Why Does this Keep Happening?

Is he stupid? Or just mean.

Every so often in Washington we hear about how the Redskins and owner Dan Snyder are lashing out at the media, or creating their own internet to give unfiltered or grinding axes by firing people or lamenting media coverage of the team by people that just don't know shit. Hell, even I have gotten email from the team challenging my coverage.

There is another spasm, and it is a good one and happening right now.

Background: Back in November 2010, just two and a half months ago, The Washington City Paper's excellent Dave McKenna, something of a bete noire to Dan Snyder, see here, here, here, here, here and here if you still are not sure, published an enterprise piece called The Cranky Redskins Fan's Guide to Dan Snyder, complete with an embellished photo of the owner with a unibrow, drooping mustache, pointed goatse and best of all, devil horns.

It is long and mad and beautiful, go and read it (op. cit.) right now before you go any further.


Present Day: Dan Snyder's legal apparatus, featuring the onmipresent David Donovan and newcomer Hollywood attorney Patty Glaser, have threatened legal action against the City Paper and or its ownership hierarchy, it did not go unnoticed by me or Huffington Post's / DCist's Jason Linkins that the lawyer letters did not go to the writer, nor to the editor, nor to the publisher of the City Paper, nor to the holding company that owns the paper, but in fact went to the hedge fund that owns the company that owns the paper.

Not only is Dan Snyder threatening legal action, he wants the City Paper to fire the piece's author, Dave McKenna (op. cit.), though I cannot find that reference in the legal letters being exchanged amongst the parties (links below).

Today Amy Austin, Publisher of The Washington City Paper, posted an open letter to readers summarizing the story, the paper is standing by the reporting and does not properly acknowledge Dan Snyder's arguments because, frankly, the paper has not formally heard of them, what with the legalese being directed at organizations above the paper that have no direct involvement in the production or vetting of the paper's content. As of this moment, Dan Snyder nor his representatives have accepted the paper's invitation to write a response or meet with editors.


What It All Means: Let me give you the tl;dr up front here for a change: DO NOT PICK A FIGHT WITH THE GUY THAT OWNS THE INK BARREL.

I really do not understand what the possible benefit could be from this action by the team. Why spend so much time and energy to squash one ant, or one anthill? Surely Dan Snyder understands it is not Dave McKenna per se, it is the suckitude. As long as the Redskins keep looking incompetent year after year all those Dan Snyder missteps and fuckups cannot get into the rearview and we can never really joke about those bad old days, a notion Dave himself motivates more eloquently in the introduction to his November piece (op. cit.)

And reading through the first of the three legal exchanges posted in their entirety on Amy's post today (op. cit.) reveals a very interesting tidbit: Dan Snyder is essentially accusing Atalaya Capital Management, the hedge fund that owns the holding company that owns the City Paper, of manipulating coverage of the Redskins to harm Dan Snyder's Red Zone Capital Equity investment operation, which competes against Atalaya in restaurant and media operations.

Returning to the content of Dave McKenna's piece, it is pretty damning, most of it recognizable by me, some I had never heard of, like Dan Snyder leaving cartons of vanilla ice cream to melt in former defensive coordinator Mike Nolan's office to protest his schemes, and all of it backed by links.

Kevin Ewoldt at Hogs Haven, a Redskins insider since he landed top level interviews during the ticket fiasco of 2009, posts up the crux of the biscuit, that while Dan Snyder may pretend to be mad about contrived attacks on his cancer survivor wife and blatantly laughable charges of Antisemitism in the devil image of the owner, the main issue appears to be a reference to a legal settlement by Snyder Communications for large scale forgery of customer signatures, thousands of them, effectively switching the victim's telephone provider without his or her knowledge, the settlement was in the millions.

Kevin actually spoke to Redskins attack dog David Donovan, who pointed out that Dan Snyder had sold Snyder Communications more than a year before the settlement, leading Kevin to wonder if a rewording or fact check on that one line of the piece and all this might have been avoided.

There is some question and some wiggle room here, the Hogs Haven provided link to the legal settlement dates it in April 2001, and does not mention Dan Snyder by name, so every reference in this legal news brief to quote Snyder unquote is referring to Snyder Communications, not Dan Snyder, and this would include payments, they do not appear from the wording of the piece to be coming from Dan Snyder personally.

The other Hogs Haven provided link is to the sale of Snyder Communications to a French firm, dated February 2000, yep, fourteen months before the settlement. Of note in this piece is a reference to Dan Snyder's planned departure... after the transition to new ownership. That date is unknown by me.

