"Bloggers and Everything"

Cracking the mainstream

Update by Ben, 2:00 PM ET, as I post this I see our own Will Allensworth of Hogs Haven and Tony Brown of Hog Heaven are featured on ESPN, get used to seeing more of your favorite Redskins and NFL bloggers mixing it up in the traditional media! (h/t to Will for self promoting)

For observant fans there was a bit of a watershed moment in the NBC broadcast of the dreadful Redskins-Jaguars game last night. With about four minutes left in the game Al Michaels and John Madden were as usual way off the game and Al asked John who his sleeper picks were for the next Super Bowl, which teams were the ones no one was talking about that could make it to the Big Game.

By way of not answering the question John responded by saying that with all the magazines, newspapers, TV shows, radio and quote bloggers and everything unquote out there and then his answer trailed off.

The clear intent was, in not letting himself be pinned down to any specific teams, to illustrate the wide world of legitimate football coverage and how there are so many choices now football fans can go do the homework and decide for themselves who may by the team no one expects to go all the way.

Add to the godfather's prime time mention of blogs as part of the media pantheon the outreach I and many fellow bloggers are experiencing from traditional sources, the NFL itself, the USA Today, the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and it is obvious the traditional media is coming to terms with this new and alternate form of regular coverage.

As recently as last season there was still a great deal of pushback against the apocryphal blogger, typing away in his parents' basement clad only in underwear, totally uninformed, not even smart enough to know it and thank goodness for the benevolent overlords of the traditional media to tell us what to think and how to think it, remember this Mike Wise piece in the Washington Post from last year?

Thanks to the readers of this and every football blog, more voices is better coverage, we are crashing the traditional media's private club. Some outlets will welcome it and work with us, others will resist and see themselves isolated.

Bring on the 2008 season!



Madden 93 for SNES, a game I played around the clock for a year, from here.