Des Moines Register - Football Blogs Suck

Today, the Des Moines Register ran a nasty rant about why College Football Bloggers suck.

Kevin at FanBlogs.com has an interesting retort. I would add to Kevin's note with the following:

I can't help but wonder why she felt the need to write this to start with? Are we as football bloggers muscling in on her turf so much that this warrants real discussion and examination?

The service that most of us *currently* provide is:
1. Aggregation of links to media sources such as hers for fans of similar affinity. Dawg Fans go to Dawg blogs and get links to Dawg articles b/c it makes the morning's reading faster. Someone has already done the surfing for me if I can get all my links in one place.

2. Comedy, smack or trash talk that can be reused against our rivals.

3. To see what other fans think about our team OR a rival's team. There are few sports blogs who seriously position themselves as media or even quasi media.

Is Moustache Wednesday from EverydayShouldbeSaturday.com or Brian's look at why Notre Dame sucks or my Urban Meyer digs really posing such a threat to the Iowa Daily Bugle that she needs to write such a nasty article?

Is this really such a threat to her? You know...maybe it is.

The real issue isn't our "sources" or our "grammer."

Our "sources" are their sources. When a rumor leaks on a message board or blog, the print media use those rumors to chase down stories. Do stories get out of hand online? ABSOLUTELY. But that is more the message boards than the bloggers. Some bloggers use their sites as a forum to help diffuse rumors as this site did earlier this month with a sexual harrassment rumor.

The issue...no, make that the THREAT...is the overall growth of our collective readership. On a typical month BoiFromTroy might pull 100k page views, FanBlogs around 300k page views. MgoBlog pulls around 60k. GTSports pulls 60k. I pulled 45k page views last month.

Niche publishing has always been mass media's greatest threat. As niche publishers aggregate, the financial value of all their content rises and the opportunity to cause problems for mass media rises. That's why blogs are the greatest threat to mass media. We link to each other to create a sense of relevance that is either legitimate or perceived.

Between the 50 college football bloggers on TruthLaidBear.com we pulled around a million page views last month. Is that earth shattering? No. By point of comparison, the DawgVent message board has been known to pull a million page views in a day. But to grow from virtually no readers to a million page views in less than a year is a staggering growth rate.

Is this what she is afraid of?

We are just college football bloggers (ok...there's some politics and an occassional pic of a shirtless gay guy from Boi, or hot lesbians kissing on PS2 covers from me, but you get the point).

The media in general *should* be terrified of bloggers. Not just sports bloggers. We're pulling incredible traffic, we don't need ad reps if we want to generate revenue (google and other services will take care of that at the click of a button), we have no overhead, no publishing costs, and our readers are a click away.

We may never make ourselves rich. I sure as hell won't given that I'm too lazy to tinker with Google AdWords. But we as all bloggers can/are/will take away print media's readers.

In reality, the cream rises to the top in Blogging just as it does in the media. If my writing slips and people don't think it's funny (assuming they do now), they won't visit. If Brian's insights into Michigan Hockey become irrational, people will stop reading (although I can't imagine who's reading about college hockey to begin with but that's another post entirely). If BoiFromTroy starts posting pics of my dad, his visits will plummet.

Her article is one of those...."Don't buy videos because it's not the same as going to the theatre" or "Downloading music via the internet will destroy the music industry" type of "Technology is Evil" articles that seem to run in every media outlet about virtually everything. The people who write these types of articles are typically those who are left behind by innovation.

If anything, her article legitimizes our collective efforts.

Plus, it gives me the opportunity to use my creative freedom as a blogger to label her as Chicken Little without being edited by my boss.

paulwesterdawg
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