I was listening to the Fan960 today (local sports radio) and heard an ad for the stations "Flames Zone" featuring blogs by Rob Kerr and Mike Rogers. The pitch was something to the effect of "they spend almost every day with the players and can give you the inside information the other guys just can't." (paraphrased)
I, being both one of the disparaged "other guys" and a potential consumer of such valuable "inside info" (tm), decided to check out the Flames Zone.
First, Kerr's blog -
Every entry is a gameday post of some sort. Here's an excerpt from the latest one:
Flames now find themselves in a tough spot with Vancouver winning last night the schedule really does line up against the local hockey heroes, for no other reason then the Canucks have 2 games left against Colorado. The Avalanche are beaten up and demoralized and are losing by at least 3 goals in games recently. The Flames need to focus on trying to win out if they want top in the Northwest.
...
If you didn’t see live, I didn’t either, Andre Roy was up to his usual high jinks after the game on Saturday. During Hockey Night in Canada’s post game show, they were interviewing Ollie Jokinen when in the back ground a pair of legs appeared out of the Flames door.
They're all pretty much like that. Sometimes he posts something he sees in practice (like the potential line combos).
Err...okay. Maybe Rogers has the valuable inside dope for us?
The Flames outplayed, outhit, and outshot the Sharks tonight but fell 2-1 to the visitors. It’s easy to say the Flames should have won the game, but the bottom line is they didn’t. The game of hockey is about results and the Flames were the losers in this one. The talk will be about how well they played, and rightly so, but they did not produce enough offence to win and even though they outchanced San Jose, they fell short. Offensively, they got the shots, but were unable to get rebound chances because of the strong play of the Sharks in front of Evgeni Nabokov, and also because the Flames did not battle hard enough for loose pucks.
The Flames lost because they didn't win. They didn't win because the game of hockey is about results...and the result was, the Flames lost. Because they didn't score more goals than SJS. etc. Also - battling hard is good.
Hmmm...not much here either Im afraid. Especially not in terms of interesting or informative data yielded via "day-to-day access to the players".
I won't go much further, because I don't actually want to beat these guys up too much. They're radio personalities, after all, and while I don't always agree with either Kerr or Rogers, they are clearly dedicated, hard-working and pretty capable at what they do (qua radio guys at least). Kerr in particular strikes me as a driven and passionate guy who is also pretty knowledgeable.
It annoys me as a consumer, however, when I'm promised inside access and instead given bland generalities. It especially annoys me as a blogger when I'm derided as not delivering value relative to these "connected" media guys when this is the pablum that they serve up. Sure, maybe Kerr and Rogers aren't writers and maybe they save the best content for when they're on air - fair enough. But maybe they shouldn't be, you know, blogging.
