Posted in The Soapbox
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08/16 2010

Balls, No Blog: The Changing Landscape of Media

Posted by Will Carroll.

Will Carroll – Contributor

My Facebook tagline is “What is a blogger with no blog?” I put it up after closing down The Juice, the blog that I did for three years as part of a collection of baseball writers. Even though I’ve since followed the herd and started a Tumblr site, just so I could write something that had more than 140 characters to it, I’m still neither fish nor fowl in the blog world.

When I started in 2002, it was as an email to friends. Three friends. I couldn’t find information on injuries and with my background, I had this goofy idea that I could do it myself. I had no idea what the demand would be and still frankly don’t understand it. I got really excited when I passed 100 readers. Then Peter Gammons talked about me on the Tony Kornheiser Show and … well, blame them for what I’ve been able to do since then.

I joined Baseball Prospectus in 2003, dropping the email newsletter that was looking more and more like spam to Hotmail … dude, it was 2003. Prospectus, which started in 1996, was also not a blog. It was more an online magazine. It started as an adjunct to the annual book, mostly because some genius at the print shop left out the chapter on the Cardinals. Even before Albert Pujols, this was a problem. What BPro was not…was a blog. Even when our management introduced something they called “Blogs”, they weren’t what most people thought of as blogs. BPro publishes like a newspaper, with things going up in the morning and staying static for eternity.

Ask about the top blogs in sports and no one will mention Prospectus. Thousands of readers, a long track record, the respect of even the mainstream press, consulting gig with teams, but blog? Nope. Once again, neither fish nor fowl. Worse, BPro has always been both stalking horse and Judas goat for paywalls. Sure, they’re all the rage now, but in 2003? Blasphemy. Even now, the idea that “this is my job” is difficult for people to grasp – readers, mortgage brokers, my wife …

I don’t even like the word blogger. Once, back in 2003 or 2004, I wrote a thing that bloggers needed to stop blogging and start writing. If you look around at the names here at Press Coverage or around the web, you’ll see that it went a bit backwards. Writers started blogging, with the quality not really meeting in the middle. There’s some amazing writers who might never have seen the light of day in a world where they were tied to a J-school and newspaper model.

To make things more confusing, I’m a mainstream guy now. I’m in the membership rolls of both the BBWAA and the PFWA. I write at SI, one of the most hallowed names in sports print.

So if I’m not a blogger and I don’t work at a blog, but yet I’m included among a collection of bloggers, does it really matter how we define the term? The great thing is, there is no real definition. It can be something amateur or professional. It can be something hard hitting or it can be the snarktastic commenting that’s so popular with kids these days. (Get off my lawn.) The downside of that is the breakdown of ethics and the possible disintermediation of journalist-as-gatekeeper that we’ve seen since Ball Four broke the wall down.

What’s next? Who knows. I’m a guy that started by sending out an email and ended up here, there and everywhere. Blogging, to me, is a journey, enabled by technology and limited only by my imagination, work ethic, and talent. Why it should be different for anyone else?

(Ed Note: This is the first in a long series of daily and weekly contributor posts. Please read, share and join the conversation. For a list of contributors, check out the Who We Are tab.)

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Posted on August 16, 2010 at 11:09AM
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  1. Kevin Orris
    08/16 2010

    The term “blog” and “blogger” almost seem to be childish to me, yet that’s what I’ve been doing for almost three years now, even with Baseball Digest. While it’s never been my title, writing and blogging seem to be coming together in certain senses.

    Even the best writers are blogging now. Look at MLB.com. Each of their beat writers runs their own blog to write more informal pieces to get the word out faster about injuries, scratches, and transactions.

    We’ve come to a point in society where everyone wants their information now, providing a market for Twitter, which we’ve all come to know and love, and rather than writing 750 word thoughtout articles, we’ve now adopted to 140 character tweets or 200 word “blog posts” to alert the readers of Chipper Jones’ latest injury.

    I love the work that I do and I love this article, and to be honest I like the transition that we’ve encountered over the past few years. There is still room for elaborate articles, because fans love to learn about the players, but it only works in certain settings.

  2. jarrod
    08/16 2010

    Hi Will,
    Great to see you on board. i enjoyed this piece and look forward to many more like it.
    cheers
    jarrod