Everyone contributes in their own way
For instance : when you say something stupid, you are providing comedic material to others
I will, in all likelihood, never be the greatest blogger in the world for two main reasons.
- There are funnier people out there who blog.
- There are people who do more research, and therefore have more things of value to say, who blog.
The guys at Fire Joe Morgan qualify on both counts, and their hilarious takedown of a crappy, poorly edited Time.com article has plenty of examples as to why.
But enough about their hideous design. What the fuck is
Runs Per At Bat: 25.8
That is not a thing, Time.com. That is not a recognizable baseball statistic, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be a meaningful one. “Runs Per At Bat”? First thing that jumps out at you — Time’s “Runs Per At Bat” is pretty clearly not, in fact, actually runs per at bat.
How does Time.com screw up this kind of thing? Could they be making this any easier for FJM? Amazingly, more than a few media types have gotten cranky at the idea of blogs because of exactly this sort of thing. “Snarf, snarf, snarf”, they say – ”All bloggers do is tear down and react to REAL writing, provided by traditional media institutions.”
First of all, no they don’t. The most hilarious blogs may not provide much original content analysis reporting of whatever it is we’ve come to expect from our media, but that’s because they’re too busy poking holes in crappy Time.com articles. But — and this point has been made ad nauseum by countless blogs, every one of which I think has been shocked that they’ve been required to make such an obvious point – demanding something other than biting media critiques from a site that specializes in biting media critiques is like defining the medium of television by the educational content in “Family Guy”, or dismissing Dateline because Chris Hansen didn’t commit statutory rape himself.
Secondly — how is it not valuable to call out a major, for profit publication when it makes such horrendously egregious errors??? 25.8 RUNS PER AT BAT??? That’s not blogging for spite, it’s blogging to alert the sporting world that Time.com apparently does not have editors, or at least ones who have ever watched/listened to/played/read about the game of baseball. People should know about this.
Anyways, the point is that there are PLENTY of analytical blogs out there doing fantastically in-depth research on all sorts of things, including sports. But for whatever reason, it’s really only traditional sports media outlets and writers who have pushed back so hard against the idea of citizen journalists, which probably says a lot more about the cushy, ultimately pointless world of professional sportswriting than it does about bloggers. Now, ordinarily, it’s the columnists of the world who seem to be the most useless (and, not coincidentally, the ones most opposed to the idea of non-columnist-fraternity-brothers writing widely-read opinion pieces), but this just goes to show you that news/feature-writing is just as vulnerable to laziness and poor fact-checking as anything else.
Jesus, how did I get onto this oft-repeated tangent? Just go laugh at FJM, for crying out loud. I should be stretching my good pedal leg for the commute home.
