I am running a segment here at SoCal Sports Hub where I will be interviewing some of the best and brightest bloggers in all of Southern California. So, what’s the point of this little feature? Well, these guys spend countless hours writing and promoting their blogs so a little recognition is well-deserved. So without further ado, the first edition goes to Signal to Noise.
Breakdown
Name: Signal to Noise
Age: Drinking Age
Location: San Luis Obispo, California
Education: Education: B.A., from a small liberal arts school in the Midwest
Occupation: Journalist
Favorite Teams: New York Mets, Denver Broncos, Colorado Avalanche, Denver Nuggets
Favorite Posts (3-5):
I make Bill Parcells White House press secretary.
I semi-defend Mike Shanahan’s freezing the kicker time-out.
I rant after Bonds hits 756.
I chew out Bill Plaschke for utter stupidity regarding college football.
I make Bill Belichick appear as a mad scientist.
2. It’s October 7, 2006. Did you just wake up and decide to start a sports blog or did it take more planning than that?
The blog wasn’t originally designed to be solely sports, and maybe if I’m ever more motivated again, I’ll get back to writing about music, politics, and some of the other crap I wrote about in the beginning (written poorly, I might add.) I just started writing and kept working to find a niche — and I’m still kind of working on that, honestly. I’ll admit the blog is better during football season. I was just reading some sports blogs and thought, “well, why can’t I do this?” That’s really how I started, and that’s still how I operate now.
3. What is your typical day of blogging like?
My schedule’s kind of atypical because I will take days off if work gets in the way. I don’t have the kind of job that really lends itself to posting during downtime. Generally, it starts when I get home from work at about midnight; I’ll read the papers and all the major sports news sites online looking for material. If I need to warm up, I’ll write a re-cap post for a league or two.
Then I’ll see if there’s anything else I can make a point with or be funny about, and work on those posts until 2 or 3 AM. I sleep, wake up about 9, read the blogs in the RSS feed, maybe write another post or two, and that’s pretty much it for the day, because I’ll head to the gym and then to work after that.
4. Do you simply blog for fun or are you trying to make a career out of it? What does the future entail for Signal to Noise?
Purely for fun. I have made money posting at other sites (mostly from live-blogs), but I like what I do for a living. You have to be very, very dedicated and disciplined to make a career out of blogging. In my case, blogging for money would sap a lot of the fun out of writing on my already limited schedule. Also, I’m really kind of lazy when it comes to anything outside of the day job
5. Many young blogs struggle to get good readership. How did you promote S2N? Message Boards? E-mails? Link Exchanges?
E-mails, link exchanges, and commenting on other blogs. I got a fair amount of hits after I started doing live-blogs for Awful Announcing, but I also sent the occasional good link around to the bigger sites like Deadspin (and still do from time to time, but not as frequently as before.) I used to be able to promote the blog more when I worked the graveyard shift — mostly because I had more time to write, and I slept during the hours when the East Coast based blogs were done for the day anyway. Generally, though, it helps to write often and write well to figure out what your voice is and where you want to take things. The bigger blogs usually notice those things.
6. What are some of your favorite blogs out there?
Yikes. I’m afraid I’ll forget someone, but here goes: Deadspin, Every Day Should Be Saturday, Ladies…, The Big Picture, The Hater Nation, The Starting Five, Kissing Suzy Kolber, True Hoop, Odenized, Hardwood Paroxysm, With Malice, Cosellout, Foul Balls, Larry Brown Sports, The Big Lead, Ump Bump, With Malice, You Been Blinded…. the list is huge.
I also have to note Awful Announcing, who basically gave me my first exposure to a bigger audience by letting me live-blog NFL games. A few of us who commented at AA regularly had blogs, and we became the “Channel 4 News Team” — those guys are behind great sites like Storming the Floor, Run Up The Score, Bus Leagues Baseball, and One More Dying Quail.
There’s also D.K. Wilson, who runs Sports on My Mind (although he’s had to move due to WordPress issues), and he’s a fabulous writer. Whew. I bet I forgot someone. If I did, I’m sorry!
7. Over the past decade we have seen a dramatic change in sports media from the newspaper to the internet. What will it look like in 20 years?
Probably more in the way of customized, instant content. More beat reporters will be blogging regularly and so will columnists — and that’s where the news will be made; no one will be waiting for the print edition to read it. Traditional media will still have a place, but it won’t be dependent as much on the printing press. My only problem is that I think it will only amplify the problems a lot of fans have with the sports media right now — it lacks context and often goes for getting it first instead of getting it right.
Instant analysis relies so much on presumed narratives and biases that it becomes unreliable, and media right now does that very well, in sports, politics, or what have you. Let me try and frame it this way: the tendency in the 24/7 news cycle is to reduce everything to very simplistic terms to fit a minute and 30 seconds on TV or only 800 words of copy. That’s the mentality that gives you “horse race’ election coverage in politics rather than actual policy differences, and it’s the same one that gives us the dumbed-down moralistic debate about performance-enhancing drugs.
So, in 20 years, we’ll probably have even more information at our fingertips, but it won’t necessarily be better or more reliable information or analysis of the games we watch and the world of sports. Of course, I’m willing to bet that I am completely wrong on this and my cynicism is misplaced.
8. What are the most rewarding and frustrating things about blogging?
The most rewarding thing about it is the community of like-minded fans. You meet the people who hate the cliches that ESPN and Fox Sports rely on so much, the ones who can’t stand Joe Buck, etc., and you can relate. The community’s a great thing.
The most frustrating aspect is either lacking the time to write or just not feeling like you have anything to say. I dip into those periods sometimes and I just decide to back away for a bit, but it hurts because I’d like to be more prolific, or at least as prolific as I was say, maybe six months ago. Then I have to remember that I’m only doing this for fun, y’know? So that keeps you level even though the frustration’s there.
9. Before you we let you again do you have any bold predictions that you’d like to make?
Everyone presumes LeBron James will win multiple titles before his career is done. I will be surprised (yet pleased for him) if he wins one. Not because of anything he does wrong (although he doesn’t D up at a MJ or Kobe level yet), but because sometimes, the guys he plays with expect him to handle it all. He does do that, frequently, but you can’t win like that. Oh, and since I’m making ill-advised LeBron predictions, I don’t think he’ll ever go to NYC, whether it’s for a re-located Nets team or to a Knick team with cap space to spare in 2010. That was either bold or particularly stupid. I’m not sure which one.