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This discussion is missing Vox's SB Nation sites, which grew out of an Oakland A's blog (and a partnership with the Berkeley political blogger who started Daily

This discussion is missing Vox's SB Nation sites, which grew out of an Oakland A's blog (and a partnership with the Berkeley political blogger who started DailyKos.com). They use local writers to provide coverage of local teams, and their content is free to readers. (Plus there's always lots of comments to read discussing the news of the day.) Eventually the articles also get syndicated to Yahoo, CBS, Comcast, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SB_Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SB_Nation Honestly, that may be what's killing sportswriting -- at least on the big TV network sites. The networks don't have the resources to compete with 30 different web sites -- one for each MLB team, each with its own staff and with their own distinct fan communities. The web makes it possible for each one of these sites to narrowcast. And then why do you need ESPN?

trowawee 9y ago
I mean, you need somebody like ESPN (or Deadspin), because there's actual journalism to be done relating to sports. Off the top of my head, some areas sports-related topics that would never have been covered by SBNation-style sites include major sports leagues' problematic relationships to the military and local governments, the stadium swindles perpetrated by teams, the NFL's coverup of concussion research, and the monstrous scam that is the NCAA fall into the category of "deserving of real journalism". I follow a bunch of SBNation sites, but sites that specifically identify as "for fans of such-and-such a team", and that rely on unpaid volunteer writers (which a lot of SBNation absolutely does) can't be relied on to cover a lot of these topics.