-collecting omnipotent news-breaker, he had to get things right. All of us do, should we choose that route. That’s the only obligation. I think most reasonable bloggers would have agreed with that far before Buzz Bissinger acted like a jackass on subscription television.

Will’s point is that your blog can be whatever you and your readers want it to be, and that you shouldn’t change for Buzz Bissinger’s sake. My point is that if you want yourself to be a newsbreaker, you have to be right. These are not mutually exclusive distinctions. The rest of us didn’t need BuzzBiss to tell us to “clean up our acts.” We were doing just fine well before that.

We’re not listed because we received Honorable Honorable Mention … or, maybe not

December 27th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanE

SI.com columnist Richard Deitsch has released, to great howling and gnashing of teeth, his 2006 Media Awards. Most of the selections are completely agreeable. For example, Chris Fowler and James Brown took home Person(s) of the Year, Troy Aikman won best football analyst, Dan Shulman won best play-by-play, John Harkes best newcomer, and so on and so forth. A totally reasonable batch of names, if you ask me.

Unfortunately, Deitsch takes all of this reasoned argument, all this accurate observation, and tosses it out the window by including one name:

BEST ANALYST: Troy Aikman, Fox Sports…

Honorable mention: Jaworksi (ESPN), Tim McCarver (Fox)

Yes, the italics are mine. Tim McCarver!? Really? Let’s let FireJoeMorgan handle that one, huh?

Hey, speaking of FireJoeMorgan, guess who won the award for best noncorporate web site? That’s right; those sardonic, hilarious, intelligent gents tore it up this year, much of their ire directed toward their namesake, Mike Celizic of MSNBC.com, and … Tim McCarver. The fact that they were honored by a sportswriter … in a subjective column … alongside TIM MCCARVER has to be absolutely eating them up. Anyway, congratulations are due. Bastards.

(Also, congrats are due to our buddies over at The Big Lead for an honorable mention. Those guys seduced sportswriter after sportswriter into insightful interview after insightful interview, including Jason Whitlock, and, well, you all know how that went.)

We’re, um, nowhere near this list, we assume. Which is OK, because R and I can continue to use the us-against-the-world angle to motivate us to really hit the keyboards hard in the coming year. 2007 awards - here we come!

Sorry for the late start

July 27th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanE

Mates: Deepest apologies for such a late start today. Apparently, there are other things to do early in the morning - most notably, bumbling through a statistics exam - than blogging. For the record, I’d rather be blogging. (I smell bumper sticker!)

Anyway, I’ll try to get back into the swing of things a little bit, but in the meantime, let me throw a few things out there (in the style of the Big Lead’s Round Up) that you should absolutely, definitely, with no questions asked read immediately:

This letter from Alonzo Mourning’s teddy bear. Read the whole thing. The Mighty MJD is a man of genius.

A very FreeDarko analysis of Chad Ford’s latest draft expositions

Some Fynal Cut goodness. And if you don’t know, Fynal Cut is a tremendous new blog started by some close friends of ours. No, we haven’t slept together. Yet.

A first rate musical discussion - post 1994 bands? Got any to add?

There, has that satisfied you for the time being, while I catch up on some work and find some things to blog about? No?

You’re a difficult one to please, reader.