We're Blushing

Stephen A. Smith, who yells about sports on ESPN, told Tom Hoffarth this week that all blogs should be shut down: "And when you look at the internet business, what's dangerous about it is that people who are clearly unqualified get to disseminate their piece to the masses," shouted Smith (presumably). "I respect the journalism industry, and the fact of the matter is ...someone with no training should not be allowed to have any kind of format whatsoever to disseminate to the masses to the level which they can."

Fire Joe Morgan has already given Smith's infallible wisdom the Fisking it deserves, so I don't have much to say about his comments that isn't either obvious or already covered. However, Smith's arrogant self-importance does contrast nicely with the Globe and Mail's Jeff Blair, who gave us a shout-out in his Globe blog today:

If you like poking fun at the Toronto sports media - all of us - this is a good place to take a peak at every once and a while. It's good to have people keep you honest. Seriously.

Seriously? Seriously!

Now, I'm not going to kiss Jeff Blair's behind just because he linked to us today, but I do have to give him a lot of credit. While Stephen A. Smith is out there screaming about the evils of the blogosphere, Jeff Blair is linking to a website that exists only to criticize Toronto sports writers (though I think it says a lot about the quality of his work that he has only been mentioned twice here since we started - once possibly due to nothing more than a typo - whereas his baseball counterpart at the Star gets ripped almost daily). And, unlike so many other mainstream sports writers, Blair really seems to have embraced the idea of blogs (both his own, and others) and doesn't treat passionate sports fans - who dedicate an insane amount of unpaid time to watching, reading about and writing about the games they love - with contempt.