1. Welcome to SportsJournalists.com, a friendly forum for discussing all things sports and journalism.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register for a free account to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Access to private conversations with other members.
    • Fewer ads.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

The history of sports journalism on the internet

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by SteveJRogers, Jun 8, 2009.

Page 2 of 4
  1. anonymousprick

    anonymousprick Member

    Don't shortchange Sportsline here. ESPN registered their domain first, but Sportsline was the first to really create the sort of newsroom model most of the major sites more or less run by today.
     
    anonymousprick, Jun 8, 2009
    #13
  2. onetwo88

    onetwo88 Member

    The BIG original basketball websites that created the blueprint for independent sport-specific sites were:

    http://www.hoopstv.com
    http://www.nbatalk.com
    http://www.insidehoops.com

    Those were the original big famous pro basketball websites from the late 1990's
    They were all written about in magazines and newspapers in the late 90's and early 2000's
    hoopstv and nbatalk shut down long ago (someone appears to have the hoopstv.com name now but it's not the same), and chad ford from nbatalk went to espn.com

    Any independent basketball website you've heard of today was more or less based fairly exactly on what one or more of those 3 sites were doing
     
    onetwo88, Jun 8, 2009
    #14
  3. SoCalDude

    SoCalDude Active Member

    When we first started using it, I typed in www.californiaangels.com, and got an escort service in Santa Ana.
     
    SoCalDude, Jun 9, 2009
    #15
  4. Cadet

    Cadet Guest

    Yeah, I wouldn't include this in any kind of paper or project. Maybe that's just me.
     
    Cadet, Jun 9, 2009
    #16
  5. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    I completely forgot about Nando. Damn. Corrected.

    ESPN is still around. ... I am sure one of the closed pre-WWW dial-up services had something that you could call more of a pioneer, for example on CompuServe. But in terms of the web, and sites that are still around, was anyone earlier to the show than ESPN? Did Sportsline launch around the same time?
     
    The Big Ragu, Jun 9, 2009
    #17
  6. whipcityblues

    whipcityblues New Member

    Sportsline launched in 1996. If you're looking to profile the pioneers of sports journalism on the web, don't forget about Mike Kahn, who unfortunately is no longer with us.

    http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/8965614/Mike-Kahn:pioneer-of-Web-journalism,-loving-father

    http://browniepoints.mlblogs.com/archives/2008/12/mike_kahn_a_great_boss_and_eve.html
     
    whipcityblues, Jun 9, 2009
    #18
  7. TopOfTheCircle

    TopOfTheCircle Member

    Usenet discussion groups were around a lot longer than the WWW ever was. Many sports (and other entities such as wrestling, etc.) were being discussed ad nauseum before phpBB boards such as the one I'm posting to now.

    Also, the Harvard men's swim team was a WWW pioneer -- it was, I think, the 63rd page that was ever created. I seem to remember that number since you had to type in numbers in UNIX in order to be transported to a Web page (this, of course, before clickable hyperlinks and this thing called Netscape).
     
    TopOfTheCircle, Jun 9, 2009
    #19
  8. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    Top, my first Usenet post ever was in 1987 and it blew me away. It was on a hockey newsgroup, along the lines of what you are talking about. I had a question and a guy from Canada responded within an hour, and it blew me away. My account was through my university and I dialed up with a 9600 baud modem, probably. Your computer (an IBM PS 2 with a 286 processor, in my case) didn't get its own IP address then, so I had to dial up to a VAX machine that the university owned, and my computer was turned into a dummy terminal, although that huge VAX machine was a toy compared to what is on people's desktops nowadays. Everything was UNIX based. I can't remember what the client for usenet was, but I remember reading e-mail with PINE.
     
    The Big Ragu, Jun 9, 2009
    #20
  9. 93Devil

    93Devil Well-Known Member

    Yahoo investing in a very good fantasy sports feature should not be overlooked, and neither should www.baseball-reference.com.
     
    93Devil, Jun 9, 2009
    #21
  10. Shaggy

    Shaggy Guest

    I seem to remember mariners.org being the first WWW site of a major league baseball team.
     
    Shaggy, Jun 9, 2009
    #22
  11. SteveJRogers

    SteveJRogers New Member

    Yeah, I'm considering B-R.com and all of its subsidiaries and other like reference sites the murder weapon of all the yearly guide and record books put out by all the leagues and such.

    Anyone even know why the NFL and NHL still publish their books? They can't be selling all that well can they, no matter whom is the cover boy of the year?
     
    SteveJRogers, Jun 9, 2009
    #23
  12. Diego Marquez

    Diego Marquez Member

    Yahoo was one of the first places I turned in 1994 when I got on the Net using Prodigy or CompuServe.
    I remember USA Today having a pretty impressive Web setup early in the Net world.
    I also remember living at sportspages.com and going region-by-region to look at local newspapers for coverage of my favorite teams (home papers and road, when applicable). It was a daily stop-off for me.
     
    Diego Marquez, Jun 9, 2009
    #24
Page 2 of 4
Draft saved Draft deleted

Share This Page