What to the New York
Times and Grantland’s Blog have in common? The Knicks, a team that no one
in New York expected to be good since Patrick Ewing left. Who could blame them?
I mean really Landry
Fields is on the starting roster; Mike D’Antoni is probably even wondering why.
And the emergence of Jeremy Lin the Harvard graduate who can slice the lane
like nobodies business and score more in his first four games than any NBA star
who ever lived. Granted the first four games of a superstar’s career tell you
almost nothing about the player, but beating Kobe and the Lakers in New York?
That will turn many heads; including Kobe’s. The Times has a sports section,
and their article on Jeremy Lin is, well, disappointing. Being a sports writer
for a newspaper like the New York Times would be awful. Instead of talking
about the fact that a single player has most of the city flat on their asses in
front of a TV watching on game day; the writers at The Times get to talk about
how Jeremy Lin has raised the stock and ticket prices of Madison Square Garden.
That’s the boring part of this “Linsanity”; the exciting part is what the
bloggers at Grantland can talk about. They can use emotion and say fuck in
their articles whereas the only people saying that at The Times would be the
editors.
This
blog could be seen as apart of a press sphere because it’s a way that people
get their news. It’s all incredibly informative with the added bonus that you
get to read what the authors personally have to say about specific sports
events.
Interesting differences in coverage of the Lin story between the Times and Grantland. Is it mainly the emotion and greater freedom in writing that makes the Grantland pieces more entertaining than what you're reading? Or are there significant differences in purpose and audience, too?
ReplyDeleteI think the writers at Grantland have much more freedom to say what they want to because they are blogging whereas at the Times whatever they write is trimmed down by editors. The freedom of being able to write more freely leads to emotion because that's what is usually edited out at the Times.
ReplyDeleteI think the purpose is generally the same, which is to tell everyone about the up and coming Jeremy Lin. However, the way they go about it is different because Grantland talks about his opponents and how he's their turning heads and the Times talks about how he's turning the heads of people on Wall Street with the rising stock prices of MSG.
There's definitely a difference in audience also. Someone who follows basketball a lot wouldn't turn to the Times as their first source of information and vice versa.