Of course, a bunch of massive media companies (even ESPN competitor Fox Sports Net) are trying to branch out into hyperlocal sites right now, but none of them are doing it with ESPN’s success. Consider this fact: Within a month of the time it was launched, ESPN Chicago drew more unique visitors than the sports sections of the Chicago Tribune or the Chicago Sun-Times. This means that it took ESPN all of one month to overcome the Tribune and Sun-Times’ decades-long head start in building trust and authority and insinuating themselves into readers’ habits, and their 14-year head start in specifically covering Chicago sports online. One month, and all that was out the window.

Let that sink in for a while. If there’s a better indicator of ESPN’s absolute dominance of the sports media world and the completeness of its takeover of local sports coverage in the public’s mind, I haven’t seen it.

What’s most remarkable to me about ESPN’s invasion of local sports journalism, though, is the climate in which it’s taking place. It seems strange to think of it this way now, but ESPN is an old-media company, just like the Tribune and the Sun-Times and every other newspaper it’s advancing on. For virtually every other American old-media company, this decade has been one of collapse, of downsizing, of a steady chipping away of authority. The theme of this decade in news media could easily be Yeats’ line, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

Yet for ESPN, this has been the decade of expansion, of hegemony, of steadily mounting authority. How has ESPN managed to make itself all but immune to the social and market forces that are tearing down just about every other establishment media organization in America? Here are a few ideas:

— It’s working with a captive audience. Most establishment news media organizations traffic in just that: news. And by that I mean general news — politics, crime, business, foreign affairs. And we’ve all seen the statistics about the growing number of people (especially young people) who just don’t care about that kind of news. Well, guess what? We’re not seeing the same trend with sports news. Interest in sports in the United States is not going to be declining anytime soon. So whereas many news organizations have to ask themselves two fundamental questions (”How do we get people interested in the news?” and “How do we get them interested in our news?”), ESPN is only concerned with the latter, and that’s one very big thing not to have to worry about.

— It moves quickly to master every style and medium its competitors use. Despite that native advantage to sports news, ESPN has still had to outmaneuver its many competitors to reach its position at the center of the sports media universe. And it’s been able to do that, quite frankly, because it’s generally very, very good at what it does. You can see it medium after medium: When WFAN and sports talk radio were just starting to explode, ESPN launched a radio division in 1992, quickly scooping up local stations and top talent and becoming a force in the business. When the blogosphere’s snarky tone was starting to bubble up early in this decade, ESPN acted quickly, snapping up the nationally unknown Bill Simmons in 2001 and turning him into the most widely read sportswriter in America, creating the irreverent, pop-culture-heavy Page 2, and absorbing the fantastic NBA blog TrueHoop.

ESPN may be at its core a cable network, but its efforts in other media are smoothly integrated enough to feel native: It functions on the web, for example, as a multimedia, 21st-century sports website, one that feels like it was produced by people who specifically had the web in mind. Most newspaper sports websites, on the other hand, still have the awkward feel of a fundamentally print-based mindset superimposed on the web.

— It has money, and it’s not afraid to use it. Of course, ESPN also pumps out an alarming amount of crap, but it’s still managed to protect its brand and its territory in the industry. Every sports fan I know has a love-hate relationship with ESPN, and the love part mostly stems from the fact that there’s nowhere else to go; no one else offers what ESPN does. No one else has made a bona fide effort to produce a regular sports news program like SportsCenter, treating sports the same way CNN treats news. No one else (except Best Damn Sports Show, and that’s off the air) has tried to produce the daily televised discussion-as-entertainment gabfest like Pardon the Interruption, treating sports the same way Fox News treats politics. And the reason they haven’t tried it is simple: It costs too much money, and ESPN got there first.

There’s a reason ESPN keeps poaching top sportswriting and on-air talent from the nation’s newspapers and TV networks: It’s paying them piles and piles of money. It’s the same reason ESPN keeps swallowing up more college football and basketball broadcast rights. I’m not privy to their financial statements, but I’m pretty sure other networks, like Fox and the new Comcast/NBC have this kind of money; they’re just not as willing to spend it as ESPN is. And the more money ESPN spends, the more of the sports landscape it takes over, and the more money it makes.

— Other sports media organizations’ declines have helped pave its way. Finally, it’s worth noting that ESPN doesn’t deserve all the credit for its own dominance — it’s been pretty serendipitous, too. The decline of the newspaper has decimated the longtime stronghold of sports coverage that was the local sports section. The collapse of their authority has created a void that ESPN has gladly and smartly stepped into. It’s also helped that newspapers have generally moved onto the web so timidly and awkwardly (especially initially — they’ve improved drastically now), making ESPN’s online offerings appear so strong by comparison.

