Author Archives: Bri Moore

Jim Gray, Randy Moss, Reporting Sources, Tom Brady

An Unconfirmed Report on Sources

To hear some reports, former New England Patriots wide receiver Randy Moss was going to be traded in the offseason. Then it was after Week 1 and his 17-minute “tirade” against the press. And then it was after he called Patriots quarterback Tom Brady “a girl.”
Yes, two guys who by all appearances got along fine, reportedly got into a tussle in the week leading up to the Patriots game against the Dolphins on Monday, October 4.
According to a CBS Sports report by former NFL general manager Charley Casserly, Moss and Brady had an argument and had to be separated. Casserly said that Brady had grown tired of the way Moss was behaving and at one point Brady told him to “shave his beard.”
“Moss countered, you need to get your hair cut. You look like a girl,” said Casserly, a former NFL GM.
Catfight!
Except, not really. No one will confirm the story. Now, no one would expect notoriously tight-lipped Patriots head coach Bill Belichick to confirm the story, and naturally, he did not, saying early this week that the alleged incident was “news to me.”
However, earlier today, Patriots defensive back Brandon Meriweather told Boston sports radio station WEEI that he also had not heard of anything as described above happening between Brady and Moss.
On NBC’s “Football Night in America” and in his SI.com column, “Monday Morning Quarterback”, Sports Illustrated’s Peter King noted that two highly placed sources within the Patriots’ organization called the report false. Then, Comcast SportsNet New England reported it as untrue as well.
So who do we believe? What’s the truth anymore? 
On the heels of the Brett Favre saga, which is now under a heavy NFL investigation, how are we to believe anything unless it’s from the people directly involved? Better yet, the question is, where do news sources come from these days? How credible are they?
To me, this isn’t about a shave and a haircut, but whether or not our news coverage, sports or otherwise, has turned into an ongoing grocery checkout lane of OK Magazine, Star and People.
What happened to hard news reporting, with credible sources? Earlier this summer, there was the Jim Gray – Corey Pavin war of words, based on Gray quoting Pavin as saying Tiger Woods would be on the Ryder Cup team. Pavin denied it, Gray called him a liar and said that Pavin “was going down.”
Woods ended up on the Ryder Cup team.
The lines have been blurred before between reporters and the subjects they cover. Gray, for example, is known to be close with both Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. On the night Bryant was accused of sexual assault in 2003, Gray went on ESPN and defended Bryant’s character. And of course, Gray was the only other man on stage in early July as James announced his basketball future on the special, “The Decision.”
Ahmad Rashad, a former athlete himself, was close with Michael Jordan and O.J. Simpson. Rashad often gave softball-type interviews of Jordan, despite whispers of gambling and infidelity. One of my favorite current writers, Jason Whitlock, is close friends with former teammate Jeff George and generally campaigns for a team in need of a quarterback to look at George, despite his advancing age. 
People play favorites all the time. Many politicians have had close ties with the media. One of my favorite stories is how John F. Kennedy kept the news of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 from leaking before he had a chance to address the nation by making a simple phone call to publisher Orville Dryfoos and urging him to hold the story. Dryfoos held the story, despite having held on the Bay of Pigs story a year earlier.
Friends tell friends tidbits of inside information all the time. It takes on new meaning when one is a reporter, or actively portraying one on television in between coaching jobs. Here’s the problem – the information received are basically bits and pieces of the truth.
Perhaps Moss and Brady were playfully talking to each other when the “shave your beard” and “cut your hair” comments were made. Friends and teammates playfully cut on each other all the time. If someone walks in and out of the room quickly, doesn’t get the context, the next thing you know, it’s on SportsCenter.
As Billy Chrystal depicted in the film “*61”, the newspapers often spoke of Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle’s friendship falling apart during their pursuit of Babe Ruth’s single season home run record in 1961. TV reports would talk about how the two were at each others throats. Mantle and Maris would be simultaneously laughing at these bogus stories over dinner in the apartment they shared that season.
We should have learned this a thousand times before: we don’t know anything about these people. From Tiger Woods to Brett Favre, we don’t know who they are. But even more so, neither do the people covering them or interviewing them.
Most of the information we receive these days are “unconfirmed” reports appearing as news items. What happened to all of the primary sources? You know, actual firsthand accounts? At best, what we get in the current age of media are tertiary sources (compilations based on primary sources). Some are secondary sources, accounts based on evidence from primary sources.
What we all get now is “reports” or “unconfirmed reports” – naturally begging the question why we’d report on an unconfirmed report? If “details are sketchy” at the moment, then why are you on the air?
Just for fun, Google “Reporting unconfirmed reports.” You don’t get links on the first page to how to report or how not to report something that hasn’t been confirmed. Instead it’s stuff like this:
  • Missouri headed to the Big Ten – Apr. 30, 2010
  • Beyonce Knowles and Jay-Z pregnant – Mar. 26, 2010
  • AP France Unconfirmed Report – Bin Laden Dead?
Turns out Bin Laden was just ‘very ill’, Nebraska went to the Big 10, not Missouri, and unless Beyonce is really good at hiding pregnancy weight for seven months, she’s not having a baby anytime soon.
We’d be better off with Facebook status updates and Twitter feeds, since our current news comes off like some combination of OK Magazine and TMZ. Just look at the screens of news channels: CNN, FOX, MSNBC, ESPN – rolling tickers on the bottom of the screen, sidebars; it’s information overload. Except it’s not information – it’s pieces of half-truths or used-to-be-true-five-hours-ago.
The lines have blurred between speculation and opinion, hard data and confirmed reports. And it’s everywhere. It’s a game of telephone, even in our own lives. I once met a friend for lunch and told him I had big news. He said he already heard: we were pregnant and moving to California.
That was news to me. The big news I had was about my dad and I scoring tickets to one of the last games in the old Yankee Stadium. I let the friend know I would be sure to let my wife know she was pregnant and that I should go, after all I had to start packing boxes.
In the current age, it seems we can trust voicemails, e-mails, texts, but we can’t trust a conversation between friends. And if we can’t trust those conversations, then think of the larger picture: where do you think what you see and hear on the radio, TV and in newspapers comes from? Conversations between friends, of course. It’s just these friends work in sports, politics and on Wall Street.
Better check your sources. Or perhaps your sources should check you.
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Wake Up, America

