Cry Us A River

Mainstream media types are starting to notice sports bloggers. In the immortal words of Derrick Coleman, whoop de damn do...

On the off chance that someone who is getting paid is reading this, we'd like to take this opportunity to point out the following:

1) The toothpaste is out of the tube. You can either cry about that, or brush your teeth. Given your career choices to date, this is a 50-50 call.

2) If the roles were reversed, and you were the person whose work was dissected by a third party... you wouldn't be looking for a way to go direct?

Way back when, I covered high school and college sports for newspapers. It's not a great way to earn a living. The athletes that have the ability to speak to the press don't want to. The ones that do not... well, they won't give you anything you can use. The pay sucks. Your coworkers are sportswriters - flabby, badly dressed white guys who live for free food and drink.

If you're good, you move up the ladder for various chains. The pay gets a little more tolerable. Maybe people start to care about what you write. On the other hand, you get scorned by athletes that earn more in a year than you will in your lifetime.

Eventually, if everything goes really well, you get hired by the World Wide Lemur, or you stay true to your print leanings and go to a big paper. Life's good then, right? You've made it to the big time. All of the ass-kissing to editors, all of the networking, all of the late nights and politicking for exclusives... it's paid off. You're getting paid to write about sports, for a living. You get to spend your entire life in a state of perpetual adolescence.

And then the world changes.

Athletes go direct. Newspapers fail to change with the times, and can't monetize Web traffic. Bloggers become relevant, because the traffic votes with its mouse. And you're reduced to writing pointless whinefests.

The point is this: the world changes. Constantly, with increasing speed, in ways that are never applauded by those who are invested in the status quo. In any event, good luck finding anyone who cares. Moving on...