Leitch and Bissinger, together at last

July 16th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanR

Seconds later, they went in for a kiss. I’m not kidding.

(BTW: This is from the new “Costas Now” this evening. Sadly, it’s not the one that’s been promised about race. It’s baseball talk with some greats. And I’m enjoying it. Update: Apparently Deadspin mentioned this today.  And I should have checked it before I posted this. But we got it from Cajun Boy on his Tumblr earlier. So oh well.)

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.

Self-definition and the L.A. Times

June 23rd, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

Update: Shanoff sums up my thoughts in the most succinct way possible. Leitch does so more eloquently.

Sigh. Problems with this story: One, it doesn’t mention Awful Announcing, which seems like a crime. Two: It doesn’t even attempt make any sense of the very mainstream nature of FanHouse, Y!SB, and The Sporting Blog, which you have to talk about if you have any interest in the maturation of sports blogs. Three: Mister I is not “edgy” or “outsider,” which they’d be the first to tell you. Four: I don’t know too many other bloggers that share these views. Yet there they are, in the L.A. Times, meant to represent us all:

“The initial reaction was ‘Buzz is a lunatic,’ ” McIntyre said. “After that, people calmed down, listened to what he said and thought, ‘You know, maybe we should clean up our act a little bit.’ “

Who did this? If you’re a blogger, and you genuinely believe anything Bissinger said was constructive or thoughtful, you just haven’t been paying attention. And if you need Buzz Bissinger to tell you something’s wrong, you’re not a very good blogger.

“What’s the shelf-life for a website that only has women in bikinis?” McIntyre asked. “Eventually, there needs to be substance to back up the fluff.”

But what if it’s all fluff? A few all-fluff blogs seem to be doing very well. And reasonable people could assert that 90% of everything sports-related is, by nature, fluff. A greater sin than fluff is unoriginality, redundancy, and inanity.

This is why the sports blogosphere will miss Will Leitch. When he defined “us,” at least he was somewhat accurate.

Blog meta moment of the moment: Will leaves Deadspin

June 5th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

This is where I tell you how much influence Deadspin has had in sports blogging, and how good a writer Will Leitch is, and how nice of a guy he’s always been, and how if I wouldn’t have stumbled on DeadSpin (some idiots still punctuate it like that!) back in the day how I wouldn’t have started commenting and then blogging and then wouldn’t be writing for FanHouse or Yahoo! etc etc but everyone already knows all that so fuck it. If you’re reading this, you get it: Will’s a big deal. You didn’t need me to tell you that.

So, now that he’s a mainstream writer again, I just want to know if Will is moving out of his basement or not. Surely, Wikipedia will have the answers:

Damnit!

“Costas Now” Internet segment in video from

April 30th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanR

O’Day asked for it, so here it is. Watching it again … ugh … I really just don’t want to write about it because I’d go on for way too long. (See here, here, here and here for some great writing on it.)

I will say this: it’s clear Buzz doesn’t read blogs; he doesn’t understand them. So to have all that spite and anger built up about something you don’t know at all, it’s a bit much. And it’s a generational thing. It happens in music, art, film, fashion — the old guard can’t except the new. And they aren’t even willing to try. This is not a new specific conflict going on between bloggers and traditional writers, it’s a debate that’s been waged many times before. We must just all let it pass and keep on doing as we do. This shit is fun, no use having someone that doesn’t get it ruin that. (Also, it’s incredibly more complex than just old guard vs. new guard stuff. There is crossover in both arenas.)

BUT ANYWAY: here’s the intro, then the panel discussion. Enjoy. (Big thanks to AA as always for the vids.)

More quick Bissinger thoughts

April 29th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

So, of course Buzz Bissinger’s little tirade — which should be making the Youtube rounds any minute now — has aroused a few passions here. First thought was anger. Second thought was incredulity. Third thought was sadness, or some semblance of it, that Bissinger can be such an interesting writer and still so extremely out of touch. The last thought, I think, the one I’ve settled on, is merely resignation. Bissinger, and the hordes of old Murray Chass-types cheering him on last night, are beyond any convincing. Buzz Bissinger isn’t going to listen to reason about blogs. He’s not going to spend some time exploring. He’s just going to get scared and swear at you and say extremely stupid, inarticulate things, something that should be a crime for someone who’s spent, as he proudly proclaimed, “40 years perfecting his craft.” (40 years of respect, Buzz? That’s them, drizzling down the drain.)

Anyway, it’s resignation. There’s no point in trying to convince people that feel as Bissinger does. There’s no point in getting as worked up as Bissinger did. Because unlike them, we understand not only the past but the future. Bissinger only sees the past, fears the future, and has lost sight of both in the meantime. He and his ilk have failed to adapt, or they will continue to fail, and like all creatures that fail to adapt, they will die off. We thank them for the contributions and wish them luck with swift, painless, metaphorical death.

Feel that, Buzz? Cold, isn’t it? That’s the gloaming. I would tell you to embrace it, but you already have.

Oh, and it’s Big Daddy DREW, you dumb fuck.

Buzz Bissinger: LOLZ!

April 29th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

Anyone watching the Will Leitch-Buzz Bissinger-Braylon Edwards-Bob Costas clusterfuck right now was just treated to the greatest narrative performance of all-time by one Buzz Bissinger. For someone who seems to disdain lowered discourse, he sure does like to scream. And swear. And come off as a crazy, deranged old man both out of touch with reality and flailing in a lost medium.

Just … wow.