The Sports Blogosphere…As Muppets. A Farewell And Whole-Hearted Thank You.

I loved doing our show for the last 550 odd episodes. Not every episode was great, but we think most of them were pretty darn good, and hopefully a little show called On the DL left some mark on the sports blog world.

The coolest thing about doing this show has certainly been the number of people I’ve had the opportunity to meet and talk with, from the show regulars to the once-in-a-lifetime guests, all done by barking into a $20 microphone plugged into a USB jack in my computer and having the foresight to press record. It’s been amazing.

For those who never listened to the show, or just caught an episode here or there when we had a big-name guest, I’ll let a message I just got from Jack Kogod explain what the show was:

MY NAME IS DAN LEVY AND I HAVE OPINIONS ON OTHERS I’D LIKE TO SHARE WITH YOU.

So, there you go. My name is Dan Levy. I have opinions on others I’d like to share with you. They’re mostly about Muppets.

THE MUPPETREAD MORE

DL552: Josh Zerkle & Bethlehem Shoals On Why We’re All Quitting This Week

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This show has always served as somewhat of a living, breathing therapy session for me. I honestly and truly believe that there’s a 50% chance I go insane on Friday. Until then, we have a few shows left and this one is one I hope you download and stick into some kind of time capsule to play in two years when the internet is, once again, completely different than it is right now.

Josh Zerkle of KSK and With Leather and Bethlehem Shoals of Free Darko are both on the show to talk about recent announcements that they, both, are transitioning to new things. Zerkle is stepping down from the helm of With Leather to focus on other, non-sports projects. He’ll still be around the site, writing a few times a month, and he’ll still be doing his podcast and contributing to KSK, but by the sound of it, it was time for him to do something new…even if that wasn’t really anything specific, yet.

Shoals is a little different, in thatREAD MORE

550: Wyshynski on Rasslin’, Media, Blogs, NHL Playoffs, Twins, Canada & Fun

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I told my wife last year, or maybe two years ago, that if it ever got to the point where Nick had obligations that precluded him from doing the show on a daily basis, the first person I’d ask to co-host with me would be Greg Wyshynski from Yahoo’s Puck Daddy. Something about two jerks from Jersey talking about sports, media, blogs and life always felt like the kind of show people would love.

Everytime he’s been on the show, that’s how I’ve felt about it…THIS is the show. This is the show we wanted to make, talking with big names in our industry — there is no debate that Wyshynski has made himself (and Puck Daddy) one of the leading hockey voices in the country — about sports, life, media and whatever else we want.

Now, let’s not forget that Wyshynski has his own daily radio show talking about a lot of this same stuff (though decidedly more hockey than I’d feel comfortable with) and hasn’t once had me on the program.READ MORE

DL523: Tom Ziller On Sports Blogs, FanHouse, SB Nation, Writing For Free & Oh, NBA Stuff, Too

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This is almost a two-part episode and the first time, inexplicably, that Tom Ziller has appeared on the show. Ziller is a lead basketball writer for SB Nation, recently leaving FanHouse a few weeks before the walls collapsed. Insider trading? I ask him (answer: no.)

Ziller was in rare Twitter form last week in response to this article by Dave Kindred that quoted FanHouse scribe Lisa Olson thusly:

“In December,” Lisa Olson said, “we were told how great we were doing.” Once a columnist at the New York Daily News, Olson remembered The National strutting on stage in 1990, a national sports newspaper hiring good people from everywhere. She thought of FanHouse that way, a gathering of veterans on a journalistic adventure. “We were all experienced and qualified, not some 25-year-old bloggers,” she said. “The motto was, ‘Go, go, go. Grow, grow, grow.’ And we did. Then, this. It’s devastating.”

Ziller was, at one point, a 25-year old blogger at FanHouse, back when it was good and way before it was being sold off forREAD MORE

DL484: Free Darko Book Party Recap

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I brought my recorder to the Free Darko Book Party. That’d be pretty good sound, right? Well, they recorded it, so I assume it’ll either be on the Blogs With Balls site or on the Free Darko site. I didn’t feel right aping it from them.

Instead, here are my thoughts on the night in New York, the book and why it sure as heck felt like Hipster Hanukkah. Jews sure loves hoops.

Thanks.