Therefore it does leave some question as to Dan's involvement with the operation while the thousands of slamming offenses were taking place, it is established in law that leaving a concern does not absolve you of malfeasance undertaken prior to your departure, and the fourteen months between the sale of Snyder Communications and the legal settlement minus the transition time before Dan actually left, well he may have been there and still had an executive position when the bad stuff was happening. That would make him a party to the case.

If so, that would make David Donovan's statements to Kevin Ewoldt on the matter misleading at best and inaccurate at worst. The only way to know is to know exactly when the transgressions in the lawsuit occurred and when Dan Snyder left the company, something we likely will only find out if it goes to court.

Which it will not.

And The Washington City Paper will not fire Dave McKenna.

As expensive as the Dan Snyder legal machine want to position litigation to be, the courts do not look favorably upon free speech cases replete with factual evidence to the public figure subject's incompetence, simply because the subject got all butthurt when he read it.


Dan, stop attacking the media, stop trying to build your own media fortress, just run the frigging team and give us a winner on the field. All the attacking will stop if the team wins, just look at the trainwreck that was Jack Kent Cooke's family and no one gave a shit. Just give us a winner and it all goes away.



Dan Snyder: Getty Images from here.

Talk About Rapid Response

Ouch

Go Skins dot Org, the great abstract cartoonist of the Redskins, already has artistic reaction up, Albert Haynesworth and Donovan McNabb just chilling together on the bench. Go check the rest out here.

The Benching is now a national news story, not sure what Mike Shanahan was going for here, he sure looks like an asshole right about now.



Albert Haynesworth and Donovan McNabb on the bench together: A GoSkins.org cartoon from here via here.

Come On Washington Post, Get It Together

Like the Redskins: Great idea, poor execution

Back in September, just a couple of games into the 2010 season, the Washington Post launched an iPhone app called Football Insider, a brilliant play designed to bolster the flow of eyeballs to what is already consistently the most popular topic of coverage for the paper, the Washington Redskins.

A great appliance app in concept and basic design, Football Insider pipes Redskins related content in three categories: stories, game coverage and photos. Stories are subdivided into blogs, featuring Redskins Insider, DC Sports Bog and Hard Hits with LaVar Arrington, articles from the print edition and columns; game coverage includes play by play, box score and general info like weather and for home games traffic and stadium transit; the photos are the same galleries as the paper publishes with game recaps.

Considering how much of my time is spent F5ing Redskins Insider I downloaded it immediately then with the use of a handy black app called Rename, relabeled it simply Redskins.

The 1.0 version was terrible, it kept crashing from the game menu and I stopped using it. Version 1.0.1 came out a few weeks later and not only featured the spiffy image of Donovan McNabb as you see above, the 1.0 version simply had a generic burgundy helmet with no Redskins logo, the app also... started working. No problems, no crashes, could access all menus and all content would refresh as expected.

About three weeks ago version 1.0.3 appeared and I upgraded, immediately problems came back, new annoying problems.

It crashes, most notably when I move from the stories section to the games section, though not as often as the 1.0 version. The most annoying thing is the app's inability to refresh itself. Under versions 1.0 and 1.0.1, when you switch away from the app and come back, it respawns, you see the splash image of Donovan as the menus are refreshing content.

Now, once you open it and then switch away and come back, the app takes you straight back to the content menus, not the splash page, which would be fine if the content updated automatically, BUT IT DOES NOT. In order to get the menus to refresh, I either have to go through the annoying process to shut down a rogue app, or restart the whole phone. Occasionally after a crash it will respawn and not be able to reestablish its data connection, hence the image above, in these cases I hit the Home button then go back to the app and oh yep everything is just fine again.

Cannot get much in the way of support either, the Support link on the iTunes online page for Football Insider links back to generic Washington Post help page, if there is a thread or a topic on the Football Insider app then I am not able to find it easily.

Maybe I should not bother expecting a decent app until I get a decent team.



Screencap of aborted app load by me.

Outlased?

Srsly?

Great to see the NFL has their best copy editors on the Redskins beat.



Screencap of NFL Gamecenter from here.

A Correction

Not mines though

Tuesday the big Washington Post Redskins 2010 preview section dropped, every year the Post puts together a special section in the paper assessing and hyping the coming season, as the Redskins journal of record it is in the best interests of the Post to do so.

This year it was pretty spare, with the main graphical feature being an awkward shot of head coach Mike Shanahan superimposed over a kind of trippy retro collage of Redskins and Washington DC imagery, it pretty well reflects the state of the newspaper business in comparison to 2009's Washington Post Redskins preview section.

