Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports media:
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New York Times sports editor Jason Stallman tells Brendan Marks of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the background on breaking the story that the Cardinals allegedly hacked the Houston Astros computers.
How long have you been working on this story?
“In this case it came together very, very quickly. Less than 24 hours.”
This is uncharted water for professional sports. Has this happened?
“It hasn’t. It was a tricky one for us to do. To our knowledge, we couldn’t find any examples.”
Dan Levy at Awful Announcing examines the concept of “vanity” sites.
The sheer notion of a vanity site isn’t new, nor was it created by or for Simmons or Peter King. (This coming from a guy who has a career now because of a show called On the DL Podcast some years back.) It’s just different when an existing media company gives an established talking and/or writing head a big budget and a snazzy subdomain to keep him around or poach him from somewhere else. Is Clay Travis’s Outkick the Coverage a vanity site? I mean anything with that guy is a vanity something, but is it what we’ve come to think of as the Peter King theMMQB.com type of site? There’s far less risk in what Travis is doing than what SI did for King, so contextually speaking, it’s less vain than others.
Danger Guerrero of Uproxx reviews “Ballers,” HBO’s sports version of “Entourage.”
If all of that sounds kind of like Football Entourage to you, there’s a pretty good reason for that:Ballers is Football Entourage. I mean, basically. It’s not a carbon copy or anything. WhereasEntourage focused on a group of childhood friends living it up in Hollywood as they navigated the movie industry with the help of a loudmouth superagent, Ballers focuses on a strong, quiet financial advisor trying to build a post-football career by wrangling current players as clients, many of whom are living it up in Miami with their entourage (lowercase, non-italicized) of childhood friends. But the same themes are there. Parties, yachts, female characters that exist only as sex objects or mothers (or both), etc. It’s like Entourage if Entourage was Playmakers and about Ari instead of Vince. And if Jeremy Piven was The Rock.
Michael McCarthy at SportingNews.com gets insights from Jim Miller about the Jason Whitlock situation.
“Now a lot of people inside are saying, ‘You shouldn’t be surprised, he’s not a manager — and why did you do that in the first place?’,” said Miller. “But look, they obviously wanted to give him a shot. They felt like enough time had gone by where they saw he wasn’t doing it the way they wanted.”
Anna Clark in CJR cites the lack of coverage for women’s sports even during the Women’s World Cup.
APSE does a Q/A with reporters who chronicled American Pharoah’s Triple Crown.
Jeff Pearlman has a Q/A with long-time ESPN anchor Linda Cohn.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has an opening for a Green Bay Packers beat reporter.