Bring it

MLBAM is launching its own online, opinion-based “tabloid” in May:

MLB Advanced Media will formally announce today that in May it will debut what’s meant to be a online baseball newspaper featuring columnists, including NBC/MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann . . .

. . . Bowman says the as-yet unnamed site will try to offer “a newspaper look — big pictures and big headlines — because it’s an effective way to communicate. Not necessarily ‘Headless Man Found in Topless Bar’ headlines, but we want a tabloid look. We don’t want it to just look like news items and a series of blogs.” Sounds pretty 20th century. But that’s OK, says Bowman: “I like to think there are columnists who are out there and not being read like columnists were when I was growing up — and the only thing against them is that they’re, say, 52. That doesn’t disqualify them for me.”

Bowman says mlb.com gets a whopping 60 million unique users per month, which is higher than its Nielsen traffic measurements, during baseball season. But Bowman says he doesn’t want the new site “to just be an adjunct” of mlb.com: “The facts are on mlb.com. But people like to read what people think.”

Let’s see, fiftysomething ex-newspaper men writing opinions about baseball while being paid by Major League Baseball. I can’t wait until I read the tenth version of “Commissioner Selig: Merely great, or the greatest ever?”

Not that I’m complaining. I’ve been putting off bookmarking all of the columnists I can’t stand in one single folder, and now that they’ll all be arranged in a virtual barrel, it will make my duck-shooting all the easier.


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brian
14 years ago

The problem isn’t the age of the writers, it’s the availability and accessibility of information. To take an example from an earlier link, we don’t necessarily need to read a column to see that Mike Scioscia is trotting out some strange lineups, because we don’t need to dig the sports pages out of the brown paper bag of old papers to compare the lineup choices of the last few days or week. baseball-reference.com gives us all that and more.

brian
14 years ago

The problem isn’t the age of the writers, it’s the availability and accessibility of information. To take an example from an earlier link, we don’t necessarily need to read a column to see that Mike Scioscia is trotting out some strange lineups, because we don’t need to dig the sports pages out of the brown paper bag of old papers to compare the lineup choices of the last few days or week. baseball reference dot com gives us all that and more.

Wooden U. Lykteneau
14 years ago

Duck? Isn’t a platypus a flightless mammal?

APBA Guy
14 years ago

Excellent snark. I was reading the blurb thinking “Oh no, just when I thought I was through with (fill in the blank).”

As you said, they’ll all be there in one spot for your delectation.

blaze
14 years ago

Oh no. Few adore Olbermann more than I, but I think he’s jumped the snark and landed in shrill invective. Maybe a return to the relative civility of baseball commentary (as compared to politics) will tame the acidity.