Remember September 2009? Scandalous stories of the team suing fans, including a 66 year old grandmother and lifetime fan, of team sales reps selling tickets directly to ticket brokers, and an environment so explosive that the Commissioner himself, Roger Goodell was drawn to town help fight the fire and so stressful that defensive coordinator Greg Blache lost it in a press conference on a former Redskins player and current local journalist, ah yes you nostalgia you lose.

Into that environment the Post launched as the anchor piece of the 2009 team preview a long retrospective on the first decade of Dan Snyder's ownership, including a super cool interactive graphic, better than the two lousy ones this year, one of which is just a piece on Mike Shanahan's offense from May. The Dan Snyder piece was pretty unforgiving and in retrospect was the perfect amuse bouche for what would later become an all time trainwreck of a season.

Continuing the trend, 2008's Washington Post Redskins preview section was better than 2009's, in fact it was truly awesome kitsch, the lead graphic a conveyor belt, former shadow general manager Vinny Cerrato places uniformed Redskins players on the belt, they then run through the Zorn-A-Mator which is a little building with a giant Jim Zorn head on it, they then travel through an electrically charged West Coast Offensisizer and a giant Star Power mixing bowl before being placed lovingly placed into a box of packing peanuts by owner Dan Snyder.

The main infographic was a good, though not interactive, it looks exactly like it did in the paper, breakdown of the Jim Zorn offense, and within the preview was a summary of management, coaching and player moves around a second lead graphic that portrayed the Redskins as a mature product in a new and improved package, on the front of the package above and below the Redskins logo are the marketing exhortations: Bold New Look! 50% More Passing! Now With More Star Power! Improved, More Efficient Offense!

Look carefully though on the side of that package, there are two warning labels, they read Actual results may vary and Caution: Contents under pressure. Truth in advertising.

So back to this year's special preview (op. cit.), I am reading the paper and I go through the schedule section on page two and I review the season, glazing over as I think of each time the Redskins last played these teams, guest divisions the NFC North in 2007 and the AFC South in 2006, the Post helpfully tells us what happened in the last matchup for context, in the entry for Washington's 2010 game two opponent, the Houston Texans we see a sad reminder of what happened when these teams played on 24 September 2006, a game the Texans won 31-15. Wait what?

No the Texans did not win that game 31-15, the Redskins won that game 31-15! It was Curly R's third ever regular season gamewrap and I remember the game well, quarterback Mark Brunell tied the NFL record for consecutive completions with 22, as Jason La Canfora of the Washington Post wrote of Mark's achievement,

The ball rarely traveled even 10 yards through the air

Tailback Ladell Betts had 123 yards rushing, the team had 234 total yards on the ground and 495 yards of offense overall, much maligned replacement for Shawn Springs Kenny Wright had an interception and the Redskins scored 31 points, a total the team would only match or exceed once more in the season on the way to a 5-11 record.

The 2010 schedule is helpfully available online here with the error still there in game two and a link to the Post recap of that game, this is your correction if the Washington Post never catches it.



Image credit: screencap detail of schedule page here.

Momentum Building for the Redskins in 2010?

Couple of guys that did it / do it for a living

While on the way home from work, listening to Sirius NFL Radio as ever, I heard Tim Ryan and Pat Kirwan on Moving the Chains, they had Sirius NFL Radio host and former Bears quarterback Jim Miller on as a guest, I missed the setup of the conversation, Tim asked Jim about former Redskins offensive lineman and current Sirius NFL Radio host Ross Tucker's pick for NFL 2010 NFC Beast winner, the Washington Redskins.

It sounded like a setup to trash the Redskins as they always seem to on NFL Radio, instead Jim accused Ross of copypasta of Jim's written take on the NFC Beast and went on to LAUD Washington and call them for the Division this season, to wit, and these are all Jim's comments paraphrased:

As part of the NFL Radio barnstorming tour Jim attended Redskins practices and he has observed first hand how head coach Mike Shanahan manages football practice and as a former player Jim is extremely impressed with the Redskins.

Redskins players, by virtue of that coach Shanahan practice regimen, are going to field a competitive team no matter who is on the field, this was a clear allusion to the potential injury impact on the team in 2010.

The Redskins have a muddled situation at receiver, that will not matter because Donovan McNabb pisses sunshine (this is a deep paraphrase).

The Albert Haynesworth situation is much ado about nothing, Albert will do well despite and to spite everything that has happened so far this year.


Jim was really high on Washington, I know him well enough from his radio work to know this matters. The Redskins are not peepee caca in 2010.



Jim Miller, Bear quarteback: Uncredited image from here.