I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that ESPN will continue its dominance through the next decade. I think ESPN has some legitimate challengers on the horizon, whether it’s on the fringes or right smack-dab in front of the network, and it’ll be interesting to watch to inevitable battle. But I think as the decade closes, it’s worth appreciating how ESPN got its position as the undisputed king of the sports media hill in the first place.

No related posts.

— First off, this was the week real-time search officially took off. On Wednesday morning, The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital broke the news that Microsoft had reached an agreement to give its Bing search engine the ability to include Twitter and Facebook status updates. Four hours later, we found out that Google, too, had reached a similar agreement with Twitter (no Google-Facebook marriage, though — that would have been a surprise).

So now we have Twitter status updates available on Google and Bing, and Facebook updates on Bing as well. The tech blog ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has a handy-dandy chart to help us keep all the companies’ search strengths and weaknesses straight. He and Adam Ostrow from the social media blog Mashable both note that Microsoft’s plan for Facebook search is dependent on Facebook’s ability to persuade its users to make their status updates at least semi-public — and Facebook users have a history of fiercely guarding their privacy.

There’s a few different ways to examine the impact of these deals: The New York Times has focused on money, noting that this is likely a huge part of Twitter’s answer to the ubiquitous “But how are you going to make money off of this?” question, and then, in turn, wondering, “How are Microsoft and Google going to make money off of this?”

Several others have been talking about the value of this data. Catharine Taylor at Social Media Insider thinks most of it is “simply unimportant,” which is, well, nuts. (You seriously can’t see how finding out what people are saying right now about a given topic might be slightly valuable?) TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld posits (rightly, I think) that the greatest value of this data will be at the aggregate, “firehose” level in the ability to refine search results to reflect real-time results — sort of like an integration of a far more sophisticated version of Google Trends.

Then, of course, there’s the journalism angle. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum asks the same question that I can just about bet Rupert Murdoch and Tom Curley were asking when they heard about the deals: “If tweets are worth money to a search engine, why isn’t the news?” Meanwhile, tech pioneer Dave Winer, in the most insightful post I’ve seen on these deals, argues that we should be beyond thinking about what this means for traditional news organizations: Google, Microsoft and Twitter are now in the news business themselves.

This is the dawn of a system, Winer says, where all of our news “flows through the same pipes, and curators pick off the good stuff and route it to people who are interested.” And instead of jumping in on this while it’s beginning, the moguls of traditional media are sitting on the sidelines, hoping someone will just stop by and decide to pay them — not because they’ve provided any serious value in this new media ecosystem, but only because they’re complaining loud enough. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Just read Dave’s post.

— The other big development this week was a report released by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie and UC-San Diego/Columbia University journalism prof Michael Schudson, which was followed by an avalanche of reactions from journalism pundits and scholars. The Nieman Journalism Lab has a fine summary of the report and the Cedar Rapids Gazette’s Steve Buttry has a comprehensive roundup of the reaction, so I won’t duplicate their work here.

The aspect of the report that got the most attention was Downie and Schudson’s recommendation of several avenues for increased government funding for journalism, summed up nicely by Michele McLellan here. And that may be the most valuable thing to come out of this report — it’s the first proposal of expanding public funding for journalism to be engaged with seriously by many of The People Who Think About Journalism, probably because it’s the first proposal that deserves to be taken seriously.

I have my own deep skepticism about publicly funding journalism — though I’m slightly more amenable to starting up new initiatives under the public-media banner than to using subsidies or tax breaks to prop up flagging newspapers — but it seems that Downie and Schudson’s report has finally gotten us past the knee-jerk “Over my dead body!” response to publicly funded journalism, even if the right answer is “No way — but here’s why, and I’m still open to hearing some ideas from the other side.”

— This week included a watershed moment for the sports blogosphere, too. Deadspin, a Gawker Media blog that towers over the sports blogging world, launched a daylong offensive against ESPN after, according to Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio, a PR rep for the network brushed aside his questions last month about a rumored affair and suspension by ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips. When the story turned out to be true and was broken by the New York Post last week, Daulerio retaliated by publishing reports of sexual misdeeds by a mid-level ESPN Radio host and an unknown-to-the-public marketing VP.

