Press Row

There’s a little bit of explaining I’d like to do about what exactly this site is going to focus around. In the future, this little diatribe will be available in Press Row’s About Us section.

The role of the “media” in sports today—or rather, the identity of the media—is undergoing an irreversible evolution right before our eyes. I use those two words rather carefully, and I think, purposefully.

I don’t mean to make this sound so melodramatic, but “irreversible” and “evolution” are really the only two words I can use to describe this. It’s irreversible because the direction it’s taking is one that incorporates so many unique tools and mediums and ideas that simply weren’t available until recently.

And it’s an “evolution” for similar reasons. You see, this kind of “evolution” is happening all across the media world. Some of you already realize that. Anyone who frequents the home pages of USA Today or CNN see that USA Today is no longer just a newspaper, while CNN is no longer just about a TV network.

The way people digest information is changing—evolving. To say it’s an evolution is to say it’s, in theory, an improvement over the previous generation.

But, we knew all of that already. The explosion of online media and digital content has been going on for more than 10 years now.

What we have yet to realize, however, is that the online media world is rapidly reaching a very, very important point of its development and usefulness. That’s a key topic we’ll be focusing on a lot here: the future of online media in the sports world. We’re going to be doing some really inventive and interesting things here to try to get a handle on this new media community that has grown to life over the past several years.

On the flip side, as the online media grows and grows, what happens to the print industry? Who will survive, and how will they do it?

We’re going to take a slightly different approach to answering these questions. Not much news is going to be breaking here; I read plenty of websites and blogs that are real professionals about digging for news. I don’t need to try to compete with them. Other media realms are facing similar issues—like, in politics and technology—and we’ll see exactly how they’re dealing with it, in comparison to the sports world.

Also, everyone seems to have an opinion on these issues. We’ll see who we can stick a microphone in front of to get a few of those ideas in flesh and blood…er, in semiconductors and plastic.

More to come.