Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Like flowers that bloom in the springtime

Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple boasted Sunday about all the blogs "blossoming" on the paper's website:
We were late to the game, but it's exciting to see how many different approaches we've taken since I started this blog [the Rocky's first, begun in April, 2005]. Monday we launch "Homefield Advantage," a new sports blog by Fed Pietila. It will be our 14th regular blog.

Let's break that number down.

There's Mark Wolf's blog, RockyTalkLive, which, not surprisingly, discusses "everything from politics to pop culture." Very safe.

And film critic Robert Denerstein's Film clips, which he started only in March but which already manages (faint praise alert) to look like a real blog. Denerstein updates fairly often, links well to others, and knows movies. Unfortunately his posts have lots of typos and other crud. He also gets hardly any comments, which seems strange in a cultcha-hungry town like Denver.

Including editor Temple's, that's about it as far as "substantive" blogs at the Rocky.

Huge potfuls of "lifestyle" blogs, though. Let's see: on shopping, videogaming, pack-ratting ("The Stuff Exchange"), fashion crap and (by the same blogger) American Idol. Nasty.

But that's only eight blogs. What about the other six? Need you ask? Sports blogs, every one. Basketball, baseball, football, hockey, one on what other sportswriters around the country are babbling about, Sam Adam's The A-List (a blog improbably offering "a different slant on a variety of sports topics") and, finally, a potentially neat one, sports cartoonist Drew Litton's blog Toons and Talk, which I'm willing to bet is the only blog by a sports cartoonist in the country.

Overall they're not exactly innovatin' the hell out of things at the Rocky. I'll look at the Post later, but I know without looking that they have a blog the Rocky should let "blossom" (that sounds so Maoist) as soon as possible: a business blog. Surely the Rocky could deploy somebody to compete with unamusingly full-of-himself Post business columnist and faux blogger (he links only to his own column) Al Lewis, couldn't they?

Here's the News' blogs page if you want to check them out.

Update: Faux. I hate that word.

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