As Americans, we’re sleeping through the biggest war in United States history.

Except it is not being fought on foreign soil, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Europe or Vietnam.

It’s closer.

Except it does not involve soldiers, guns, nuclear weapons, planes, tanks or warships. In fact, there’s nothing physical about the greatest war in United States history.

It’s a war of philosophies, of minds and of sheer will.

And we are asleep. We’re asleep in our foreclosed homes and reduced salary positions as our very infrastructure crumbles around us. If we’re not careful, we will wake up one day to find that the United States are gone, living on in name only.

Remember that we must learn from the lessons of history or be doomed to repeat them?

We could be already.

Many speculate the Roman Empire fell, over the period of 300-plus years, due to overexpansion and inflation.

Due to the growing size of the empire, a massive budget was required to maintain many key components essential to its survival. This included roads (required for communication, transportation, and the moving of armies) and aqueducts ( as many of Rome’s cities relied on the water that it provided).

At the time the empire was fighting enemies on all sides due to its expansion into its territories, it was also contributing huge sums of silver and gold to keep up its armies. To try to combat both problems, the empire was forced to raise taxes frequently, causing inflation to skyrocket. This in turn caused the major economic stress that some scholars attribute as one of the causes for Rome’s decline.

Um, anything seem vaguely familiar here?

Projecting ourselves as the world’s watchdog and beacon of light has left us with enemies on all sides. This is not a product of President Bush alone, or President Clinton before him, whose policies placed a great deal of venom into the minds of the Middle East.

