Bob Costas Is, And Makes Me, A Cranky Magical Elf

More fallout from the Costas Kerfluffle... after painting the sports blogosphere with a wide pass from the stupid brush, my favorite fellow alum "clarified" a bit yesterday. And how did he do it? With a phone call to Will Leith at Deadspin, who I
suppose, since he has a book and a living and TV punditocracy to his name, counts as someone with A Life. Congrats, Will -- Bob Costas thinks you're special!

Anyway, I'm not going to get into the details of what Costas said and how he's still an irredeemable prick, regardless of how many sports bloggers are as well; the plain and simple point is that Generalizational Thinking is always Flabby Thinking, and if Costas had swapped out "(insert skin color) people" for "bloggers", he'd be unemployed and a Hardaway-esque punchline. But there's a bigger point to bear here, which jumped into my radar from a recent New Yorker piece on the subculture of magic.

In the piece, the writer talked about how magicians are split into various camps, despite mostly coming from the same wellspring in a Brooklyn magic shop. You've got the table folks, who are basically doing card work and sleight of hand, and the bigger Illusionist people, who compete for the Vegas slots and the David Blaine-esque endurance stunts. Both camps are more or less insufferable, of course, being a niche inside of a niche, and that's true of all sub-cultures really -- if you delve too depp into the craft, you're just performing for the other practitioners, because technique for the sake of technique is, well, self-play, to be polite about it.

These are also, of course, people you do not want to play cards with.

There is also a heightened sense of insecurity among many magicians. They can see the writing on the wall with the explosion of entertainment options, the jadedness of the audience in terms of seeing the impossible every day via CGI screens, and the sense that the pace of modern life is throwing them aside. Think about the last time you saw a magic trick; for the larger pieces, there is always a set-up, drumrolls, drama. If you don't have those, it doesn't seem like a big show. But how is the practitioner supposed to impress or entertain you, when you could just fire up YouTube and see more or less the same thing, but faster... and maybe even the sad blessing of someone showing you how it's done?

There is no security for the magician.

Nor is there for sports broadcasters, or pundits, or networks... when bloggers can act as disintermediaries. (Note: We can only do that for the stuff that doesn't require legwork reporting. Which is to say, 90% of what these people are doing.)

And sure, your casino magician isn't really going to suffer, at least not until the generation of people who don't think an hour with a broadband connection is a good time pass on. Nor will the NBC Carnival of Smirky Football Related Whimsy, or whatever the hell they are calling the Sunday Night Is A Night And Football Is Played On That Night Because It's Sunday And All telecast these days.

But in the long run, they are losing audience and market share, and they know it.

They also don't like it much.



Welcome to the marketplace, boys.