Most of you know by now about the dustup on Bob Costas' little roundtable thingy on HBO a couple of nights ago. Buzz Bissinger of Friday Night Lights fame launched into a tirade against Will Leitch of Deadspin, and now folks are hashing out the implications.

I've actually been a little bit in Leitch's position once (though thankfully it wasn't on TV) and it isn't a lot of fun. What's happened is that the news industry as a whole has been put under an enormous amount of pressure to stay relevant in the internet age. The end result has been that a lot of friends of people like Buzz Bissinger have found their jobs and livelihoods at risk from a new source of competitors. This is a lot of what happened with Moneyball as well, folks saw that the jobs of scouts and "baseball men" were being threatened by stat geeks and they were unamused.

So it's only natural to see folks lash out at people they perceive to be threats to themselves or their friends. I wonder though if folks are trying to defend territory they had little hope of keeping in the first place. I mean at some point we need to stop being concerned about the effects new competitors have on the telegraph and horse and buggy industries and start looking at who achieves the task at hand the best.

The beat writer maintain's his necessity with access. While some might do better with some variation on the "Get quote from player. Get quote from manager. Write story around those qutes." model of beat reporting, they still have access to things most of the masses do not. Many sports columnists however seem too willing to fall back on styled prose devoid of substance or insight. And as pretty as some of their writing might be, sports fans can't be blamed if they turn to someone who less artfully conveys ideas to them they didn't know about before. Because bloggers and other folks on the internet have a much wider variety of expertise than a room full of sports reporters, they often have the ability to see and explain things that the traditional sports media doesn't "get." Predictably some in the sports writing industry have taken the stance that "if we don't know about it, it isn't worthwhile" and that I think hurts them.

I don't really have much else to say specifically about Bissinger's comments, other than if you really want to put down the blog uprising, learn to do what they do but do it better than they can. I think he'll find that to be very difficult. A thousand average intelligence people know more than one genius.