If, like me, you're a fan of the work Le Ann Schrieber has done as ESPN ombudsman, be sure to check out her interview with The Big Lead. There's a lot of interesting stuff therein, but I was especially struck by Schreiber's professed affinity with the same sports bloggers that many traditional sports journalists love to hate:

As an obsessive reader of TrueHoop, ESPN's fine basketball blog, I was somewhat dismayed by author Henry Abbott's initial response to Boston:

Anyone who has lived in New York, I suspect, finds Boston to be unbelievably ... tidy. New York is a city where respectable upper class people have favorite graffiti artists. It's also a place where you can hardly go a block without hearing an epithet or two.