Forum > A thought on the sports media
Columnists in newspapers being relevant, there's your myth.
t ball
"America votes with it's feet and it's wallet," Wish I had thought of it first. If you don't like it, Walk away, Don't Pay. it won't last. There are those who I will not read, or for that matter, listen.
Everyone is living on a different plane and at a different place of "Prior Knowledge." I was taught early on that the basis of all learning is 'Prior Knowledge.' If one knows nothing, they can learn nothing. The more one knows, the more they can learn.
I think I know electronics but one time I hooked up with two PhD Professors in Electrical Engineering at U of Colorado in Boulder. One was from Germany and the other from Israel. They knew things about electronics that I never dreamed about but they could not express themselves in American English. Slang and idioms of expression threw them a curve. I can't speak English, I speak Southern American. We all questioned the other's selection but all knew the other had select knowledge that we really wanted to tap into. We spent a good portion of our time looking up words in a Dictionary. Not the ones I was used to but one of those that is about six inches thick with twenty meanings to every word.
i read the paper they wrote for IEEE and I could follow it but it was way over my head. It takes all kinds. Different strokes for different folks.
Tom b
Newspapers will never have the funding to have "one sport" columnists. Unless they hire me.
Josh Bowe (Josh 2.0)
Kevin Sherrington this morning:
Wilson is a well-conditioned athlete, but, frankly, his conversion from bullpen to starter is nearly the stuff of mythology.
Is it really the "stuff of mythology" if it's been accomplished three times -- by Adam Wainwright, Ryan Dempster, and C.J. Wilson -- in the last four seasons?
If there's one thing I'd really like to see change in the "new" sports media, it's the phasing out of the all-purpose sports columnist. I'm not talking about your Jeff Passan types who adroitly shift from one topic to the next and craft articles that could make the most boring of sports come alive. I'm talking about your generic, run-of-the-mill DFW sports columnists that cover virtually every sport, but don't actually cover any single one of them well. I'd be willing to bet that the single-sport, "dedicated" columnist model is a lot more effective/efficient from the standpoint of providing interesting, well-written, insightful sports columns.
But maybe that thought stems from the fact that (a) such newspaper columns have an overwhelming tendency to provide no real insight or substance beyond hackneyed opinions, and (b) I have a credibility issue with columnists that only chime in on the Rangers maybe 1-2 times a month (which encompasses most of the DFW lot) and aren't baseball-specific, which excludes writers from FanGraphs, BP and the like.