When you look out for everyone else, often you lose sight of your own problems and issues. By growing our national debt so much in the last 10 years that it equals what it took 250 years to build up, we have become that guy – you know, the one who goes ahead and buys stuff they can’t afford, puts it on the charge card and figures they will deal with it later?

Well, it’s later.

We’ve ignored our infrastructure – our educations and our economy, namely. The BP oil spill happened because we quit paying attention. Katrina happened because we ignored the fortification of New Orleans to natural disasters. Naturally, the first reaction is to blame what was not done to fix it – but that is America’s biggest problem, we want things fixed, not solved. There’s a big difference between the two.

Early on, and part of the philosophy that this country was found upon, American political leaders and average citizens logically thought through issues that faced us. We identified the problem, noted multiple options for solution, implemented, then tweaked those solutions as necessary.

Was it perfect? No, as anything rarely is perfect. But it was an enlighted, educated and rational method of republican (small r) values. We’re not a democracy – we’re a republic, or have we forgotten the pledge of allegiance?

Perhaps that is the biggest problem facing the United States – we’re forgotten our pledge, most likely because we can’t repeat it out loud anymore. We’ve become so concerned with being politically correct, we’ve become apathetic to everything.

It’s not about health insurance and gay marriage or equal rights, it’s about the entitlement that people feel. It’s about what’s mine, not what’s ours.

We always shared very little in common with each other, but now, we don’t even share the same concept of liberty, freedom and what American Revolution stood for.

We’re at a tipping point. It’s the point in the roller coaster ride where you’re just about to drop. And the crazy carnie with the drop lever is our current President.

While it’s tactically and fatefully wrong to blame one person – you just can’t – it’s hard to notice there’s a drastic difference in the philosophy of President Obama and pretty much everyone who took the oath of office before him.

Obama promised change, and for certain, he is making good on that promise. It took a while, but his landmark change, the healthcare reform, must be looked at through a different scope. It goes beyond just revamping the healthcare industry in the United States and directly to core values of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, to the depths of the principles and foundation of this country.

President Obama is a huge practitioner of the Alinsky Method. He spent years teaching workshops on it.

Basically, the Alinksy Method is concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people. It’s core idea is to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace through revolution.

Remember Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2008?

She said, ‘Barack stood up that day,’ (talking about a visit to Chicago neighborhoods), ‘and spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about ‘The world as it is’ and ‘The world as it should be…’ and, ‘All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do – that we have an obligation to, fight for the world as it should be.”

They are powerful, moving and motivating words. Remember carefully that we are a nation of problems and we want those problems fixed. What we need is problems solved.

The larger question from Michelle Obama’s quote is simple: who and whose values determine the world as it should be?

The Alinsky Method, a form of Neo-Marxism, suggests that a “Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage – the political paradise of communism.” (1)

President Obama is currently doing this, first with healthcare reform – it’s a guise to end capitalism by taking healthcare into the hands of the government. But it doesn’t stop there.

Obama constantly blames the current Washington landscape for lack of change. He blamed the system for not reacting quickly enough to the BP oil spill. How is this crisis any different than Hurrican Katrina, in terms of how quickly it was dealt with?

It’s easier for most citizens to forgive President Obama because he’s so likable. He says all the right things, wears all the right clothes. He smiles and is engaging. He fills out NCAA tournament brackets, knows his sports and pop culture and even petitions on where he would like to see LeBron James play next season. He’s adept at dealing with the media and crisis and has a strong vocabulary.

In other words, he’s the opposite of President Bush, who lacked the verbal skills and was not as strong in crisis. Heck, when Bush owned the Texas Rangers, he even traded Sammy Sosa, losing major sports points there.

None of that matters or makes one a better or worse leader of a nation, though.

What matters is how well that leader upholds our values and the Constitution of the United States. That’s what they were elected to do. Every President was brought in to monitor and mitigate issues, to use those core documents as a way to solve problems.

