Box Score Beat

Just Click It — 7/6/09

Posted on 06. Jul, 2009 by Collin Orcutt in Just Click It, NFL

I know, I know, I’m a day late. Blame it on the holiday weekend. It was a busy one in the world of sports–busy enough that I spent mine covering an event. More on that later, but for now, the clicks.

• Jockipedia. Excuse me? Yeah, Jockipedia. This weekend, Richard Sandomir of NY Times‘ introduced us to Jockipedia — a site dedicated to centralizing every athlete and league’s social networking pages. If this site fills out (few athletes have full profiles yet), it will surely become one of the first places I hit any time I’m looking for athlete information.
• We’re still in the midst of learning the details about Steve McNair’s sad death, but while those work their way to the surface, give Michael Lombardi’s tribute a read. Quality praise from someone knowledgeable enough about the finer points of the game to know.
• Here’s an article from 10,000 Words about the 10 ways to improve online sports journalism (thanks to all those who gave me a heads up on this). What I found most interesting about this post was that none of these ideas struck me as ground breaking. That’s not to say that the article is base (or that I am of superior intelligence), though. Rather, I think it speaks to the progressive nature of sports journalism in utilizing the full capabilities of the internet.
• Nieman Journalism Lab put together an excellent four-part series on the topic of a sports media that is so often working for the leagues it is covering. My favorite of the four parts was the third installment, “When the league owns the network — and pays the journalists: A new set of ethical questions arise,” but the entire series deserves your attention.
• Lastly, a piece that a good friend and colleague of mine, Lia Calabro, wrote about the 2009 Nathan’s hot dog eating contest. The event is one of the strangest things I have ever seen in person and she captured it brilliantly. Also, while we’re at it, a little shameless self promotion (that term has become absurdly cliche since Twitter’s popularity boom by the way): check out the video piece I put together from the same event.

Enjoy the reading all.