The Dividing Line

Green on one side

It would be one thing if the Washington Post was running a competition, call it DC's Top Blogger, in which the winner gets a paying gig off the street as a sports writer at one of the nation's top newspapers. It is another thing entirely that one of the most respected media outlets in the country is banking on its name to solicit volunteers that will write stories for free.

=====

When Curly R started in August of 2006 there were already at least 250 NFL blogs, maybe closer to 350 as tracked in the early days by Fair Catch, a rating service for NFL blogs, Fair Catch was replaced by Ball Hype which itself has reached end of life.

Since then the number of NFL related blogs has exploded, I am sure there are thousands now and I am not even sure there is an easy method of quantifying them. The growth has been very exciting, new voices, new perspectives and new outlets most benefit the fan, which is what professional sports is really all about.

The rise of this independent and or alternative media has had a profound effect on the traditional media, newspapers, radio and TV broadcast and cable news, the sports media and the net effect has been deleterious to those established and closed business models, the decline of traditional media is well documented and not at issue here.

If we then view the decline of insular media as a neutral concept, neither good nor bad but simply a fact, and we understand that money and eyeballs fuel media, then as money and eyeballs migrate away from traditional media and into alt media then the invisible hand of the market will eventually push the traditional media to adopt practices to win back or retain those eyeballs, or else suffer a permanent reduction in market.

The invisible hand first happened in 2006 when the Washington Post launched its series of in house blogs, including Redskins Insider and DC Sports Bog, both in the same month Curly R debuted. At the time I thought it was a great idea, as long as the in house bloggers, who were really the beat writers for their sport, were to be given the freedom to practice the arts that have come to characterize what we call quote blogging unquote: timeliness, non neutral viewpoint, broadness of scope, flexible adherence to style conventions.

Well they were and both have become very good and very popular, former WaPo Redskins beat writer Jason La Canfora in particular cultivated a blog culture on Redskins Insider, to a fault at times considering how often he angered Redskins management with his skeptical approach to news coming from the team. Jason Reid and his team continue the success of Redskins Insider, it is hands down the best source for first cut news as it happens, many of the posts that hit are short and not polished but highly informative, later the reader can compare the print versions and see how they were Postified.

Now the Washington Post wants to take what it no doubt regards as the next logical step, the paper has announced it is creating a new in house blog run by fans, this Fan Blog will cover Washington sports from top to bottom and from the sounds of it they want quite a commitment. Interested parties were invited to submit an application via a web form by midnight Sunday and the blog rolls out in September.

Immediate reader reaction was crickets, this Redskins Insider post on the Fan Blog has one comment, about the fact that there are no comments and this Early Lead post introducing the blog and application process has exactly none comments.

Later that evening Sports editor Cindy Boren posted an FAQ on the Early Lead blog, here we learn about whether or not these writing positions are compensated, that

Sadly, the answer is no. We hope that for some people, the large audience a site like washingtonpost.com could provide is enough motivation to post here, but we understand [zero compensation for generating content at Washington Post] may not work for everyone.

Clarification in brackets by me. Later in the comments of this piece (comments do not have permalinks) WaPo writer Jon DeNunzio writes that the paper is working to keep the focus of the blog narrow, establish schedules for topical or team based content and moderate, read: edit, the posts.

So let us recap: The Washington Post, the newspaper with the fifth largest print circulation in the nation this year and the second largest online audience last year by this metric, wants to add what amount to unpaid interns to churn out moderated and scheduled content that will compete directly with the work of paid professionals. Likely the WaPo will sell advertisements onto the Fan Blog webpages and excerpt content into the ad supported print edition where it will also crowd out the work of professional journalists.

This is called cannibalizing your market and it is easy to see why this is unpopular, I will bet you it is as unpopular with the Post writers whose work and therefore value it will dilute as it is unpopular with the readers leaving comments that ask rhetorically why would I write for the Post if I was not going to get paid, get a credential or own the work, and why would I want to read the amateur work of comment whore yahoos promoted to the front page?

This is the apocryphal dividing line of the title to this post, the barrier which cannot be crossed.

I love doing what I do on this blog, I can tell you that if the Washington Post came and asked me to join their staff it would be hard to say no to unless they offered not to pay me then it would be very easy to say no. I already do not get paid for Curly R and for not getting paid I have no schedule or content moderation standards other than that which I put forth. I have no mommy on this blog and no payroll to make.

The Washington Post on the other hand is part of a giant and profitable conglomerate and even if the core newspaper operations are not profitable in themselves the Post employees are not refusing the subsidies from the other units in the form of salaries. Anyone that would take this gig is essentially crossing a picket line and taking work from a professional journalist and generating free work for a company that will profit from it and deny you the rights to ownership.