The reaction from the sports blogosphere was almost universally negative (though there were exceptions), which is notable because so many of those blogs generally operate with a very similar M.O. If you had to boil the sports blogosphere down to just a few of its defining characteristics, one of them would be its fixation on sexual scandals that only tangentially involve sports. Yet this week we found out that even regarding that, those blogs have a line. And when even the most powerful sports blog on the Web crossed that line, they heard it from their fellow bloggers. If you’re interested in diving deeper into this, the National Sports Journalism Center has a roundup of reactions, Midwest Sports Fans has an audio interview with Daulerio about the flap, and lawyer and former Deadspin associate editor Clay Travis uses the episode to give us a lesson on libel law.

— In the wake of the past few weeks’ adventures in news orgs’ social media guidelines, veteran journalist Gina Chen has an extremely helpful personal guide to the ethics of social media for journalists, complete with case studies. Over at MediaShift, meanwhile, Stephen Ward has some tips for news orgs crafting social media policies.

— The nation’s 12th-largest newspaper, Newsday on Long Island, has put a paywall around its online content. Newsday execs explain the move at Editor & Publisher, and news business expert Alan Mutter cautions that Newsday’s being owned by a cable company makes this move a tough one to replicate.

— Finally, two professors argue at SEED magazine that social media and the explosion of online publishing mean that soon, our society will be characterized not only by nearly universal literacy, but by nearly universal authorship as well. And if you’re a journalism student (or a working journalist, for that matter), Publish2’s Ryan Sholin has some helpful advice: Be great at one analog craft and one digital craft. Sounds about right.

Related posts:

1. This week in media musings: Fort Hood, citizen journalism and Twitter lists
2. This week in media musings: Murdoch’s game of chicken, and a lesson in process journalism
3. To make money from social media, a newspaper plays consultant

— In honor of baseball’s postseason, a couple of wonderful baseball stories: First, one of the all-time classics, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” by the New Yorker’s incomparable John Updike. It’s a beautiful account of Ted Williams‘ last game with the Boston Red Sox in 1960, and it’s about as canonical as it comes in American sportswriting.

Second, “The Ripples From Little Lake Nellie,” Gary Smith’s heartbreaking story of a 1993 boating accident that killed Cleveland Indians pitchers Tim Crews and Steve Olin. Smith, who’s been at Sports Illustrated since 1983, is one of the nation’s best sportswriters, and one of its best feature writers, period. And thanks to the amazing SI Vault, it’s all there for the reading.

— ESPN columnist/yukster Rick Reilly may have turned his career into a punchline for bloggers, but believe it or not, he used to actually write good stuff. My favorite of his is “The Mourning Anchor,” his 1988 profile of Bryant Gumbel. It’s understanding, but not exactly kind. Most importantly, it’s an honest and perceptive look at a flawed man.

— There’s been a pretty good amount of fantastic writing about evangelical Christian culture in the past few years. I’m partial to John Jeremiah Sullivan’s first-person foray into a Christian music festival, “Upon This Rock,” which ran in GQ in February 2005. His vulnerability in the piece is striking and offers a lot of illumination into a very idiosyncratic subculture. Jeff Sharlet is the dean of this type of long-form Christian-subculture writing, and his May 2005 profile of Ted Haggard and his Colorado Springs megachurch is one of his finest works. It’s pretty surreal to read this in light of Haggard’s subsequent meth-and-male-prostitute bust.

No related posts.

— I’m about a week and a half late by now on the Washington Post’s new social media guidelines, but it dominated discussion this week and commentary is still trickling out about it, so it only makes sense to lead off with that. Here’s the quick summary: The Washington Post internally released its new guidelines a week ago Friday, the same day the paper’s ombudsman, Andy Alexander, described them for the public with an example of a Post editor who’d coincidentally (!) made some politically charged statements on Twitter that week and had subsequently shut his account down. Two days later, paidContent got its hands on the entire guidelines.

Predictably, the guidelines got hammered online. Among the more thoughtful critiques: The Columbia Journalism Review’s Megan Garber, the Times’ David Carr, Time’s James Poniewozik (probably the strongest criticism), Paul Bradshaw and BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker. Howard Kurtz, the Post’s media critic, offered a tepid defense of his paper’s new rules. The most comprehensive thoughts on the issue came from the apparently indefatigable Steve Buttry, who used the episode to think about social media as conversation, trust at the Post and objectivity in general.

So what was everyone so upset about? For the most part, it came down to two things: The concept that “nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment,” and the subsequent admonition that Post staffers not post anything “that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility.” That seems to pretty well adhere to old-school journalistic values, but it also limits journalists from posting on just about anything online except, as Kurtz put it, “the weather and dessert recipes.”