And so what’s frightening is this:

“The means-and-ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive — but real — allies of the Haves….The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means…The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.” (1)

That statement is found on pages 25 and 26 of Sal Alinsky’s book. Notice anything, say, about the world as it is or the world as it should be?

Rationing from some to give to all teaches nothing. The only thing gained from that approach is a lazy, apathetic society that expects things to be handed and given to them. Once upon a time, we had to fight to gain our freedom. Now, we take that freedom so literal that we’re blindly giving it up.

President Obama has us right he wants us. We’re awake, but we’re oblivious to the infiltration. He wants to makes us feel as if we know him and we can trust him. In turn, that builds up his innate ability to communicate the unreasonable into the believable. The slogan “Change We Can Believe In” takes on new meaning. It’s not the change part – it’s the belief part.

He wants us to believe. In other words, put faith in him.

That is more than a slightly dangerous proposition, as true faith is and has always been reserved for religion. The simple fact is, President Obama is becoming a kind of cult, a religion if you will.

That was never the intent of the President of the United States, the office or the one holding it.

During moments like this, and there have been several in the past 20 months, I’m reminded of this:

“Whether by innate character or the oath you took to defend the Constitution or the weight of history that falls upon you, I believe you to be an honorable man, sir.” – Ben Gates to The President in “National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets.”

That’s not even the best quote of that scene really. The follow-up is even better:

The President: “Gates, people don’t believe that stuff anymore.”
Gates: “They want to believe it, sir.”

And we do want to believe it, as in oaths and innate character. Not in a person, but in ideals and principles that ground us and unite us.

Alinsky’s tactics were based, not on Stalin’s principles, but on the Neo-Marxist strategies of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist. Relying on gradualism, infiltration and the dialectic process rather than a bloody revolution, Gramsci’s transformational Marxism was so subtle that few even noticed the deliberate changes.

And that’s the fear.

Or it should be.

We’re asleep – and it’s time to wake up.

  ** Citations – (1) Pg. 10, Sal Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals.” 1971.

(Note: This was originally written June 4, 2010.)
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Favre Pic-d Off