I do not understand why the Post is doing this, they could ask any one of us bloggers toiling on our own time and own dime to contribute and we would, they could ask to re post our work and we would let them. That will not work for the Post though because the Post would have to credit our work in the agate type, and the Post gets cited, it does not cite.

Instead, competing amateur writers out then not paying them and putting them on a schedule to publish moderated work is going to result in a product that is substandard to the main work of the Post. If readers want to read fan rants or amateur work dressed up like real journalism then they can get it in a million places other than the Post. The Post should stay far away from this.

I also know the Post and other traditional media outlets subscribe to Sphere and other content syndicate networks, Curly R is in several of them and the linkbacks from random media sites appear in the Sitemeter all the time, I do not get any money for that because that is not the model; the business model for an independent outlet like this one is to sell ads directly on my site, the more people that come the more ad impressions are delivered, the Post pays the syndicate and gets the content on its site, the syndicate delivers the eyeballs to me, I am on my own for a business plan.


All this said, anyone with aspirations of real journalism and the time and inclination to donate their services, I wish them luck, I have been there, in 1995 I interviewed for and was offered an intern position with WRC NBC 4's George Michael in sports, the reason I ended up not taking the gig had nothing to do with the fact that it was unpaid.

I will read the new blog and will apply exactly the same rules of engagement to this new blog as I do to any content I encounter on the internets: Quality is king, if the work is good I will patronize it. If it is crap it will be ignored.



Dividing line from here via here.

Albert Haynesworth: I DID NOT EMOTIONALLY ABUSE THAT STRIPPER

SO. MUCH. WIN.

The intrepid journalists at TMZ, a celebritology media property taking its name from the thirty mile radius or zone around Hollywood in which the largest movie studios built their empires, found me today and wanted to share a story. A story about our friend and defensive lineman Albert Haynesworth.

Redskins fans already know about this, back in February in the days leading up to Super Bowl 44 Miami, Albert allegedly met a stripper from Brooklyn, they began what is euphemistically referred to as a relationship, when the woman first announced she was pregnant, according to her, Albert promised to support her, emotionally and financially. Surprise surprise, Albert broke it off before February was over.

In May, when the woman was four months pregnant meaning now she is somewhere around seven months pregnant and will be giving birth in the first month of the season, she sued Albert for ten million dollars, citing a lack of financial support. The brief Redskins Insider piece on the lawsuit indicates a quote assistant unquote of Albert's suggested the woman go visit an NFL doctor, which to this expectant mother must have been like asking sit back for a transvaginal ultrasound with a ferret.

According to a TMZ piece in May, Albert has acknowledged having sexual relations with that woman, swears he wore protection. *chuckle*

Now Albert's lawyer is quote fighting back unquote. Quote going on the offensive unquote, according to TMZ, Albert through his lawyer claims he never emotionally abused that stripper after he learned she may be carrying his child, and that the ten million dollar lawsuit should be dismissed because even though that emotionally unabused stripper may feel aggrieved, she does not actually have a legal case, principally because she has yet been unable to prove the child is Albert's.

Looking forward to more details and the results of what must be a forthcoming DNA test.


Just another great week to be Albert Haynesworth.



Albert Haynesworth: AP photo from here.

An FYI to the PTB

Tailgating is apparently not a food related activity

Food bloggers and sports bloggers should NEVER mix socially.



Clique t-shirt from here.

Social Event Journal: Redskins Writers Night at the Ballpark, 6/10/2009

...has been moved here.



All pictures and video by me except for the one of Joe Theismann coming off the field, that one is from the Washington Post here.

Kevin Ewoldt from Hogs Haven and CSN's Rich Tandler on NBC 4

Wait I thought we always wore pajamas

Chris Gordon, longtime reporter for NBC's channel four affiliate in Washington DC, has been making the rounds of area Redskins bloggers to gauge reaction of the media underclass to the firing of Jim Zorn and the hiring of Mike Shanahan. Wednesday I got my thirty seconds on a street corner near Capitol Hill in the piece on the the hiring of coach Shanahan.

Monday Chris caught up with Kevin Ewoldt of Hogs Haven, the SBN big dog Redskins blog, and Rich Tandler, the godfather of Redskins bloggers who writes for Comcast SportsNet Washington and runs his own must read blog Real Redskins, their video is above.

I had a chance to hang with Kevin and Rich and a bunch of other Redskins writers at a Nationals game last season, an event I photodocumented thoroughly and never got around to posting up on, we mostly drank at the Red Loft bar while some guys played baseball behind us.


Redskins blogs and other alt media outlets are steadily gaining influence, the traditional media outlets want to catch the buzz. Twelve thousand monthly visitors cannot be wrong.



Embedded video snarfled from here.

Curly R's Appearance on NBC 4

I really don't look that much like Ted Koppel

Yesterday I spent five minutes outside for a blogger on the street interview with NBC 4's Chris Gordon on the Redskins' hiring of Mike Shanahan.


FYI the point in this video where the audio cuts off in my shot is where the segment goes back to the studio for the live wrapup with Chris.



Embedded video from here.

Washington Times to Kill Off Only Really Good Section of the Paper

WTF

A story broke today, still unconfirmed, that if true would signal the plague killing off traditional media outlet by outlet has finally arrived in Washington, no another corner box rag has not disappared, no other longtime niche papers with a better web model than paper model have not stopped printing, it is much worse than all that.

The Washington Times, Washington's other enterprise daily, is ceasing regular sports coverage at the end of this week.

This was foretold to those watching the long slow death of traditional media, back on 4 December, Editor and Publisher, a 125 year old outlet that itself is shutting down in print and online raising questions about whether these links will be active in a year, reported that the paper's new publisher was preparing to announce some radical changes, one of which was revealed the day before Christmas, that the paper would no longer publish a Saturday or Sunday edition.

That same piece presaged cutbacks in news coverage and a shrinking newsroom, I just never imagined they would cut out the best part of the paper. And although this selfishly means less Redskins coverage for me and my ilk, check Dan Dan the Sports Bog Man for what this really means, to the business and to area sports coverage (op. cit.).

David Elfin, Ryan O'Halloran, Dan Daly and the other guys that covered the Redskins first hand for me, I have no idea what will happen to them, I hope they get something lined up, the Times has a great sports section and those guys deserve to keep doing what they do best.

Now I am no economist but I do know a thing or two about how the news business works and what stories sell. The Washington Post regularly publishes its most popular online stories and the Redskins always dominate, even in the offseason.

Sports stories have something that many so called straight news or hard news stories do not have and that is the burning urgency of now combined with binary emotional reactions and an essential harmlessness. Fans want to know what is happening with their favorite team or sports figure TODAY; yesterday's news is too late.

Sports stories have a tendency to draw a smile or set off the grinding of teeth with readers; stories covering sports do not inspire the meh shrugging of shoulders the way HEALTHCARE IN PERIL EXCEPT UNLESS IF ITS NOT or THINGS STILL REALLY BAD IN BAD PART OF WORLD stories do.

Finally, only in a very small number of cases do sports stories deal with death or essential loss, meaning they are low risk for intrusion of the real world into our escapist diversions. When bad things do happen, like Sean Taylor getting shot and killed, these cases tug back at that emotional response that reminds us that although sports is an escape, it is one that takes place in the sadness of reality.

Back in September, after the Redskins first two games, Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander ran a Sunday column asking rhetorically whether the Post ran with too much Redskins coverage. Of course as you might expect I did a coffee spit take at the breakfast table because I never think there is ENOUGH Redskins coverage but I digress.

Andrew wisely cited hard fact: reader demand. The Redskins dominate WaPo Sports coverage in the online paper and Redskins Insider is the site's most popular blog. Their case for so much Redskins coverage is not homerism, it is a solid economic case based on advertising revenue. The money goes where the eyes are.

So the Washington Post and Washington Times are not the same paper, I know that, and here is how different they are: The Washington Post has a daily circulation around 623 thousand (op. cit.) and the Washington Times has about a tenth of that (op. cit.).

However it is logical to posit that Sports and the Redskins command a similar percentage of total eyeballs and I am comfortable predicting that reader surveys and visitor logs to the website reveal that Sports and Redskins coverage pay for themselves and more at the Times, an important matter at a news concern that is rumored to receive as much as forty million dollars a year in operating subsidies from the Unification Church (ibid.).

E&P's 24 December story indicated that some or all over the areas of coverage that were going to be terminated in the print edition would persist online (op. cit.), so maybe the sports team will stay more or less together and simply move to a more virtual existence. Unfortunately though it looks as though they are about to drop the axe, none of the beat writers are with their teams traveling today (ibid.) and beat writing is the source for all sports coverage.

Near as I can tell, in yet another example of how clumsy management is in dealing with the established reality of 7x24 news cycles, the Washington Times sports staffers know only as much as I do about the plan and at least one has already taken to the Times itself to say thank you and goodbye.


Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.



An oldie but a goodie Washington Times front page from here via here.

