Yahoo!Sports is quickly becoming the go to place for sports information, a position that has long been dominated by ESPN. Universities now fear when Yahoo reporters start searching around their programs as the site has broke the stories about Miami, Reggie Bush and UConn. While ESPN continues to build relationships with every major conference in the country, Yahoo!Sports is now doing the NCAA's job and discovering which programs are cheating. While ESPN cozies up with the biggest team in the countries, Yahoo!Sports is now hated by these schools. Yahoo!Sports is doing their job, they are finding stories and showing them to the country.
Not only is Yahoo!Sports writing hard hitting stories they are now moving towards showing actual games and events on their site. A few weeks ago they had a UFC pay-per-view on the site that you could pay to watch. Yesterday it was announced that Yahoo!Sports will show 9 of the last 10 races of Nascar's season, formally called The Chase. Today it was announced that Yahoo will have their own MLB show partnering with MLB.com that will feature live look-ins, highlights and use social media with the broadcast to follow the MLB.
Yahoo!Sports is creeping up on ESPN, maybe not quickly but they are making moves. As the internet and television began (or continue really) to merge Yahoo!Sports is positioning themselves to challenge ESPN. This is what we, as sports' fans, should hope happens. I love ESPN but as Yahoo pushes them over the next few years we will get a better product across the board. ESPN will do their best to try to become the place people go for big, breaking news. Yahoo will begin to put shows online and ESPN will have to up their television product to compete with that. Yahoo!Sports is taking away the sports monopoly from ESPN and the level of sports media on both sides should improve from this competition.
Disagree. The miami piece was incredibly sensationalized. It was a headline grabber and alot of the story has already been debunked. If you look at his allegations and compare them to what the ncaa handed down there are not even close. Putting the abortion and dequan jones piece in there was poor journalism.
ReplyDeleteThe NCAA's investigation is not over. They ruled on the current players but there is still over 60 players that still need to be investigated. I don't think Miami is in the clear yet. The reason that isn't poor journalism is that it is part of the allegation. You couldn't write that piece and not have it in there. My point though is that ESPN doesn't break these types of stories. They have placed themselves in a position where they make a lot of money with college football and they don't search out stories that will hurt their product.
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