Not so secret ingredient
Judy Battista, the great football writer at the New York Times, had a good piece in yesterday's edition about the creep of the NFL into every corner of the calendar, the Super Bowl bleeds into the Combine, then free agency, the Draft, then minicamp, organized team activities, more free agency then finally training camp, the preseason, the regular season, the post season, rinse repeat.
If you are a football fan then you love it, there is news all year, spasms of activity separated by long stretches of fan speculation and obsessing on minutiae, hanging on every coded word spoken by every coach and team executive.
Kind of a macrocosm of the regular season isn't it? Like a soap opera addicts we have little real action relative to down time, we fill the week with trash talk, commiseration, speculation and armchair coaching.
Thank god for Sirius NFL Radio, for all its warts and its too frequent pro league position it keeps me entertained and my jones fed year round. And that brings me to the gaping hole in Judy's piece. Not only was the satellite radio channel and deal to broadcast every game not mentioned, there was no mention of the rise of alt media complementing the NFL's year round schedule, going hand in hand, by the football addicts, for the football addicts.
And I am not simply talking about blogs, no sirree. Blogs, the well written and regular ones, are certainly a major element of that, there are others as well.
Sports Blog Network, the beneficiary of a large round of funding late last year, is popping up as link outs on NHL.com and Yahoo Sports. Blog syndication networks like Sphere are putting content right into traditional media pages with relevance.
National Football Post, an independent network of writers covering the full scope of the game. Imagine a newspaper where every section was about the NFL.
Cold Hard Football Facts, independent statistics, better and more granular than any traditional media outlet could justify publishing, it is like grain alcohol.
Pro Football Talk, the incredibly reliable rumor mill, putting Chris Mortenson to shame.
Podcasts and internet radio, like Harry Hog, as a matter of fact I have been invited to sit in on a couple of internet radio shows this season and yes guys I will get those pictures from when I ran into you at the December Bengals game in Cincinnati before camp.
And there are many others, the world of football reporting is very open right now, everyone can find their fetish and satisfy it safely and without shame whether you are into straight news, wild opinion, you like to touch numbers or even if you crave the voyeurism of fondling content generated by the players themselves.
To be sure the league is pushing a year round agenda, the NFL is a juggernaut with no sign of slowing down, as we speak I am already blocking out my piece on this weekend's minicamp, and that is the point. There are more outlets, those outlets can generate a legitimate audience and the league will only be working more closely every year with alt media.
The divisions between media outlets are crumbling, from the league's perspective it is just all NFL all the time and I take it in the main line.
Redskins 2009 seventh round draft pick Marko Mitchell at the NFL Combine in February: Getty Images from here.
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