Thumbs Down Indeed

Hey Paul 2002 called, it wants its CRT monitor back

With a hat tip to lifetime Eagles fan, season ticket holder and Curly R reader/lurker Wilbert Montgomery, Philadelphia Daily News NFL columnist Paul Domowitch gave Dan Snyder a thumbs down in today's column:

Thumbs down

To Redskins owner Dan Snyder for his rapid-fire hiring of former Bucs and Raiders executive Bruce Allen as his new football operations vice president. I've got two problems with this. One, Allen is a barely - and I mean barely - more competent talent evaluator than the boob he's replacing, Vinny Cerrato. Two, the Redskins announced the hiring of Allen less than 2 hours after Cerrato's long-overdue resignation was announced. Makes you wonder how earnestly Snyder complied with the league's Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least one African-American candidate for coaching and front-office positions. He probably brought in Bob from accounting and Frank from marketing for 5-minute interviews right before hiring Allen, who will fit in nicely as Snyder's newest yes man.

So let us review Paul's challenges with the Bruce Allen hiring, first that Bruce is barely a better talent evaluator than the boob he replaced. Ok fine, let us assume that is the case. Then one would hope as general manager, a title Dan Dnyder has never bestowed upon anyone, Bruce would be smart enough and invested with enough authority to develop his personnel evaluation team, whether in the form of a hotshot coach with personnel cred and responsibilities like Mike Shanahan, or in the form of capable suits.

From a transactional perspective, Redskins fans lose nothing if Bruce Allen bumbles his way through another disastrous draft like 2008's, and have everything to gain if Bruce can actually build a college and pro talent evaluation program.

Using this criticism of Bruce Allen we should be able to go back and find Paul's columns critical of the Eagles' hiring of Andy Reid as head coach directly from a quarterback coaching position in Green Bay because Andy was way less qualified as a head coach than Ray Rhodes, the guy he replaced who at that point had coached sixty-four more games at head coach than Andy's zero.


Second, Paul seems to have a problem with the quote rapid-fire unquote timing of the announcement of Bruce's hiring coming too soon, not even two hours, after the announcement of Vinny Cerrato's departure, as if it all seems much to conveeeeeeenient to have happened above board, Paul even wonders if the presumably black guys in marketing and accounting got a five minute token interview to validate the Rooney Rule.

There are two issues here, the timing and the Rooney Rule compliance.

Although these twin announcements took all of Washington by surprise, as it turns out the whole thing was not knee jerk or rapid fire and had been in the works for some time. There was talk in January of this year that Dan Snyder and Bruce Allen had met to discuss a possible role with the team, and numerous sources, including Bruce Allen's brother, Senator Macaca himself George Allen have confirmed that this has been brewing under wraps for long enough that people had to be sworn to secrecy.

Dan Snyder never leaps without a net except when he hired Jim Zorn before hiring a head coach, and we should have known the canning of Vinny was just the first shoe. The team had been negotiating this transition for long enough that a requisite minority candidate was interviewed, if we presume the transaction's approval by the Fritz Pollard Alliance sufficient to validate this. The Fritz Pollard Alliance is the group formed to encourage minority hiring in the NFL and to police franchises on practices.

Do we know who that minority candidate was? Or if there was none how did the team acquire a waiver? No we do not and we may never know, then again this is Washington and it may leak out. Few people really know how these things are brokered or measured. What matters is the regulator agrees the team complied. As a Redskins fan and inquirer though, I would like to know more about the details.


With their poor play, the fan backlash that came to be known as the Burgundy Revolution, the Bingo Caller, the Playcalling, obvious friction between management and coaching and mounting injuries, the football media at large was given license this season finally to write about what a horribly run organization is the Redskins. And they have, and I have no doubt that negative coverage, so many respected football writers and talking head not simply saying whoa they suck right now in 2009 but that they have sucked for a decade and we all know it, we all know why and everyone knows it, played a part in helping this transition along.

And while we do not know what the future holds for the Redskins and how they will be run and how successful they will or will not be with a formal general manager, it is disingenuous for anyone with a real football credential not to say the last 24 hours represents steps in the right direction for the organization, especially when evidence refuting concerns about timing and rule compliance is right in front of our faces.



Paul Domowitch, Philadelphia Daily News NFL writer from here.

Trying to Put Me Out of Business

Enter search term

So all forms of traditional media or tradmed, are dying and we know that, this is not a shocking statement. Newspaper circulation is falling so fast and old line newspapers are shuttering at such a pace that it is difficult to keep up with it. Television news has long been transformed into a profit center, thus becoming more like Wall Street, run by quarterly ratings and not by differentiation, quality or tradition. Cable news has become dominated by partisan personalities, CNN is now paying the price of last place for its naive insistence that middle of the road reporting will draw eyeballs.

