The volume and variety of news pertaining to Olie Kolzig’s departure from the Capitals last week was instructive in these new media times. When we at OFB verified that Kolzig’s home was listed for sale last Wednesday, which wasn’t a particularly difficult endeavor (all manner of such information, including taxes paid on a particular residential property, are a matter of public record), we got dinged by two members of the Capitals’ communications team, one in particular suggesting that the news’ arriving via “a blog” was, ipso facto, cause for its being disregarded.
Meh.
Nonetheless, lunches and face time with the old goalie were hastily arranged by old media on Thursday, and by Friday the news holdouts had their confirmation — the goalie indeed was pulling up his roots in town. The take-home point for someone like me last week was this: more time is needed to persuade select members of even an ahead-of-the-new-media-curve organization like the Caps that media times are-a-changin’.
Which brings me to this past Monday’s Washington Post, and Norman Chad’s column therein. Relying partly on the hackneyed trope of stuffing his column with reader questions and his witty rejoinders (aka lazy journalism), Chad addresses Zach from Ohio’s query, “Are bloggers journalists?” A straight, sober, and reasonably thoughtful reply would have been “Not really.” A really thoughtful reply would have gone along the lines of, “Not really, because journalists are fast becoming bloggers.”
Instead, Chad huffed, “Let me put it this way: Just because you start cooking rib-eye steaks on your George Foreman Grill doesn’t make you an executive chef.” It might also be said that a bad cook who pork chop shops at Dean and Deluca still serves up a lousy dinner.
An interesting thing to do at NHL games in the new media era is to make mental notes of old and new media present at say Caps’ games and compare the quality of products generated a day later. To a certain extent, some of the old guard are hamstrung by the unyielding dictates of convention — what I call formulaic sports journalism. Or: corporate writing. Get the time of the goals right. Be sure to acknowledge the left winger’s third straight game with a secondary assist. Fatten file with recorded jock-speak filler — irrespective of how mundane, cliche-ridden the reflection.
The adherence to this dying script is precisely the point of new media’s rise.
To be fair, the Caps have two print guys on the beat who carry off the conventions as well as can be expected. They’re quite good. What’s more interesting to me, however, is, in a relatively short period of time, the meteoric popularity of their online readership for their respective blogs. These readers, like us, might miss a game file or three along the way but daily, sometimes hourly, monitor these guys’ blogs, which often are treasure troves. There, away from the conventions, away from the rigid formula, we go inside the team, inside the sport. There the scribe’s personalized passion for the game at times comes to life. It’s prose with a Budweiser, and they’re buying. Their readers sure are.
Another distinction, perhaps: at times I skim the old media game files, sweeping through the inverted pyramid prose swiftly for any event my eyes on the game didn’t detect. However, I never skim that reporter’s blog files. I suspect I’m not alone in this habit.
Back within the formula, it isn’t always the athlete at fault for the poverty of reflection. If there are 60 questions directed at a hockey team by 14 reporters in 20 minutes of post-game access, irrespective of the city, irrespective of the prestige of the news outlet, I can assure you that 40-plus are of the “Did he or she really just ask that?” variety. Don’t take my word for it. Watch ESPNews and its revolving door rotation of intellect-numbing game pressers. Or if you’re really interested in surveying the limits of Darwin’s Theory, tune in to the Super Bowl presser the Tuesday of game week. That’s George Orwell’s Animal Farm come to life. Some reporters are just plain stupid; many more though are asking questions whose answers feed a script. Gotta file, gotta formulate.
I can assure you that when Greg Wyshynski is in the arena the last thing he’s looking to do is fill his recorder with jock-talk. Chatting with him during a game often is more entertaining than the product we’re there to chronicle. His is a creative mind ever abuzz with unconventional coverage ideas. And this is largely why his blog numbers, be they at Deadspin, the FanHouse, or now Yahoo Sports are the envy of those of every old media outlet in press row.
One of the reasons this “debate,” such as it is, about bloggers and reporters exists is because it itself is an old media convention. Like Andy Rooney, it persists, perpetually. It has a radioactive half life. It’s erroneously conceived, superficially analyzed, and nurtured by a whiff of controversy. Therefore expect it to be around still 24 years from now.
More interesting to me is the embrace of Washington’s hockey bloggers by big media’s online or alternative editions. Rare was the week during this past season that one of us wasn’t excerpted in Washington Post Express. Eric McErlain transitioned from blogging at his groundbreaking site Off Wing Opinion in 2006 to covering the NHL for NBCSports.com last season, and this year he’s doing the same for the Sporting News. Jon Press joined McErlain at AOL Sports last year. Wyshynski of course is a blogging man very much in demand.
Just in the last week I found promo snippets for two of my OFB files slotted into the NHL team pages at Sports Illustrated’s web site. There’s nothing sly or sinister about that — SI needs content for its hockey pages in the offseason, apparently, and they’ve come to regard lil’ ole OFB as a source. Readers who normally wouldn’t know about OFB are, thanks to the big slick mag site, getting a look at us.
Lest you think old media in its new configuration is gobbling up gifted writers and consigning them to the old marching orders know that all of McErlain, Press, and Wyshynski are blogging for their new employers. That appears to have been a business decision by big media.
Each passing week is bringing about a remarkable evolution in information dissemination and consumption, in sports, politics, public policy, you name it — and in the process, in a very healthy way, obliterating the confining limitations of the old guard and its tired old formulas.
Isn’t it great to be a hockey fan today and to possess a healthy appetite for quality coverage and analysis of your team and its sport and to have that appetite nourished by the breadth of new and old media we’re now seeing? Even in the summer. Ahead, more quality voices will get added to the online chorus while the dour defenders of the tired, outdated approach whither and recede. The Revolution continues.
OFB: There are increasing accounts of Washington’s popularity in Russia due largely to the popularity of their Russian stars. Is this your sense, that there is a special appreciation for the Capitals in many areas of Russia?
Welcome to the hockey blogosphere, Graham Mink, 2006 Calder Cup hero. Mink, signed just a couple of weeks ago by the Caps and Hershey Bears, 
She is the first professional tennis player to appear in Playboy, birthday suited. The only other pro athlete likewise unlayered there was swimmer Amanda Beard. For some reason I really wish 
Any criticism of the 
I was also very impressed by the NHL Network’s presence in Buffalo in the leadup to, and after-event coverage of, the Winter Classic. When the NHL hosts a special event, its network seems to rise to the occasion.
On Monday morning we joined Tarik and Corey and a few other media outlets out at Kettler Capitals Iceplex for a pre-draft gab session with Capitals’ General Manager George McPhee. We put a tough question to him:
