Press Row

What the heck are Abbott Lines? Well, it’s our own little take on news one-liners, influenced by TrueHoop’s Henry Abbott.

For those of you unfamiliar with Abbott or TrueHoop, it’s an NBA blog—formerly, a very successful independent blog before getting snatched up by ESPN (and still very successful). For any basketball fan, it is an absolute alpha-dog must read, in my opinion. Even for those of you only slightly interested in basketball, it’s for sure worth a peek.

Plenty of sports sites and blogs use some form of one-liners—usually, a one-sentence or so summary of a piece of news. What Abbott does, however, is instead of just summarizing the point of the story, he pastes in a key phrase or point from the original story—of course, giving proper credit as well.

This is a really great format, and it helps accomplish what we want to do here. While Press Row will certainly become a tool to track the evolution of sports media, we also need to make sure we point out the talent that already exists.

So, we’ll take a survey around a) well-said opinions, b) breaking news, and c) what the most influential people had to say, and piece it together. During the NFL off-season (NFL will be our original focus here for the time being), we’ll do this once a week. By the start of the regular season (maybe before), we’ll do it every day. Keep in mind that this isn’t only print media—we’ll travel across the blogosphere, too.

Feel free to pass along any really nice quotes or snippets from the media world. If there’s a blog that just continually makes great points that you think deserves some air time, send it over. (that includes your own!)