Among the 309 blogs on the SB Nation sports blog network, “Sonics Rising” is unusual in that it’s dedicated to covering a team that does not exist. The Seattle Supersonics moved to Oklahoma City in 2008 and, with nothing but memories and an idea to root for, the unpaid bloggers now write about Seattle’s increasingly desperate quest to secure a new team, as well as topics loosely related to the city’s basketball past, like a recent face-off between the college-aged sons of Sonics legends Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton.
Yet while Sonics Rising is one of only two SB Nation blogs devoted to defunct teams, it is an endeavor that demonstrates the kind of fanatical passion that the network as a whole and others like it were founded to serve. Where traditional sports writing aims for objectivity and tells stories through firsthand quotes and descriptions, the hundreds of blogs on networks like SB Nation and FanSided have been the latest development in sports media’s history of innovation, rising to popularity by covering teams in untraditional ways. Their constant, focused coverage, emotional empathy, and digital savvy has found an audience of millions looking for a more fan-oriented reading experience.
“It’s incredibly fun and rewarding to read the comments on a blog like Land-Grant Holy Land after Ohio State wins the national title. The objectivity that so many traditional outlets have driven for isn’t what people want in that moment,” said Tyler Bleszinski, the founder of SB Nation, the original property of Vox Media. He argues that it initiated the entire phenomenon of team blog networks. “They want the raw emotion they’re feeling and someone to express it adequately. Only someone who lives and dies with their team can capture that.”
Bleszinski adds that one of the main reasons he started the network was because he was personally frustrated by the lack of coverage of his favorite baseball team, the Oakland Athletics.
Even ESPN, which offers a neverending stream of general coverage of every major sport, inevitably covers teams from larger markets more heavily than others. And coverage of any given team is liable to cool, especially during the offseason. Team blogs, on the other hand, provide ever-renewing wells of content about individual teams. In season, that usually means multiple posts, per blog, per day, with the content of the pieces ranging from game recaps to detailed analyses of the team’s defensive rebounding statistics. The offseason features coverage of player acquisitions and related rumors. And when the dust settles and the roster is mostly set, it comes time to predict how the retooled squad will perform against the competition.
“We operate off of the philosophy that there’s no such thing as an offseason for fans,” Patrick Allen, the vice president of content and strategy for FanSided, told me in a phone interview.
But it’s largely a labor of love–by fans, for fans. The freelance editors who manage individual FanSided blogs are paid based on what portion of the site’s total pageviews their content receives–with some FanSided blogs getting just thousands of clicks per month, though others get millions, according to Allen. Similarly, on SB Nation, Tyler Bleszinski told me by email that the traffic a contributor’s story attracts partly determines how much he is paid.
As a result, Allen argues that content built around GIFs and Vines, staples of these blogs that are largely absent from more traditional coverage, is an inescapable part of new sports media. “That’s what people are clicking on,” he says. “That’s the kind of stuff that’s generating revenue for blog networks like FanSided.”
But Jason Rosenberg, the founder of It’s About the Money of ESPN’s baseball blog network, SweetSpot, does not think that their run of popularity means that the blog style of sports writing, in the sense of GIFs and Vines or subjectivity, will render the traditional style defunct.
“I see it as additive,” he told me by phone. “Until such time that teams are going to provide access to non-traditional media, you’re going to continue to need those mainstream guys who are going to be able to go into locker rooms and have those relationships with the guys making the news.”
It is true that bloggers frequently cite the insights that reporters extract from players and coaches at games or in locker rooms. Allen recalled that, when he was writing for Arrowhead Addict, FanSided’s Kansas City Chiefs blog, he would sit on his computer in Brooklyn watching live streams of Chiefs press conferences that wouldn’t have been held unless the local press had been there to attend them. He said that he generally posted his stories about the press conferences “while the reporters were driving back from the stadium.” He further observes, “In a lot of ways, the Kansas City Star was funding my coverage of the Kansas City Chiefs.”
But the benefits don’t have to flow in only one direction. There are things traditional outlets can learn from sports blogs too. As seen on most newspaper websites or even ESPN.com (aside from the video atop the page), game recaps–a constant of sportswriting in all forms–convey what transpired on the field exclusively through description, whereas blogs often pepper their game stories with video highlights using Vines, GIFs, or other short videos. While, on their own, these devices don’t provide as clear a sense of the action as a good writer armed with quotes from players, they can enrich a reader’s appreciation of what happened by actually showing it, and provide a hint of the aesthetic pleasure of watching the game itself.
In 2015, many of the best sports journalists, like Grantland’s Kirk Goldsberry, do not merely choose one path or the other; they merge original, person-to-person reporting with the tools of the Web.
Christopher Massie is a CJR contributing editor.