Deadspin, like all of Gawker Media blogs, is at its best when it is serving more as a media watchdog than as a source of serious journalistic reporting.
Deadspin was founded as a blog without "access, favor, or discretion," and the source of its creation, as noted by Will Leitch in God Save The Fan , is that the media that reports on sports have gotten in bed with the sports teams they cover. It had the financial and media resources to do so better than anything else, and its purpose was ultimately to improve the experience for sports fans who have long been frustrated with prima donna athletes, shock jock radio hosts, idiotic beat writers, and most of all, ESPN, which dominated all television sports coverage.
Over the course of Leitch's editorship, that purpose got lost in the frenzy, and the issue became less about fans vs. sports professionals and more about bloggers vs. mainstream media. Every time the term "mother's basement" was evoked, bloggers everywhere rallied up equally harsh defenses. This side of the debate reached its peak in the Buzz Bissinger-Will Leitch interview in 2008.
From the fallout of that ...
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