GPD08: Good People In Sports Blogger Land
This is a little outside the box for this site, but crazy wine enthusiast, social network proponent and JET FAN Gary Vaynerchuk has challenged folks to talk about the “Good People” they know on the web today declaring it Good People Day 2008. This is a guy who made Conan O’Brien eat dirt on national television … who am I to argue? Here’s five entries for me …
Jeff Clark – Jeff is one of my best friends in the world, and a guy I would trust with my life. His blog, Celticsblog was the inspiration for me to do this site. Yes, he’s a Pats fan, but don’t hold it against him. He’s the most good-natured fan of sports you could meet. Heck, the guy even wrote a treatise to his New England brethren about not being That Boston Fan. You’ve got to be a a saint to try that one.
Michael David Smith — Seriously, beyond a caffeine drip into his bloodstream I don’t know how the man does it. He writes for every publication or website you’ve heard of … AOL, ProFootballTalk, CollegeFootballTalk, the NY Sun, Football Outsiders, and he’s guested everywhere (the NY Times, Fox, you name it). He’s one of the most diligent writers I’ve seen, seeks others opinions (he often bounces his thoughts about the Jets off me before he writes something) but comes up with stunning articles like this week’s scathing article on Peter King and sympathetic treatment of John Mara having to charge his fans PSLs.
Jamie Mottram — Yes, it’s an oversimplification, but Will Leitch is the champion of parody and satire of sports and media, while Mottram is champion of infiltrating media for sports blogging … although I would never say that both are mutually exclusive. Although FanHouse wasn’t exactly the right fit for me, Mottram gave me my first forum nationally and I’ll never forget that. Mottram is a fellow JMUer (we Dukes are taking over sports blogging!! Mottram, TheBigLead, Celticsblog …) and he fought for, set up and built FanHouse for AOL, and is now working for Yahoo! Sports doing even more with them.
Tom Rock — What can I say? I’m biased to folks who actually answer emails I send them. Rock is one of the newer reporters on the Jets beat for Newsday but he gets blogging, and consistently does a solid job in sharing what he can as quickly as he can. He also understands though that blogs are best served as a seperate space with different style than his normal stuff for fishwrap consumption.
Matt Cerrone — He’s been a HUGE proponent of mine, been extremely helpful in guiding me along the way. We talked about building a New York based sports blogging community three years ago, and now we are doing it together at SNY. I couldn’t be more happy for his success and to work with him.
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Pshaw!
[...] writing last week that I thought Tom Rock was a good person, he went out and broke my heart … it would seem he’s going to be covering the Jersey [...]