Digby
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Everything posted by Digby
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Speaking of racists, Kirk Minihane officially out at WEEI. Going to go start a podcast for WEEI's parent company, something called Radio.com. Kind of a brilliant corporate win-win; Minihane gets to curse and be a bigoted miserable sleazebag without FCC or advertiser worries, and the bosses get to say they didn't fire him but shunt him off to nowheresville. I can't believe we're at a point where Gerry Callahan is the good cop on that show, but what could be more 2018. It seems unfair that all the newspaper will go out of business before the sports talk radio stations do.
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I'll have to binge on that one next -- ironically, stuck on the Globe's podcast about the Gardner art heist at the moment. Speaking of Boston: any cord-cutters have a streaming service that includes NESN? I was about to pull the trigger on Hulu's live TV service but realized that one was missing. Far as I can tell only Youtube TV has NESN so far, but I might be wrong.
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Could be the overall branding, too -- when they went to Anaheim the periwinkle scheme and the absurd 90s logos came with it, so it was a cleaner break. Anaheim to LAAoA was easy to miss, frankly, if you weren't paying attention beyond the field of play. -
Paging Patti Smith.
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Yeah, I always thought it was just commonly accepted that the Mighty Ducks and then the Angels took on "Anaheim" as the geographic ID primarily because making it "Disneyland" would have been one step too far.
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Ah, this'll be a fun one to relitigate.
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I think you're spot on about the origin stories -- but I think what Barstool does and is, that's quite a ways beyond the :censored: internet oneupsmanship game of a previous era. I think it's worth outlets (not Deadspin) taking stock of Barstool at a deeper level, the way Daily Beast did, as long as they're going to be the top lifestyle brand for a certain type of modern bro.
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Gotta wonder how long Simmons will keep pumping money into that site. Losing Grantland was unfortunate but all the best parts of it went elsewhere (even the ESPN mothership) which really takes the edge off. Nobody under 30 (maybe 35) knows or cares who Bill Simmons is. And the Ringer has never had the apparent capital or talent to be a big deal.
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Stoolies making a show of some Deadspin editor's 12-year-old comments is like some kind of dollar-store Gamergate, which is kind of an ironic turnabout considering the proponents this time are slacker lawyers and finance bros instead of underemployed gamers.
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My college days involved Champions League on those ESPN afternoons. Halcyon days. (Of course then I had to fire up a bizarre P2P app to watch more than one Premier League game come Saturday morning.)
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Anyone here subscribing to the Athletic? Is it worth it? Seems like some of their national coverage of soccer might be good but I'm not finding any other compelling reasons to subscribe to it. I guess I am lucky to live in the reach of Boston sports media (...) which is saturated enough that the Athletic doesn't really offer a compelling local-level competitor. That and my Boston Globe subscription is unbelievably expensive so, much as I love to support the local media at this point in time, that's also taking up my media-support budget.
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Genuinely curious how much the hardware ecosystem has fractured in the OTT streaming era. I confess I never would've thought having to support X number of gaming systems would be a big deal until this thread! I'm also old-fashioned and stream all my supports on a desktop or laptop computer.
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Right, I think this is an issue in all the non-NFL sports, but it's more obvious in the NHL given more Canadian teams. The Blue Jays weren't on Sunday Night Baseball for what, 14 years or whatever it was, and the Raptors have been nonexistent in the States during their good era, except in the playoffs when their good era has evaporated.
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I just did the same only to discover that he was just a couple of rows in front of me at a Breeders show in Prospect Park last week. I guess that was my brush with greatness. Or at least my brush with something.
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No idea where to put this, but I have to get this out of my system. Today in "You hate to see that": Paul Lukas has to get a new landline number and he may never recover. He's having a terrible time with Verizon customer service but having an absolute meltdown about it on social media. I guess when you get to blog about sports uniforms for a living you might lose perspective on what real problems are. Get a grip buddy.
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Correct! I naively thought that that was vintage Boston, but Minihane has carried the miserable racist torch for a new generation ever since John Dennis got demoted for being an alcoholic.
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WEEI really is amazing. So on brand for Kirk Minihane to blame his depression on being called out for mocking a 4-year-old and, apparently, learning nothing.
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I had no idea of this Olbermann news if I hadn't checked this thread. My reading list must be drifting away from the media blogs! Or maybe that even sympathetic folks are tired of the zero-value-added chattering pundit class. Then again now that I HAVE seen this thread, I'm immediately seeing Clay Travis having a full-scale meltdown. Anyway, big news for the few dozen people who legitimately believe ESPN is sinking under its liberalism.
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Oh you're totally right. Can't believe I forgot about FreeDarko. The leap from "I watch basketball but also watch movies" to "I watch basketball but also got really into Kierkegaard in undergrad".
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I see no fault here! I would also say there are a couple other factors working for the NBA. First is the rise of Warriors-type basketball, which pisses off purists still (maybe?) but is more generally palatable for people who like their sports to be fast and fun and flashy. Jordan and then Kobe, as players, masked how dour the NBA was for a while there. Kobe's Lakers were totally unlikable, the Spurs were boring as hell, the Celtics had individually interesting personalities but were meh as a group, and never quite achieved dynasty status besides. Now I think the trendy styles of play are just generally more fun to watch. (Of course that also happened in the NHL simultaneously.) I don't discount the element of general hipness, though, in the same way the rock kids started listening to Kanye and Clipse 10 years ago and then suddenly everyone was a rap expert all along. But I don't think white guilt and art-school trendiness fully explain how the NBA has gone global this decade, so there's a lot at play.
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Well Deadspin trashes all things Boston regularly so at least they're the counter there. Another thing I think Simmons deserves credit for, though, is that while he was definitely the proto-basketblogger, I think his passion and his knowledge of the NBA is tough to dispute, and traditionally his basketball writing keeps the sport in perspective and appreciates it for what it is, instead of falling down the rabbit holes of NBA as social criticism and high art that the rest of them do. (I get the feeling that Burnenko knows his :censored:, too, but he's all the way down that rabbit hole.) And it's even more impressive that Simmons did that while also being the Boston guy, too, because his entire come-up happened when no one in Boston gave a :censored: about the Celtics. That's one reason that the Ringer disappoints in just being kinda generic modern NBA blogging mixed with a Celtics fan's facebook feed.
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I get the sense that Grantland built on the Simmons strengths — or those of his idea/genre, not always him personally — but the ESPN structure kept it restrained. Without that, The Ringer lets that get too self-indulgent and the worst impulses end up driving. agree on the podcasts though. Those have to be subsidizing the operation. It’s wild how Simmons’ instincts in audio/video content are so drifted from his writing M.O.
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That list is mostly garbage and I enjoy a petty feud, so I have less of a problem with that, even when it does come across as hypocritical. What drives me nuts about Deadspin is their guys who ostensibly write about basketball but are really more masturbatory and off-topic than Simmons at his worst was. And all of the Arbitrary Sarcastic Proper Nouning of things, like yes thank you, I also read David Foster Wallace. What's his name, Albert Burneko? Worst offender, which is sad because sometimes he gets some proper basketball tactics talk in there. Classic example of online media's misguided belief that anyone should post anything without an editor.
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I think it depends on whether you need news or takes. I get the sense the Athletic wants you to subscribe for the news. But they haven’t cornered the market on news enough yet. i generally like Deadspin but I can’t believe they still have the soccer guy after the Mix Diskerud bicycle kick incident.
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An obstacle to OTT services is that your average sketchy Reddit stream is still higher quality than the official ones, I thought as NBCSports.com repeatedly froze, glitched and randomly threw to "coverage returning shortly" screens in the middle of NHL playoff action.
