There is a war going on in Bristol and the good guys are beginning to win. Somewhere within the headquarters of ESPN there is group of honchos who hate blogs. They have probably been with ESPN for over a decade and are utterly dismissive of the up and coming media channel that is nibbling on the the toes of The Worldwide Leader in Sports. Then there are ESPN personalities, the staffers, the average sports fanatic who squeezed into ESPN within the last couple of years and love blogs as a complimentary more pure direct channel to the beat of sports in America. ESPN has done a lot on the surface to try to embrace blogs. They launched a espn.com blog network in late summer. This effort was and still is pretty lame as the writers are not true bloggers by any sense, but rather traditional journalists for ESPN told to wear a blogger hat, because suddenly its cool. God only knows how ESPN will butcher Twitter sometime in 2009.
But ESPN got more serious when they launched the ESPN True hoop Network of blogs. Although its hard to tell how succesful this venture has been, it was pretty low risk and was in the proper spirit of blogging.
So the powers to be this past week trotted out another attempt at capitalizing on the growing blog trend. It was a tremendous failure at first.
ESPN unveiled a new feature called “Blog Buzz” which is supposed to be a high level view of what the sports blogosphere is chatting about. The problem?
Well first off, it’s basis for the buzz is a tool called Sports Media Challenges’s Buzz Manager, which is not exactly embraced as the pulse or the authority on the sports blogosphere. I don’t think anyone up until now really knew of their product or of that company. I am kind of skeptical myself of their methodology.
More importantly though, Blog Buzz first two blogs shown were actually not blogs at all. They were an espn article that they call a blog and a newspaper article which they label as a blog.
But here is where it gets interesting. A mere 24 hours after falling flat on its face, ESPN remedied the situation with an on air apology and explanation. This segment has a lot of great potential and its great to see the powers to be admitting their first attempt was pretty much garbage.