Brett Favre seems to have been intercepted again.
This time it was a different kind of pick though, one that will and should cost him his already tarnished image. Deadspin.com broke another part of a story today about an alleged set of incidents where Favre sent text messages of his junk to former Jets sideline reporter Jenn Sterger.
According to Deadspin and Sterger’s comments to the Web site, Favre began to call her early on during his 2008 season with the Jets and leaving strange, friendly messages. Apparently Sterger didn’t want to act on it because Favre is Favre, he was married and Sterger worked for the Jets, so she was afraid she’d lose her job.
Then things got a little weird. And by a little weird, I mean Woogie’s foot fetish from “Something About Mary” weird. In an ironic twist, Favre was in that movie.
Sterger started receiving picture texts, of um, certain areas Brett shouldn’t really be exposing. Apparently, he knew all about “Pants on the Ground” before he started doing that ridiculous locker room act with the Vikings last year.
Again, according to Deadspin’s report, the pictures kept coming, one of Brett taking care of some personal business, another of him holding his junk in one hand, his wristwatch he wore during his first retirement in the other.
Now, the problem is no one can actually confirm if it’s Brett. The Jets won’t talk and apparently Brett got Sterger’s number for an intermediary. And Sterger won’t comment on it, the voicemails and pictures Deadspin has were acquired through a third party. Basically, the story is breaking, but not to the national media like ESPN. It’s possible it could be someone trying very hard to appear like Brett Favre – which, as Deadspin points out, would require voice lessons, a Mississippi cell phone number and implicate people with the Jets for no other reason than to mess with a sideline reporter who worked Jets games but wasn’t employed by the Jets?
I wanted to cover all that (to give proper credit and cover my rear) before I got to this: If it’s indeed Brett, prepare for a scandal of epic proportions. Tiger Woods scandal got so big, involved so many women and so much weird information about his preferences and quirks we became numb to it.
“Oh, Tiger’s number might be triple digits? Huh, interesting. Can you pass the sugar?”
But Mr. Wrangler? He’s comfortable in Wranglers and apparently comfortable sending naked pictures of himself to a 25-year-old who’s just a few years older than his oldest daughter. His wife had breast cancer a few years back. And even weirder? Jenn Sterger looks a lot like a younger Deanna Favre.
This could ruin Favre’s season. It could ruin Randy Moss’ return to the Vikings. It could turn the whole Brett Favre saga into something more than just his indecisiveness. And certainly, that’s a story in and of itself.
It could also ruin his family, his children’s lives and his marriage.
Hey Brett, Bumblebee Tuna.
Is it our business? Is it our job to care that a nearly 40-year-old man sent pictures of his twig and berries to a young sideline reporter two years ago? I really don’t know. But you put a story like that out there, for a nation of sports fans and consumers, we’re going to laugh for a few minutes (c’mon, it’s just funny Favre would even do it), before we turn our internal thoughts to how weird it is. And stupid.
It’s not necessarily to debate if you can get away with it, but why you’d even contemplate it?
Jason Whitlock said on Twitter, “Think about it: do we really wanna live n a society in which a middle-aged man can’t showcase his junk n pursuit of a younger woman?”
Perhaps Whitlock was being sarcastic, which I would imagine. But in the larger scheme of things, what’s going on here? Why is this even a discussion. Yes, it’s inappropriate. Don’t give me this nonsense about the old days and how many athletes cheated on their spouses or got drunk and made bad decisions. It’s not 1960. You can’t tip a bellman $20 to keep it quiet. Everyone’s got a cellphone. Messages are saved, sent and posted.
A lot of my friends could have cared less about Tiger Woods extramarital affairs. It was a joke. Woods gave new meaning to the word “foursome.” We’re just numb to it because we hear it all the time, right? It’s not so much about morals and values as it is common decency and common sense. Well, it may be about those things to me, but I’m not getting on a soapbox and proclaiming they behave.
Just do us a favor: just stop getting caught so we, in turn, can stop hearing about it and having to explain to children younger than 12 why everyone’s now weirded out by these guys.
My son, who’s 8-years-old, asked me if I liked Tiger Woods during Ryder Cup highlights last week.
“He’s a talented golfer,” I said.
“Do you still like playing his video games, Daddy?” he replied.
“Um…haven’t bought one in a while, bud,” I answered.
“Why not?” he continued.
“Just haven’t…hey, let’s hustle up, we gotta get to school,” I said, doing my best to change the subject.
If you don’t have kids, you might not get it. It’s just that it becomes our business when the media break the story and then cover it like it’s the only thing to talk about for three weeks. Word gets around and suddenly your kid’s asking why you don’t play Tiger Woods Golf anymore.
And it’s not just the seedy sexual stuff. We live in a world where Daunte Stallworth can run over and kill another human being and spend less than a month in prison. And we’re all OK with it. Now I’ve got to explain to the boy why the TV announcers are talking about how this wide receiver for the Ravens ran over a guy, killed him and is still playing football.
There’s no right and wrong, morally or just in general, anymore. It’s all just various shades of gray.
We shrug this stuff off, but then get mad, bitter and angry when it seeps into youth athletics or just high school. Why cry foul at coaches who yell at our kids and don’t coddle them on the playing field or in practice, but it doesn’t bother us when Latrell Sprewell chokes his coach and simply gets traded to another team?
Go look up how many NFL players have DUIs or DWIs in the past 12 months. Then go tell your kids or if you’re a coach, tell your players, “don’t drink and drive.”
Yeah, but they do it – and nothing bad happened.
We tell our kids to be honest, to do the right thing and then laugh when Derek Jeter pretends to get hit by a pitch so he can get on base. That’s just good baseball, right?
Is there a difference, or is it all just various shades of gray?
Let’s find out and see what happens with Favre. And let’s watch how America reacts.
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The Promotion of Self Promotion

