April 10, 2007
On ESPN Radio, Colin Cowherd And The Big Lead
I had a house full of company for Easter Weekend, so I'm a day late and a dollar short when it comes to Colin Cowherd's ill-conceived DoS* attack on The Big Lead that took place late last week. Needless to say I'm right with the folks at The Big Lead, people who have done nothing different than what I've been doing at Off Wing for more than five years now: Simply speaking my mind about the world of sports.
Which is why we all ought to be concerned about what happened. ESPN and all of its properties are a looming presence in sports journalism -- and that presence can be positive one day (witness ESPN The Magazine's work on the death of Pat Tillman), and banal the next (ESPN Hollywood just for starters).
As great as it is that ESPN has seen fit to employ an ombudsman with some teeth, the folks who are really going to hold ESPN accountable are people like you and me -- committed sports fans who aren't satisfied with simply consuming sports media, but readers, viewers and listeners who want to participate in and shape the conversation about the games we love.
What's so incredibly disappointing about this story is just how shallow Cowherd is, and how he'll probably take the wrong lesson away from this incident. Here Cowherd has an audience that will go to a Web site at his direction, and all he has them do when they get there is tear it down. Instead, why not engage that audience in a conversation that will extend his reach outside of his regular on-air slot? Why not treat them as something more than lemmings, actually listen to what they have to say and reward them for their loyalty?
Unfortunately, that means answering for what you say and do. It means giving other folks a fair shot once you've taken yours. And sometimes it means sitting back and taking a licking and then admitting, God forbid, that you were wrong.
Unfortunately, that's not the way a sports jock talks. But it is the way normal people talk, and it's the sort of way that they prefer to be addressed.
Over the course of the past season inside the Caps press box, I've met plenty of folks in Cowherd's business, and not everyone is like him. Some are doing their level best to embrace this new medium in hopes they can leverage their chosen profession into something more. There are others who are struggling to understand it, and scrambling to get in front of the parade lest it run them over.
And yes, finally, there are folks like Cowherd who would rather attack what they can't understand than embrace something that could transform the way they work, even as they see a collapsing print and broadcast ad market force their employers to cut reporting positions again and again.
Granted, this is all pretty easy for me to say. After all, I haven't invested my life's work in a profession only to see it being swept away by technological change. But the mistake that too many people in print, broadcast and radio keep making is failing to experiment with ways to meld the heart and soul of what they do with a new medium that offers far greater power and flexibility than anything that's come before.
If all of that was good about the old way of doing business was to get swept away along with the newsprint, the old call letters and broadcast frequencies, it would be a real shame. Here's hoping more people figure that out in time.
*CORRECTION: It was a "Denial of Service" or "DoS" attack, not a "DNS" attack as I first noted. I've since made a correction. Thanks to Susan Farrell for pointing out the error.
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12:23 AM