Here’s my take: The Post and its critics are operating in two different universes, and both are convinced that the public also inhabits their universe as well. In the Post’s universe, the paper operates in a “hyper-sensitive political environment,” as Alexander puts it, in which “many readers already view The Post with suspicion and believe that the personal views of its reporters and editors influence the coverage.” Their new-media-savvy critics live in a world in which “transparency is the new objectivity,” and readers trust “here’s where I’m coming from” more than ostensibly objective journalism.

I think that right now, among most Americans, the Post is right. By and large, American consumers of news are obsessed with bias — perceived or real, disclosed or hidden. The notion of objectivity remains without question their primary frame for interpreting and judging journalism. The statistics bear this out, and I doubt many journalists would tell you otherwise based on their own experiences. Here’s the but: In the long run, the new-media critics are right. We’re headed toward a world in which transparency matters more than objectivity, and it’s not a matter of if, but of when. (Look at the rise of Fox News and MSNBC, for example: Even as they complain about bias, devotees of those two channels know they’re not getting objective news; they know where their news source is coming from ideologically, and it’s the same place they come from. That’s why they like it.)

So for the Post to create social media guidelines that are born out of dealing with a bias-obsessed public is entirely reasonable. After all, that’s who they’re dealing with every day, right? But it’s also short-sighted. The time is coming (and I suspect it isn’t far off) when the tide among most Americans will shift, and they’ll actually understand that a journalist who discloses her biases is more trustworthy than one who pretends she has none. And the Post has virtually assured itself that it will be caught flat-footed once that time comes.

— Must-read of the week: Former Rocky Mountain News editor and publisher John Temple’s speech to the UC-Berkeley Media Technology Summit giving the 14-year-long blow-by-blow of how and why his newspaper failed. It’s one thing to hear self-appointed media mavens bloviate about why newspapers are dying; it’s quite another to hear it from a man who helmed one himself — and doesn’t exempt himself from blame.

— The big tech news of the week was the introduction of Google Wave. Its announcement initially left a lot of non-programmers (like myself) going, “Huh?” Fortunately, Mark Milian of the Los Angeles Times has told us what the Wave could do for journalism. I’m officially excited.

— This week in depressing (but pretty) graphs: mintlife has a nifty-looking set of visuals giving a quick-and-dirty picture of newspapers’ decline.

— If your interest in sports media goes beyond complaining about TV announcers, the National Sports Journalism Center’s new site has been a gold mine of fascinating stuff. Just within the last week, Jason Fry gave sportswriters great tips on how to use their access in a fan-driven world, Eric Deggans offered practical advice for local TV sports departments and Dave Kindred outlined a vision for a better game story. Also on the sports front, Matt Egan of Fox Business wrote a great summary of what ESPN’s local sites might mean for newspapers.

— In the wake of his talk last week at Harvard, Clay Shirky did a “news biopsy” on his hometown paper, the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune. The results were depressing: He found only six staff-written local news articles. The problem? The paper’s list of 53 newsroom staffers includes just six news reporters. Jay Rosen tried an experiment like this earlier this year and generally found the same dearth of locally produced news. Obviously, if someone were to start a new local news organization in any of these towns, it would be much more thinly staffed than the newspaper. That’s the nature of institutions: They just don’t adapt well.

— Another big news announcement this week: NPR is launching a $3 million, two-year pilot project to give a dozen affiliates the tools to focus on providing more local news online. The same day, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy issued a report on the information gap in communities as it relates to maintaining a functioning democracy. The two events are obviously a coincidence, but it’s not hard to see the connection between the two ideas.

— I leave you with two interviews worth reading: One with The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman in which she argues that “press release journalism” is being increasingly exposed as worthless, and another with Columbia professor Dale Maharidge on journalists’ tone-deafness regarding issues of class and poverty. Enjoy.

Related posts:

1. This week in media musings: Obama v. Fox News, and NPR’s social media tact
2. This week in media musings: What real-time search means for news, and journalism subsidies get a hearing
3. This week in media musings: The Demand Media invasion, and ‘objectivity’ trumps transparency

A predictable firestorm erupted, with national media taking notice, Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez going into damage-control mode and Michigan’s already anti-Rodriguez fan base up in arms. But their pitchfork-wielding anger was directed not at Rodriguez, but at the Freep.

I’m not so much interested in the specifics of this story as the trend it illuminates. As former Ann Arbor News sportswriter Jim Carty observed:

The most striking thing about this week was how openly and aggressively most of the media moved to reject the Free Press story out of hand and get down to the business of attacking Mike Rosenberg and the paper.

