Sports Illustrated: “Start Your Own Blog”

Writing in the March 27 issue of Sports Illustrated, Chris Ballard notches a refreshingly candid, thoroughly modern story about his online brethren: the journalists, columnists, reporters and, yes, just plain bloggers who cover sports on the Web. From the lead-in…

The Internet is changing sports coverage. Columnists who seldom leave their couches hold forth. Athletes break their own “news” on their personal websites. Rumormongering is rampant. Don’t like it? Get rowdy. Start your own blog.

An insightful overview of how sportswriting has evolved over the years, this article is worthy of high praise and much attention not as much because – ironically – it’s published offline, in a magazine (what the snarkiest and most cynical among us might refer to as a dead-tree medium), but because so much of what its author has to say is relevant well beyond the realm of sports coverage.

Read it yourself and tell me if you don’t think it’s further validation that corporate America has taken notice of the blogosphere and the changes it’s already wrought on the way people like to receive their news and information.

On a personal note, I was delighted to see Ballard cite my idol and inspiration, ESPN’s Bill Simmons, as “a pioneer in the online sports community.” In the late ‘90s, when Simmons wrote for AOL’s Digital City Boston under the moniker, Boston Sports Guy, I read him religiously, and to this day I credit him as my motivation – indirectly, of course, and certainly from afar – to enter the blogosphere.

To read this article (“Writing Up a Storm” by Chris Ballard, Sports Illustrated, March 27, 2006), click here (free access to the complete story for magazine subscribers only).

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