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

DL526: Kornheiser, Feinstein, Snyder, Favoritism. Plus More Deadspin, SB Nation, Bleacher Report

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We try to briefly recap the night in sports, but other things just keep getting in the way.

We got some interesting feedback from yesterday’s show, so we address that and delve a little deeper into intricacies of the homogenous world of sports blogs (and how eventually Comcast will own us all).

We also talk about the fact that John Feinstein wrote on his blog that Tony Kornheiser has asked him not to talk about Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins, when “Junior” is a guest on Tony’s show. Per Feinstein, it’s not because Snyder owns the station that airs the show, but more because Kornheiser likes him as a person.

So…which is worse? Is playing favorites because you’re contractually obligated to do so better or worse than playing favorites because you like someone personally? This isn’t just an issue with Kornheiser — thought it is a HUGE concern that he’s telling guests not to rip a guy who ultimately has the power to yank his show off the air — butREAD 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

Over/Under: Reaction to the Reaction to the Reaction to Jay Cutler

I had a whole big thing planned for this, culling together headlines and block quotes and link after link of reaction to Jay Cutler leaving the Bears-Packers game early in the second half. I had a list of links a mile long that had reaction and reaction to the reaction and, in some cases, reaction to the reaction to the reaction. Like this by David Haugh of the Chicago Tribune or this by Rick Telander of the Sun-Times that cleverly rhymed “Twitter” and “quitter” in a delicious headline pun.

I had hundreds of them (note: not actually hundreds, but a lot). And then news came out that Cutler did, in fact, have an MCL tear, rendering all the speculation about why he was pulled from the game and all the bloviating about his toughness into a giant pile of earlier-today’s news, which in the world of instant reaction somehow and someway became more dated than yesterday’s news.

Then I read this, tweeted by SI_27Seven

The story behind that link is by Jim Trotter and while I completely agree with his premiseREAD MORE

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

No, I Do Not Hate Free Speech. A Phillies Blog As Voltron Explanation

Yesterday I was sitting in Jury Duty and I got an email from Kevin Kaduk at Big League Stew to ask me if I could submit the Phillies Dear John letter for the site. Honored to do so, I started to write down some of the thoughts I had for the season.

The request comes with some loose instructions on what sections to include in the post, one of which is “what would you change about the team?”

Well…nothing, really. The Phillies got beat by their own streakiness and a bunch of spare parts San Francisco duct taped to Buster Posey, Tim Lincecum and a few of their other stud pitchers to get past the Phillies and into the World Series. The Phillies didn’t play like the best team, but that doesn’t mean I would really change anything about this squad. Sure, Danys Baez can jump in the river (I actually wrote we should throw him off the Besty Ross Bridge) and Greg Dobbs’ sideburns need to be DFA’d for good this winter. But other than thatREAD MORE

Some NHL Teams Don’t Want Bloggers Anywhere Near Their Players

There’s this odd misconception in the world that blogs are only written by fans. It’s hard for people in the media who get paid to do their job (and, by and large get told what teams/topics to cover) to understand that people who write blogs are not necessarily doing so while wearing a jersey with their faces covered in temporary tattoos of the team’s logo. Sometimes, independent media is certainly nothing more than a fan’s ramblings, be it everything from mindless homerism to insightful criticism and commentary.

More often than not (at least more often than in the past), independent media is borne out of a need for fans to get more from their local coverage. Certainly in the case of the NFL or many successful MLB teams, there will be more “fan blogs” than independent media sites looking for a different angle of coverage. Traditional media gravitates to what’s popular, which is why there is usually no lack of coverage for the major sports. It’s difficult for an independent site to get recognized and credentialedREAD MORE