New York Times: StatSheet Is Writing Sports Stories With Software
Tuesday, 30 November 2010, 11:42
"StatSheet, a Durham, N.C., company that serves up sports statistics in monster-size portions, … is working to endow software with the ability to turn game statistics into articles about college basketball games."
Nieman Journalism Lab: GameChanger sees a business model in baseball scores
Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 14:26
"GameChanger is trying to monetize not just sports-related content, but sports scoring in general. Via, in particular, a mobile app that coaches and other scorekeepers can use to tabulate the scores of their games. And which they can also use — here’s where we get interested — to automatically distribute those scores to local media. … the platform facilitates targeted — highly targeted — crowdsourcing: via the GameChanger app, baseball and softball scorekeepers use their iPhones or iPads to file the detailed scores of their games, in real time. Those data then get beamed to GameChanger’s central servers, which tally up box scores."
Wired: Game Changers: How Videogames Trained a Generation of Athletes
Sunday, 7 February 2010, 17:39
"For more than 30 years, sports videogames have been focused on simulating real-life athletics more and more perfectly. But over the past decade, games have moved beyond just imitating the action on the field. Now they’re changing it."
Guardian: Interactive 2010 sport calendar
Tuesday, 5 January 2010, 09:49
Great idea from the Guardian – make your annual sports calendar available online as a shared public Google Calender.
Los Angeles Times: A new spin on inside stories
Wednesday, 30 September 2009, 12:59
James Rainey: Various people and organisations who "think the news media no longer cover the universe — or their corner of it — adequately and all have hired journalists of their own. … Those who once were merely subjects of news coverage increasingly will be looking for ways to write the story themselves. … "
New York Times: As Coverage Wanes, Los Angeles Kings Hires Its Own Reporter
Monday, 28 September 2009, 06:49
"If your business depends on free publicity from newspapers, what do you do when the papers can no longer afford to send reporters to cover you? In professional sports, the answer, increasingly, is hire your own."
Alastair Campbell: A lifetime’s ambition fulfilled
Saturday, 8 August 2009, 16:21
Alastair Campbell: "I have … signed up to write a weekly column on Burnley for the new AOL website http://football.fanhouse.co.uk."
Online Video Watch: ESPN Drives Another Stake Into Newspapers
Thursday, 23 July 2009, 20:48
"For ESPN it’s a natural extension, in Chicago a 3-5 minute local version of SportsCenter is available online daily, and the company can leverage its scale to reach much more specific niche audience. For newspapers it’s a competitor they may never be able to beat."
New York Times: ESPN Aims to Be the Home Team, All Over America
Monday, 20 July 2009, 23:28
"ESPN is taking aim at hometown sports coverage, threatening one of the last strongholds of local newspapers and television stations. … after a promising test run in Chicago, ESPN is adding local offshoots to three more cities."
New York Times: High School Football Formation: Offense of the Future, or Just Unfair?
Saturday, 13 June 2009, 10:03
Malcolm Gladwell's recent discussion of the full-court press in basketball as an example of insurgent innovation reminded me of this story about the A-11 offense in American football. Underdogs use it to beat conventional tactics and some in the game's establishment think it's unfair or unsporting. Boohoo.
The New Yorker: Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath
Saturday, 13 June 2009, 09:26
Malcolm Gladwell: "When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He couldn’t fight the establishment, because he was the establishment."
AllThingsD: The NCAA Blows the Whistle on Twitter’s “March Tweetness”
Saturday, 4 April 2009, 09:06
"{Federated Media] has taken down [March Tweetness] at the request of the National Collegiate Athletic Association … The college sports group, which keeps a tight grip on any and all trademarks related to its teams, games and tournaments, says the site infringed on its copyrights."
WSJ.com: Digits: ESPN Plans Local Sports Sites
Tuesday, 24 February 2009, 21:40
"Add ESPN to the list of national news outlets positioning themselves to capitalize on the demise of local newspapers. … ESPN hopes ESPNChicago.com will be the first of a series of new sites that will deepen its online penetration in local markets, following an increasingly popular approach for major content providers."
SEOmoz: An Example Of Why Content is King – The Guardian Chalkboards
Monday, 9 February 2009, 00:31
"Guardian Chalkboard [is] an online application which has data from the past three years for every premiership football match with data about tackles, passes, shots, throw-ins etc etc for every single player! That's an incredible amount of data and it allows you to draw virtual chalkboards and compare matches and players."
