Sports Blogging: Not (Necessarily) Just For Weirdos Anymore

A gathering of some of the greatest (and would-be greatest) sports bloggers in the country? Talking about where sports blogging is going, how it will and won't rule over traditional media? With free drinks? Count us in!

The first Blogs With Balls conference was held this weekend in New York City, and it left Bostonist with a pretty good feeling about where this industry is headed. Panelists from large, established sites mixed with some from small independent sites, blog networks and "mainstream media" (though that definition doesn't really work anymore, which was a large part of the discussion).

The future of what people have been calling "traditional media" is just about done. Well, sort of. Apart from the not-inconsiderable fact that newspapers and other print media are having troubles (that you may have heard about), a lot of the things that they did well, they either don't do or don't do well anymore. Anyone who remembers looking forward to reading Peter Gammons' canonical "Notes" column in the Sunday Globe, but now gets all their rumors and tidbits from the Internet, knows what we're talking about here.

The athletes themselves are blending in with what we call the media. When Shaquille O'Neal's instant reaction to the NBA Finals makes it into newspapers as a news story, it's clear the old rules and labels don't apply. Half the NBA seems to be on Twitter now, and there are companies who specialize in helping athletes craft their message and deliver it directly to fans. (Chris Bosh of the Raptors might just be the leader in this race right now, with his own YouTube channel.)

Even the most Web-savvy bloggers did agree that there still is a place for the old-school press and the beat reporter. Even if, as one panelist described, they sit joylessly in the press box and stir only when the conversation turns to how many Marriott Points they've built up. The question of access to the clubhouse and direct quotes did come up prominently. If you missed the Raul Ibanez controversy, a blogger at Midwest Sports Fans crunched the Phillies slugger's numbers, noticed some trends, and raised the question—only the question—of whether the "S-word" (and in baseball, that's a different word than you might be thinking) might be in play. Reactions were swift from Ibanez himself and some newspapers. The blogging panel said that, in the past, you'd never write anything like that without going to the player for a reaction first. Today, the people writing things like that generally aren't allowed anywhere near the player. And this probably won't help. It's a complicated situation, and nobody really had an answer.

There are things sports blogs can be other than complements/thorns in the side of traditional media. We got to hear the heartwarming story of WhoDeyRevolution.com, started by a Cincinnati Bengals fan(!) at the end of his rope, who started what's been described as a Project Mayhem-level campaign to register his and other Bengal fans'(!) disgust at the front office for the years of ineptitude. We've got it pretty good here in Boston now, but something like this sure could have come in handy 10 years or so ago.

Before the conference moved on to the afterparties, attendees got some enthusiastic words of wisdom from web guru Gary Vaynerchuk. He said everything he does, he does so he can one day own the New York Jets (sorry, Gary, but we can't be friends anymore once that happens), and told all the bloggers there that having a similar lifelong goal is the best way - maybe the only way - to keep themselves motivated and focused. So when Bostonist partners up with the Celtics ownership in a few years, we'll have Gary V. to thank.

Photo from Flickr's MissChatter and used under Creative Commons license.