Since I lost my weekly sports column back in early January 2009 due to the economy (in case you haven’t heard, newspapers and Web sites are struggling for advertisers), I’ve been pondering the current state of sports media and my place in it.
But the more thought I have devoted to it over the past few months, I’ve come to realized four things: a) I’m not that talented; b) no wants a no-name writer from a small town who hasn’t been a slave to a big-time newspaper and “built” a following; c) I haven’t missed it as much as I thought I would; and d) I’m not marketable.
That last one, while not surprising, plays a bigger role than we think in a vast majority of things involving sports – from writing to television, how we receive them and how we interpret them.
Case in point, there’s a great podcast by Bill Simmons on ESPN.com about the monster itself, highlighted by his conversation with the outgoing ESPN ombudsman, Le Anne Schreiber.
The highlight for me was a thread where Simmons posed to Schreiber the hypocrisy of ESPN’s “journalistic integrity” on Sports Center all while breaking things down on the Budweiser Hot Seat and taking calls on the Subway Fresh Take Hotline. Simmons even laid a dig on his own podcast, aptly titled “The B.S. Report,” which is also sponsored by Subway.
Conversely, Schreiber nailed her take, which was essentially, blame DVR/TiVo. And she’s exactly right.
A nation obsessed with “watching it later” and avoiding commercials may want to notice that the commercials are seeping into the shows we watch.
On ESPN, we have the aforementioned Budweiser Hot Seat, Subway Fresh Take and the Coors Light Cold Hard Facts.
But it’s not just ESPN.
A couple months ago, my wife was watching the new ‘90210’and we kept noticing the strategic placement in one three-minute scene of Dr. Pepper. It was always visible behind the characters shoulder – no matter which character was talking.
I became obsessed with this revelation and began rewinding and watching the whole thing like it was the Zapruder film. Back and to the left.
Back and to the left.
Back. And. To. The. Left.
Advertiser’s infiltration into our subconscious is almost comical. Hell, at times, my wife catches me singing the FreeCreditReport.com jingle.
I can’t help it – it’s just catchy. What’s troubling is I don’t know I’m even doing it.
But what happens when it begins to affect how we digest sports and how sports information is presented to us?
Frankly, it’s a deeper and darker conversation than I think most sports fans care to have, because it’s affecting the way we get our sports coverage and how we interpret the information presented.
John Walsh, Simmons boss at ESPN, says that the newspapers demise started in the 1950s. “The powers that be, and status-quo, in newspapers stopped covering everything,” said Walsh on the podcast last week.
Walsh indicated that newspapers and magazines began ignoring the developing stories, like the 1960s counter-culture, sports on cable, the internet and computers. Simmons chimed in about he agreed because back in the 90s at the Boston Herald, he’d tried to pitch a fantasy sports column and was stonewalled.
In essence, the argument is that newspapers are to blame for their downfall.
Perhaps. Newspapers in general have a variety of flaws, but the crux of the argument is filled with dimwitted half-truths and fails to take into account a number of key components.
I would agree that lack of creativity is a problem at large and small papers across the country. But it’s small minded to think that people would eat up more copies of the paper, subscribe or read certain articles (thereby increasing profits for the company and paid advertisers) just because the coverage changes to include those topics that weren’t popular at the time.
Devoting more time to developing stories might have helped over the past 50 years, but let’s be honest – the counter-culture wasn’t even slightly interesting to the guy who worked an investment job from 8-5. Did anyone want to watch professional bowling at 8 o’clock on a Thursday night in 1985 on ESPN – or did they want to watch Cheers?
You must take into account the era and how information was gathered and received.
For example, does anyone think Bob Knight would have lasted five years as a basketball coach if the internet, blogging and “Around the Horn” were around in 1978?
Furthermore, it is easy to look back on something that’s big and in retrospect call it a movement and say that everyone else should have gotten behind it. Remember what happened to the counter-culture movement? It died when it was no longer counter and became popular culture, because you’re only weird until enough people think you’re not, right?
