On Frozen Blog

It isn’t often that you find traditional media acknowledging the accomplishments of their new media cousins, but that’s precisely what the Washington Times’ Corey Masisak has done in his newspaper this morning. Looking ahead to tomorrow night’s showdown with the Penguins in Pittsburgh, Masisak rightly identifies it as one of the season’s more highly anticipated games, due largely to Alexander Semin’s spooky Halloween comments about league poster boy Sidney Crosby.

In his story “Hockey’s not lost in translation,” Masisak notes that, ” ‘New media’ ” has had a profound impact on coverage of sports in general and hockey in particular.” He gives specific credit to OFB chum Dmitry Chesnokov for his work in getting to a side of Alexander Semin no one else had. Masisak’s premise is that blogs, with their increasingly common coverage of Russian and European hockey players, conducting interviews in their native tongue, have broadened and amplified the coverage of hockey.

Talk about taking the high ground.

“The result has been access to new information about European players that members of the “old media” in North America would struggle to provide,” Masisak acknowledges. “For years, fans have read quotes that were limited either because of a player’s grasp of the English language or his comfort level with the North American media.”

“Now there are video clips of Alex Ovechkin doing interviews with Russian television splashed across the Internet and long, thought-provoking interviews from Chesnokov on Puck Daddy with guys like Semin, Viktor Kozlov and Columbus rookie Nikita Filatov. Blogs Alex Ovetjkin and Tuvan Hillbilly are dedicated to translating interviews with the Caps’ Russian players.”

This may not come as a surprise, but I personally have found Corey Masisak to be consistently one of the most approachable and personable figures in traditional media. Two years ago, immediately after I learned that he was apprenticing on the hockey beat under a very ill Dave Fay, I emailed him and asked for 15 minutes of his pre-game time one night to survey his experience covering hockey. He gave me 30, and he was strikingly candid about his inexperience and nerves. I told him he’d be fine, and I was right.

For this terrific and important story today the Times‘ Caps’ guy also sought the views of perhaps hockey’s most important blogger, Yahoo’s Greg Wyshynski.

“I think it started on the [message] boards,” said Wyshynski, who was recently named one of the 100 most influential people in the sport by the Hockey News. “You have these people who find these Russian interviews and maybe they know a few words or whatever or maybe they would just link to it. Then there would usually be some guy on the board who would know Russian and then all of a sudden translate it.

“It kind of gradually and naturally extended itself to the blogs. Now you have bloggers that speak Russian or speak whatever and they’re able to translate these interviews in a timely fashion. That led to us working with Dmitry Chesnokov to get interviews with Russian athletes and ask them our sort of goofy [stuff], which in another natural progression led to The Washington Post hockey blog hiring their own Russian guy [Slava Malamud of Sport-Express] to ask the Capitals’ Russian players some similar things.”