DL477: Brian Cook of MGoBlog on New Media, Blogs & BCS Chaos

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Brian Cook sent me an email last week and said he listened to the episode with Will Carroll and he had a different perspective on this whole independent media world. Cook, after all, built MGoBlog on his own and made it his career. Could MGoBlog work now? Could the site start now and thrive like it has, or was he the beneficiary of timing, having built his audience far before the playing field got so full?

The show is a lot of that — inside bloggy stuff — but it’s pretty interesting to get Cook’s take on the situation a lot of us find ourselves in. Cook has a very very very very very (very) specific niche in covering one school and basically one team. Can his success work on a national level? Are there just too many voices and not enough people listening? Has he convinced me to give it all up and start doing family portraits at the mall?

Look, if you write for a blog — be it recreational orREAD MORE

The Big Leagues: Sports Blogging as Mainstream Media Business

In 1946, Peter Drucker invented the concept of the “company man” within his landmark book The Concept of the Corporation. His call to decentralize – or as he called it, de-federalize – and to give employees more power was seen as anathema by Alfred Sloan, the all-powerful CEO of General Motors. GM was then the most powerful company in the world, challenged only by Hughes Aircraft or perhaps the U.S. government itself. There were no giant banks. The brokerages on Wall Street were still a specialty industry. Japanese and German auto companies were still in rubble for the most part. Sure, there might have been a few more auto makers than just Ford and Chrysler, but names like Studebaker and Hudson weren’t long for the new post-war world.

By 2009, GM was bankrupt and split up. Pontiac and Oldsmobile were gone, consigned to history like Studebaker and the Edsel. While things seem to be turning around, the cyclical problems of manufacturing continue to make GM a company that may end up in that same dustbin, alongsideREAD MORE

BwB Guest Post: espnW – Finally, a Brand for Female Athletes

(ED NOTE: This column originally ran at womentalksports.com and blogswithballs.com and is being re-run here with Don’s permission — and byline).

While we’ve always promoted BwB as being “gender-blind,” we recognize that different audiences have different voices and preferences. This past week, the announcement that ESPN was launching a female-focused platform was met with much debate in the online sports community. To our surprise, much of the response took a negative tone, seemed misinformed, and was spearheaded by a host women sports bloggers.

BwB3 attendee and professional colleague Megan Hueter was in San Diego this past weekend where the WWL gathered “some of the biggest movers and shakers in women’s sports” to launch espnW.  As the cofounder of WomenTalkSports.com, Megan has long been a proponent for advancing the female athlete and sports community.

She also left San Diego as one of the biggest advocates for espnW.

Here is her take…

espnW: A brand for female athletes

ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports, recently announced a bubbling business from within called espnW, a brand completely driven for and by sports-minded women. Now, before you jump to conclusionsREAD MORE

Blogs with Balls To Invade SxSW in March. Cool.

I saw on Twitter that the list of panels for SxSW came out today and I immediately clicked to see if Blogs with Balls had been picked up as a panel. There was a great grassroots movement by Dan Shanoff and the principals of BwB to get a panel at SxSW this year. Low and freaking behold, it worked.

Check this out, from the SxSW website:

Film geeks, political buffs and gossip lovers may argue, but nowhere has the impact of blogging and podcasting been more dramatic in the past few years than the sports world. In a space dominated exclusively by those with access to the field, the press box and the locker room, the audience has grown completely accustomed to stories being broken by a fan with little more than a phone and a Twitter account almost overnight. Fans and voices outside the velvet rope of media credentialing are not only reporting on the stories of the day, they’re making and breaking stories with increasing frequency. They’re also emerging as some of the most important influencers, connectingREAD MORE

DL390: Alana G of YardBarker On BwB3 and Blog Ethics

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Last week, we talked with Brian Cook of MGoBlog about the panel at Blogs with Balls that focused on ethics. Go back and listen to that show, but the long and short of it was the issue that, well, some blogs don’t have any ethics and it dumbs down the entire industry for the readers and hurts the rest of us who do have ethics. (There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the gist, and most of that centers around the tete-a-tete with Spencer Hall of SB Nation and Jason McIntyre of The Big Lead.)

Alana Nguyen from YardBarker was on that panel, and took a lot of heat — including from me and Cook — about her comment asking, ostensibly, why a blog has to have ethics if they don’t want to. Specifically, Alana commented on Josh Zerkle’s decision not to do a story because he didn’t want to run it without checking the facts first, to which Alana asked why it’s not okay to write the rumor, simply explainingREAD MORE