We Eat Children has an interesting Q&A with local columnist/radio personality/villain (in some Flames fans eyes) Bruce Dowbiggen today. It's fairly extensive, touching on a variety of subjects including blogging, journalism, the Flames management and the team itself. And while he doesn't have nice things to say about amateur bloggers (ie: me), I think it's definitely worth a read.
An excerpt:
WEC: What’s your take on using a blog to cover a beat like the Inside the Flames blog?
BD: I think it’s necessary now. I think that right now we’re finding out how it works and what we should post. The way the market is right now for beat stuff I think the blog is more important than the newspaper stuff. In fact I think the newspaper is where the opinion should go and the blog is where all the news goes. So if our beat guy is at a practice and the news of the day is some guy pulled a hamstring at the practice and he had to leave, boom, get that on the blog right away. I think that’s a great way to do it. The future of the business is to do that stuff online as it happens and then you pick the newspaper up the next day to read the interpretation and the columns.
WEC: In your years covering sports have you come across coaches who just did not want to cooperate with the media?
BD: Oh sure, Darryl Sutter is a very uncooperative kind of guy. There are lots of people who are very uncooperative. I have to contrast it from when I started 25 years ago when the beat guy was almost an assistant coach to the team. He was a sounding board for the coaches, it was before video, it was before a lot of the sophistication had come in. The role of the media and the beat guys relative to what they were covering has changed a lot over the past number of years. There are a lot of guys who cast their lines back to that era when they had life or death over whether a reporter gets information. The thing that really pisses Darryl Sutter off the most is that what they used to have as proprietary information is now public i.e. what the salaries are, what the contracts are. We are as informed on that stuff as anybody and we can talk to the players, the agents and the coaches about the decisions that go into who plays and who doesn’t. They don’t really control the flow of information the way they used to. They can’t BS us, they can’t trick us they way they used to and some of them find it hard to deal with and so they tune you out and try to silence you. That’s okay though, that’s their choice.
And that's just a snippet. check out the whole thing here.
