ESPN.com "hyper local" expanding to Dallas, LA, NY

Haven't seen anything posted on this yet. This guy has a pretty interesting take on the whole deal.

 

Probably best to start with the top four markets.

 

I was watching an ESPY remake tonight and thinking to myself. Erin Andrews is hot, but she's allegedly a journalist who has crossed into celebrity status. A very troublesome thought: ESPN has made its people that way. And now this. They'll team with rivals or some site like that and hammer even the preps people across the country. It makes me hate ESPN. They're getting bigger and bigger and no one seems to be able to stop them. It's like watching the Yankees of the 1920s or 1990s.

 

Would be easier to hate ESPN for this if the papers weren't doing a bang-up job of killing themselves all on their own.

 

Pretty sickening. It's like watching the neighborhood's Bill Gates, though a nerd he had a brain that would have the next-door toughie mowing his yard, getting his ass whipped as an adult.

 

Yup. This is NOT good for newspapers, and only reinforces the belief that smaller papers are the only ones that have a shot in hell of surviving. ESPN certainly has the resources, staff and power to significantly affect major metro papers.

 

What kind of crews do they have working on these projects?

 

Figured this was coming when they went on a shopping spree a year or so ago.
Figure Boston, Atlanta and Denver will be next.

I'm waiting for word that they'll start offering their stuff to local papers for free. I guarantee publishers will jump at it.

 

It's the poor top-down administration that has killed papers, not (necessarily) the lack of local coverage. At papers with the resources to do it I still see plenty of bang-on hyper local coverage. This is the further growth of sports journalism's WalMart and I fail to see any real positive to it.

 

So what do they do in Chicago? I am not familiar with this at all. Does anyone have a link to a Web site?

 

Never looked. But they sure promo the hell out of it.

 

ESPNchicago.com

They use AP for everything with some columnists and bloggers to kick the Sun-Times and Trib's ass. Cheap and a big money maker...obviously.