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February 28, 2010 There are many ways to be involved in sports. You can be an athlete, a fan, or a member of the media covering sporting events. I’m lucky enough to be all three. But there’s a new type of person relating to all subjects, but sports in particular: blogger. That’s where a good friend of mine, Kyle Kujawa, comes in. Kyle worked with me at the Cats’ Eye News for two years when we were at NHS, and I always knew he loved hockey. What I didn’t know is that he would find a fantastic, informative and entertaining outlet for his obsession. It’s hard to say when blogs first became an integral part of the internet; some sources have put it as early at the mid-1990s. But it hasn’t been until recent years that blogs have become widely read. Blogs have pressured Senate leaders to resign, fact-checked Dan Rather and come to the aid of athletic programs besieged by overzealous investigation. It was a blog of sorts, the Drudge Report, that played a key role in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. MGoBlog is the foremost source of University of Michigan sports, read more widely than any other college sports blog in the country. With blogs increasing rapidly in popularity, and a desperate need nagging at Kyle to find “a creative outlet for the hockey-related thoughts that torture him throughout the day,” Kyle started his second blog Babcock’s Death Stare. It’s now my number one source for Red Wings information. Kyle puts countless hours into his blog, writing a recap of every game the Wings play, and investigating hockey prospects near and far. And unlike diatribes from Drew Sharp or any other columnist at a traditional newspaper, Kyle’s blog, like most, sheds some light onto what the writer himself is up to. That’s an aspects Kyle thinks most important in drawing in his readers. “I've found that, even though I'm nothing more than a fan, people seem to like being able to bounce ideas off me…” he said, adding that most Detroit columnists tend to be less visible than the usual blogger. Of course, time is everyone’s most valuable resource. With readership of many blogs rapidly increasing, and newspapers in major cities struggling, delivering print editions only a few days a week, you have to wonder what effect this army of bloggers is having on the conventional media market. Kyle doesn’t see blogs are a direct cause of the decline of newspapers however. As he points out, most bloggers get their news from team beat writers. Where would the blogs be without those beat writers? Further, “blogs are not a substitute for journalism—anyone can blog and develop a following if what they say is interesting enough (whether or not it's even accurate),” according to Kujawa. He might be right. Instead of fearing this change, and decrying blogs as a source of “misinformation” or just plain bad information, we should probably just take them with a grain of salt, like any single source of information. Without the obligatory political correctness of newspapers and other mainstream media, blogs often hit the nail on the head more often than not, in my opinion. I think we’re blessed to have so many entertaining sources of information today, thanks to the extraordinary passion and commitment of people like Kyle. If you’d like to see Kyle’s thoughts on the Red Wings season, Jimmy Howard, how he named his blog, and why you should watch hockey, see the full transcript of my interview with him HERE. (c) 2010 Novi
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