WEEI.com effing rules

Pax Arcana

Do you like sports? Are you especially fond of sports played by men who are paid by wealthier men who declare Boston to be geographic center of their teams’ activities?

Then you should check out the new WEEI.com, the Web site arm of the insanely dominant sports talk radio station. According to the venerable Scott’s Shots, the revamped site has surpassed the Boston Herald’s Web site as the Globe’s only competition in the online sports journalism department.

(Full disclosure — Tim Murphy, who is quoted in the below, may or may not be the brother in law with whom I share bro-tastic fist pounds over sausage and eggs on Christmas morning whilst our wives tend to the cookery. Also, the site’s main editor is a former coworker of mine, though he probably wouldn’t recognize me without the suicidal look on my face.)

That sound you heard last Monday morning was BostonHerald.com’s sports offering plunging to the depths of irrelevance. That was the day Boston became a two horse town as far as mainstream media sports sites go. With its total overhaul and Entercom’s apparent commitment to make WEEI.com “. . .the new sports page in town,” as the site’s VP/GM Tim Murphy said, the site is now fully ready to compete with the region’s sports-on-the-web leader, Boston.com.

“We didn’t want the site to be just ‘radio good,’” said Murphy in an extensive March 13 pre-launch interview and “walk-through’ of the new site with Shots. “We’re redefining what a sports page is. I like our chances of being the No. 1 (destination for Boston sports fans) in time.”

For an idea of what he means by redefining what a sports page is, consider today’s announcement that Curt Schilling had decided to retire rather than be forced to endure just one more painful minute in the spotlight. Rather than leaking the story to a favorite print reporter like most washed up old pitchers might, Schilling instead broke the news on his own blog at WEEI.com — grammatical mistakes and all.

Of course, in order to vault to the forefront of the local sports media market, WEEI.com will need to feature exhaustive, multi-part investigative pieces that contextualize the role of spectator sports in society as well as expose the vestigial racism and sexism that permeate professional sports.

Just kidding more cheerleaders and funny videos plz thx!!!

WEEI.com Impresses; CBS College Sports Doesn’t; Dan Shaughnessy and Geography [Scott's Shots]
WEEI.com [Home]

Is Father Scott the next great sports blogger?

Father Scott

Doubtful, but WEEI.com (which has been revamped and is actually pretty great now) held a contest this month in which they were searching for “the next great sports blogger.” They’re looking for someone to write once a week (so is it really a blog, then?), and since they’re offering $5,000 to do it, I figured it was worth throwing something out there.

I sort of went old-school with it and wrote a limited (approx. 500-word entry requirement) old-fashioned newspaper column, rather than a ZOMG Julio lugo sucksszszzz blog post, of which I figured EEI would receive roughly 18 billion (and they did — check out some of the samples they have listed on the contest page). But it was worth the hour I spent doing it. It’s about Coco Crisp and Theo Epstein and probably isn’t focused enough to be effective for what I was going for. But I’ve posted it here after the jump, simply because if I bothered to write it, I may as well help pad Pax’s blogging efforts by posting it here. They announce finalists October 13; I’ll let you know if there’s any news to report.