I’ve written enough about how ESPN.com has lately gone down the tubes nearly as quickly as its broadcasting partner, more through oversaturation than anything else- better to publish 80 new pieces a day of non-sports and “rumors” when five or six would’ve sufficed.
Now, we see SI.com getting in the act too. They’ve brought back Jeff Pearlman for an occasional column- that’s the good part. The bad part is, Sports Illustrated’s web counterpart has apparently sought to copy the Worldwide Leader by tossing up all the content in the world- much of it by writers not good enough to appear in the print version of SI. Most egregious of all is a new feature called “The Daily Blog” which- since it’s merely a rotating column by several writers in which each entry has a page to itself- is not a blog in any sense of the word at all.
This amateurism has for the most part remained outside the print edition of the magazine, with the glaring exception of a recent Scorecard item that praised much-maligned ESPN basketball analyst Stephen A. Smith because, despite being bashed roundly by viewers and media critics alike, Smith “must be doing something right,” since he’s been popping up on programming throughout the network, including SportsCenter and “Pardon the Interruption.” As though the network’s decision to throw Smith on every show somehow makes him any more watchable- in fact, I often think ESPN’s mantra is “the more annoying you are, the more airtime you get.”
Posted by Stephen Silver at July 8, 2004 01:23 AM