February 5, 2009
Link-O-Rama
Finally an answer to my long-standing "what's the point of Facebook?" question!Khloe was devastated when she discovered evidence that Rashad was cheating with girls online. She confronted him, and he reacted angrily and tried to deny the story at first before admitting that it was true. He'd been hooking up with girls over Facebook for the past two weeks.
Several years ago the Minneapolis Star Tribune convinced John Bonnes to move his Twins Geek blog to their site, but that was short-lived amid union-related issues and since then most newspapers have turned their beat writers into bloggers. Still, it seems natural that, for instance, U.S.S. Mariner's superb content and huge audience would be of interest to one of the Seattle newspapers. As the line between "mainstream" and "blogger" continues to blur my guess is that we'll see more moves like Weisman's.
Naturally much of the piece seems silly looking back nearly 30 years later, but the report's conclusion holds up pretty well: "Engineers now predict that a day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer, but that's a few years off. So for the moment at least, this fellow [a man selling newspapers on the street] isn't worried about being out of job."
Good or bad my first impression of a sports columnist tends to stick, but my initial take was way off on two well-known guys: Pearlman and Jason Whitlock. At first they both struck me as Jay Mariotti-style columnists who were more interested in creating controversy than actually producing good writing, but I've since come to appreciate them both as very good, entertaining columnists who genuinely have a lot of interesting (and sometimes controversial) stuff to say. Also, neither engages in much poultry humor.Unfortunately, like most places these days, ESPN has been struggling. This is just my take, but it seems the network/website/magazine became obsessed with adding every big journalism name out there. So it started unloading tons and tons of money on the Rick Reillys of the business. Rick, of course, is a wonderful talent. But what have they done with him? At some point, ESPN seemed to be hiring for the sake of hiring. They treated journalists in the way sports organizations treat players--gobbling up "free agents" without much thought. Now, they're loaded with big names, but is the finished product that much better? Probably not.
Be warned, men. Apparently that's what happens when you put a ring on it.