Back in the 1990s, we rolled the bottom of our jeans in middle school – why? Because everybody did it. It was just cool and I can’t explain it, since I don’t even know. You were weird if you didn’t roll your jeans. A few years passed and rolling your jeans became weird (as it should be).
And that’s what happens, as a country, we change and evolve.
So for newspapers to be behind with the times, well, yes…they report what’s happening now. Newspapers were never meant to be ahead of the curve, they weren’t built for that.
Frankly, you can’t report everything that’s going on – there aren’t enough pages (or advertisers) to support that.
But what that gap in coverage did is pave the way, with the emergence of the right media (or medium), to fill those gaps. The internet is an indefinite amount of space that cannot be quantified, a library that can never be filled. It is the next step in communication.
You want to read about 80s cartoons? You can bet there’s a blog on it, a site to buy it and another to trash it. Want to know about what B-movie actor from a cheesy 1970s horror flick did after that film? You can find it, where he lives and who he married. Need the lyrics to that song you haven’t been able to get out of your head? Google it, baby.
Sports, trivia, news, politics, music, shopping – it’s all on the internet. No need to go to a store or pick up a book to find what you need.
Some say that’s a bad thing. Newspapers would certainly agree about where you get your news – except their fatal flaw was giving away for free what you could read in the paper for a fee.
So at some point earlier this decade, the graph lines crossed and newspapers could no longer compete with the internet’s massive expansion and capabilities.
But here’s the thing – there’s still a place for the newspaper. It’s local. CNN.com going to cover state high school basketball, provide a look at the local political candidates running for county council? Think that some national Web site will publish a few photos and do a story on a new local playground and the local companies that funded it?
Large market papers are falling by the wayside, as are county papers. Does it suck? Yeah, it does. It has flooded a job market full of writers with nothing to write about. In a way, it’s the same thing that happened during the Industrial Age.
It’s not that bloggers have stolen the jobs of qualified journalists, it’s just our minds don’t want to sit and scan the pages of the paper for the three things that interest us.
By the time a local paper prints, I already know what the President’s speech was, how it impacts me, the state and the country. I know the score of the big game and what celebrity adopted a kid from Africa this week.  
As for opinion columns, the canned clichés of the past don’t work. I want someone who breaks it down differently, who’ll through in a little humor, who knows watches the same shows and makes the right analogy.
Problem is, everything is owned by about four companies.
Let’s go back to our good friends at the Worldwide Leader. Since Mickey Mouse owns ABC and ESPN, the Disney brand floods everything. How about ESPN the Weekend at Walt Disney World! We’ll even send our radio guys there, bring in some sports celebs and tell you how great it is – it only costs $1,500 for the trip, which most people can’t afford.
But it’s synergy – and that’s the wave of the future. In the forgettable and crappy movie, “In Good Company,” Dennis Quaid’s sports magazine is bought by a conglomerate that tries to tie in cell phones and cereal.
The best part is the hilarious (for its ridiculousness) speech by mogul Teddy K. who explains (or doesn’t) synergy, the merging of products and brands that have no real connection.
And there’s the downfall of our current medium and media movement. When I’m watching the NFL, I don’t really care about the next episode of “Fringe.”
It’s the promotion of self-promotion that has me most bummed out, because, as I said – I’m just not marketable.
So I guess there’s not a place for someone like me at ESPN or Fox Sports – as a writer or a fan.
That fan part should scare you a little too, because if we’re pushed out and ignored, what are they making and who are they making it for? With newspapers dying a slow, yet natural death, is the current rage of blogs, podcasts, streaming video and journalistic climate ready to meet our demands?
Or are they just this decade’s version of rolled jeans?
(Note: This was originally written in March 2009.)
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