Quick Blog Thoughts

(NB: Since we're a publishing company, kinda, sorta, for at least the next week, I figured this might be relevant.)

The best baseball writer in the country is also the best sports columnist in the country is also one of the best writers in the country. His name is Joe Posnanski. He writes for the Kansas City Star. For the past year or so he's also been blogging. His blog is routinely funny, thoughtful, and whimsical. If you're a baseball fan it's required reading, but he writes about much more than that.

Anyway, this morning Joe announced that Sports Illustrated has offered to start publishing his blog on their website. They'll also give him a weekly online column.* Good for him. Good for humanity.

Here's the thing: How badly must the KC Star be kicking itself this morning?

Sports Illustrated isn't going to have any editorial control over Joe's blog. There's no overhead to republish his blog. He was doing it for free to begin with, so pay incentives were probably nil. Sports Illustrated is just going to publish it. So why didn't the Star offer to do the same thing a year ago, when his blog started generating a national audience?

Like when John McCain, who was once a prisoner of war, confuses the geography of the Middle East, placing Iraq next to Pakistan, these are the small moments in history when you can see an institution show its age. 100% of all newspapers are behind the eight ball when it comes to the internet and 99% of them look like lost school children in the face of this challenge, which is really a golden opportunity only they don't realize it.

(Mike Silver covers football for Yahoo. For the better part of the decade he was one of two senior football writers for Sports Illustrated. Last week in his Yahoo column he published the following email from an angry Packers fan who was upset with Silver's coverage of the team: "I personally think you are FOS and could care less what you think of this town and the the fact that you are some geek writing for yahoo can’t get a real job writing for a newspaper."

This guy is representative of the old guard who's too [fill in the blank] to realize which direction the wind is blowing. Silver moved from newspaper to magazine to internet. That's the hierarchy.)

These small moments make it all the more clear that as the newspaper industry confront the internet it's going to be a survival of the fittest and no one should shed a tear for those who don't make it. It'll be their own damn fault.

*How Joe finds time to eat and be a father is beyond me. His blog posts are usually over 1,000 words long, often approaching 3,000, and he's also writing a book after having just published one last year. And he's also a newspaper columnist. Basically he puts most other metro columnists to shame.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008