Carty called the episode a perfect example of “faith-based” coverage, which “sees sports as a diversion, something to be enjoyed and embraced and not examined journalistically the way city hall or a labor union should be.” Carty then examines the rise of this perspective among the media covering Michigan sports, with sports blogs rising to prominence and making significant inroads into the establishment media — and the sports information department’s good graces.

This general trend isn’t anything new — the emergence of the voice of the fan is probably the story of the decade in sports media — but it seems to have been particularly pronounced around Michigan athletics. And last week, we saw a few of its less appealing effects: A perfectly reasonable story (though, as Carty notes, a flawed one) is dismissed out of hand because its author is perceived to have a grudge against the coach, an idea that simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

I can’t help but relate the rise of fan-based coverage of sports with the simultaneous rise of ideologically based political journalism — as in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. I think a quick comparison between the two might be helpful in shedding light on where fan-based sports coverage is prone to falling short.

First, both have provided a refreshing (and necessary) corrective to the dominant “objective” view of news. Partisan journalism has exploded on both the liberal and conservative ends of the political spectrum because people were tired of journalists using the tired “he-said, she-said” strategy and acting as though the truth therefore somehow automatically landed in the middle, when in actuality, truth is hardly ever politically neutral. The voice of the sports fan has provided a counter to professionals’ formulaic, emotionless “no cheering in the press box” journalism that gradually but surely divorced itself from the fan’s perspective. It’s difficult to view these changes as anything but fundamentally good for the areas they’re covering.

Second, both forced those traditional spheres to change as a result. When you see someone pressuring the establishment political media to abandon a “neutral” characterization of an issue in favor of one that’s simply more factually accurate — as in the definition of torture or the “death panels” scare — the vast majority of that pressure is usually coming from the conservative or liberal blogosphere. And they’re starting to wear the hated “MSM’ down. Likewise, mainstream sportswriters have begun to realize that they are writing for fans who want a more human voice than they’re getting, and you’re seeing people who reflect that realistic voice flourish.

Third, both provide a valuable communal space for like-minded people who had previously gone unconnected. As Clay Shirky argues in “Here Comes Everybody,” this has been one of the fundamental societal shifts enacted by the Internet as a whole over the past decade or so. It’s been especially valuable in both these arenas. Both sports fans and political junkies seem to have a particularly strong desire to gather and share thoughts with other like-minded people, and the Internet allowed both to connect with those people far beyond the geographical surroundings to which they were previously limited. It’s incredibly empowering to discuss politics within a cohesive community, and especially convivial (or cathartic) to follow sports among one, too.

Fourth — and here’s the distinctive difference — the political partisans have shown they’ll do investigative journalism, while the sports fans haven’t. Let’s illustrate this with a thought experiment: What if the “objective” establishment media reporting regularly on politics and sports all disappeared? (And from what Carty describes, it’s not that far away in Michigan football.) Would investigative journalism — the practice of digging up something the powers that be don’t want people to know — still exist? In politics, the answer is unequivocally yes: The conservative blogosphere would dig up dirt on liberals and vice versa. How do we know this? Because they’re already doing this. They’re highly motivated to dig into the area they’re covering, because they’re essentially covering their opponents.*

*Whether the American people would choose to trust these sources is another matter. But the work would get done.

But in a solely fan-driven sports media world, investigative reporting would be in big trouble. (The establishment isn’t doing much of that anyway, but I’m comparing fans to their political counterparts right now, not sportswriters.) Why the heck would a Michigan fan or booster go through weeks or months of work to dig up something like the Freep did? Or even with a simpler story like this one, why would they broadcast it within their community? (Don’t believe me? Look at what Michigan fans did to someone who did try to do that.) And there’s no way an Ohio State blog would go through the work to expose it, either: They’re too busy debating about the health of their own backup halfback.

While political partisans are covering their opposition, fans are covering institutions they love. Yes, fans have long shown they’re more than willing to criticize those institutions, but they haven’t shown willingness to devote significant time and resources to find out something (probably negative) that the public doesn’t already know. (To be fair, generalist fan sites like Deadspin have been plenty willing to bring negative stories to light, though those stories often fall on the gossip side of the aisle and usually have to be dropped in their laps.)

That’s a problem, because sports is big business, and especially in college sports, there are plenty of shady dealings going on in just about every corner of the country. While I don’t buy into the “Journalism will die when newspapers are gone! Who will cover the city council meetings? Who?!?” hysteria, I think we have more of a reason to be concerned in sports coverage down the road than in most other areas. Fans may be asserting themselves as the engine that drives sports coverage, but we don’t necessarily want them steering the entire way.

Related posts:

1. This Week in Review: A mobile aggregation dustup, journalists and the link, and fan-based local sports