You may have seen over the past couple of years that Google has found itself in the middle of the media death throes with large media conglomerates like News Corporation and coalitions of tradmed screaming bloody murder that Google Search and Google News make money on the backs of the tradmed by featuring links and stealing eyeballs that never wind up at the news site in question and that would have resulted in increased pageviews which in turn is the metric used to sell site advertising.

Setting aside the fact that no enterprise news gathering organization can make enough money selling in page web advertisements, the tradmed thinks Google is drinking its milkshake. And it is, but not for the reasons the tradmed thinks it is. Google is the dominant player because it is an aggregator by subject, not affinity, but that is another story.

In an effort to stave off a decade of litigation and in reality to save the tradmed from putting the final nail in its own coffin, I mean really, when the best idea the New York Times and Washington Post can come up with is to demand that Google drop them out of News and Search returns, that is like a starving surgeon lopping off his own leg to eat it, Google has begun to partner with media firms.

The first big thing to come out of these budding partnerships is a thing called Google Living Stories. Wisely, Google has taken the approach of looking at how news is delivered, not how it is gathered, read about the background and the project here.

Currently only the New York Times and the Washington Post are participating, and there are only eight living story threads, The Struggle Over Health Care, The Politics of Global Warming, Executive Compensation: How Much to Pay, Washington Tackles Health Care Reform, Fixing DC's Schools: Michelle Rhee Takes Charge, The War in Afghanistan and... The Redskins Face a Season of Troubles.

These single topic living stories are top down chronicles of their subjects, with timelines, links, summaries and images...

KIND OF LIKE A BLOG

=====

Despite the mock angst of the headline, these types of new media forays will only serve to strengthen the hand of alt media like the little site you are reading now. Why? Because they are becoming more like me than I am like them. For diehard Redskins fans, they now can, and should, bookmark this link and check it out every day to see what the writers and editors at the Washington Post are churning out.

Then get back out on the wildnet and see what the bloggers are saying about all that.



Google girl from here.

Your Call Is Important to Us

If you'd like to leave a message, please fuck off after the tone

Our inside man Danny Rouhier got a new job this week, as Redskins owner Dan Snyder's receptionist. It looks like a tough job unless you are dead on the inside. Or a comedian.



YouTube from here.

Jason Campbell's Quarterback Slide

Is like a seventh grader asking a hot girl to dance

Danny Rouhier keeps us engaged with his week nine video in which he learns Chinese, the better to communicate with his Redskins Stadium overlords and excerpts game commentary from last week's debacle against the Falcons.

Danny is one of the best things Redskins fans have going for them right now.



YouTube from here.

Rich Tandler @ CSN: On the Offensive Line and the Appearance of Normalty in Ashburn

Your reading assignment for today

Rich Tandler's latest two pieces are up at Comcast SportsNet, in Thursday's piece Rich compares and contrasts the quote talented unquote versus quote rag tag unquote offensive line. Great now Stephon Heyer is hurt which is a little like the disappointment you feel when those khakis that you love but are way too tight are not clean for the party, everyone can see they are not a good fit.

This morning Rich posted up how inside the locker room Redskins Park everything seems so calm and serene, players enjoying a fall day and making dates to go scrapbooking, while outside the storm still rages.

Go forth and get educated and enjoy your Saturday.



Rich Tandler from here.

Rich Tandler @ CSN: Fred Davis, the Bye Week and Learning to Block

Blogger-patriot

Rich Tandler's second piece is up on Comcast SportsNet, tight end Fred Davis on how I spent my fall vacation, get over there and read it.

Did I mention that Rich also writes books about the Redskins? And the Hokies but I will not hold that against him.



Rich Tandler from here.

Rich Tandler @ CSN: How Deep Is Washington's Bag of Tricks?

Read me? Read him.

Our own Rich Tandler, dean of Redskins writers, editor of the indispensible Real Redskins blog and the most knowledgeable Redskins fan I know signed on with Comcast SportsNet last week as a writer and beat reporter covering Redskins Park, this is huge news for him, for CSN and for Redskins fans, please join me in welcoming Rich as a card carrying member of the liberal media establishment.

Curly R will be pimping out Rich's work at CSN, over on that side of the fence they care about things like pageviews so do the right thing, click over and give it a read and help me ensure there is ample audience for his work.

In his first piece, from Monday, Rich lists some changeups the Redskins should consider on the long road to the end of this season. Go read it.

Congratulations Rich.



Rich Tandler from here.