Sports-Blogging, the Mainstream Media and the Emerging Church

In the mid-90’s, sports fans primary source of news was the Sportscenter due of Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick. Their shtick, sports news laced with sarcasm and pithy catchphrases, more or less built ESPN into the media powerhouse it is today.

Olbermann and Patrick were the first of a mold: innovative and groundbreaking in their era. For some reason, maybe pre-9/11 conditions, the people wanted smarmy hosts laying on the snark. Craig Kilborn got his start on The Big Show before beginning and nearly killing The Daily Show and going on to struggle on The Late Late Show. Looking back, it’s hard to remember his act ever working.

The strength of Olbermann and Patrick hinged on their populism. They were obviously wittier than the viewer, but they brought the viewer in on their joke. This is the difference between them and the legions of slick-haired, vaguely-jock-looking Sportscenter hosts who’ve followed. The catchphrases and pop-culture reference that were ground-breaking in the 90’s are now trite and cliche.

But by the early 2000’s, ESPN was an unstoppable empire. The success of Sportscenter had enabled the underdog cable sports channel to become a major player on par with the major networks. ESPN airs the NFL, NBA, the World Cup and Major League Baseball. It’s no coincidence the NHL has been dying since 2004…that’s the year ESPN dropped National Hockey night. No coincidence, either, that NASCAR’s popularity soared in recent years…ESPN picked up the sport in 2007.

And since ESPN crowned themselves the “World Wide Leader in Sports”, their personalities have become celebrities in their own right. Stuart Scott and Chris Berman are nearly household names, and a bevy of sportswriters like Stephen A. Smith, Bob Ryan and Jay Mariotti have made their names not from their daily sports columns in Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, but as screaming heads on ESPN. After all, obnoxious commentators worked for cable news…why not the sports world?

ESPN still holds a stable of fine sportswriters…particularly the peerless Peter Gammons and superfan Bill Simmons, who has gained a fervent following on ESPN.com…but sports fans love an underdog, and ESPN was quickly rising to the status of the New York Yankees. Around the time ESPN started shoving Arena League Football and endless Barry Bonds stories down viewer throats, the viewers went looking for a more democratic sports experience.

Enter the sports blogging community.

Since its launch in September 2005, Deadspin.com has been viewed by over 111 million visitors, and has lead the crusade, intentional or not, against mainstream sports media. The site offers “Sports news without access, favor or discretion,” and is edited by Will Leitch. Like Bill Simmons Dan Patrick and every other great sportswriter, Leitch’s strength is writing which speaks personally to the reader, which points out the absurdities of the current system. For Deadspin, “the system” is ESPN, and the blog has built a readership by going after the World Wide Leader. Instead of beat reporters wandering the clubhouse, Deadspin is more likely to receive their news from an enterprising reader with a cellphone camera snapping pictures of an athlete overindulging at a night club. And since ESPN personalities are also news, they haven’t been spared either. One of Deadspin’s most famous posts was the first in a long line revealing the bizarre truth behind Chris Berman.

The success of Deadspin fed the rapid growth of the sports blogging community, the more famous of which spawned from Deadspin’s legion of commenters. If you’ve ever been irritated by internet forums or comment boards, Deadspin has the answer: commenters are heavily, HEAVILY screened. The result is a series of comments often funnier than the post itself, and a complete avoidance of flame wars.

Suddenly, mainstream sports media folks are angry, and it’s understandable. After all, they fought for years to build a career, following the local sports beats and doing the dirty work of sports journalism, and now “some kid in his parent’s basement” is doing it for free and getting more readers.

The furor reached a peak on HBO’s Costas Now, when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Buzz Bissinger ranted at Leitch (Warning: Video clip contains profanity) over what he perceived as a future of dumber sports media.

And, you know, Bissinger might be right to some extent. Deadspin is an top-notch blog with excellent writers, but Will Leitch is set to leave the site and become a contributing editor at New York Magazine. The stable of writers set to take his place, while uniformly brilliant, are also far more profane. Up ‘til now, Will Leitch’s Midwestern manners balanced out the insanity of writers like AJ Daulerio and Kissing Suzy Kolber’s Big Daddy Drew. I’m assuming we’ll be seeing a lot more pictures of women in bikinis on the Deadspin’s main page.

But the rage over blogging ignores the fact some of the best sportswriting today is coming from those blogs. Will Leitch and Bill Simmons are two of the best sportswriters working today, and both have eschewed traditional aspects of sports journalism in favor of a more distanced approach to the subjects they cover. It also makes the assumption that bloggers are journalists, which they aren’t. Big Daddy Drew writes penis jokes, and while most of his columns are exceptionally funny and insightful, I’m not reading his entries to find out what the Trail Blazers are looking to do on draft day.

The battle over sports media is a visible example of a larger conflict being fought in this country: the often generational divide between where we were and where we’re going. Buzz Bissinger’s tirade smacks of a similar struggle between established church leaders and the younger American church.

Like the mainstream sports media’s view of blogging, traditional church leaders characterize the emergent church as being reactive and more concerned with protest and glib irony over how the American church has operated than actually making positive change. As a small part of that larger movement, I admit, as the editor of Burnside, I’ve been guilty of this from time to time.

On the other hand, disregarding the concerns of young Christians as juvenile and reactionary only points out the blindspots and hastens the demise of the traditional American church. Just as ESPN doesn’t realize it’s lost touch with the common sports fan, conservative church leaders can’t see how their blatant participation in politics and preoccupation with legislating morality have driven people outside the bubble away from a relationship with God.

Dwight Jaynes, a sports columnists from The Portland Tribune I usually disregard as contrarian and cranky, summed the sports media conflict up beautifully in a recent column. Buzz Bissinger and Will Leitch each look at the Ideals of Journalism the way Frank Pastore and Brian McLaren look at the Ideals of Christianity, and both, at times, will speak truth.

In a shifting world, the young American church will make mistakes. There will be great, reasonable leaders (like Will Leitch), insightful-but-questionable minds (like Big Daddy Drew), and plenty of bad commenters, writing the future of Christianity in their parent’s basement. The realization we need to reach is this change is unavoidable. The world is changing, America is changing, and trying to claw our way back to the “idyllic” 1950’s isn’t going to happen. This is the nature of inherited sin…we keep going and dealing with the changes as they come. The only way to truly know we’re doing our best is by following Christ as often as possible.

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For edits, I sent this article to Dan Gibson and Jon Adams, who each provided great insight. I wanted to post Dan’s thought on the issue below.

Maybe in some way, the parallel is to the wiki-ness of everything around us. Beyond being postmodern in the sense that everything is subjective, now everything is authoritative. Big Daddy Drew and his dick jokes hold the same relevance in the marketplace as Rick Reilly, since they have similarly sized audiences. The only demand we have as viewers becomes “entertain us” instead of “inform us”, which isn’t entirely different than the perspective of church-goers as well, who used to have a few options based on denomination, etc., but now have very specifically marketed mini-denominations to choose from.

At some point, the Christian blogging world will catch up the sports world, and you’ll see more edginess, I imagine, more microanalysis of news and trends. That hasn’t seemed to happen yet, as mostly conservative sorts have latched on to blogging in any prominent fashion (as far as I can tell). Either way, analysis and commentary used to be the playing field of the elite, now it’s anyone with access to the internet and talent for clever wordplay.