At ESPN.com, Blogs Rank Far Behind Video, Fantasy and Synergy

MDS is in Bristol for an ESPN Media Workshop. Here's his latest dispatch from behind the cameras of the Worldwide Leader.

Yesterday I spoke with some of the bigwigs at the biggest player in the sports web world, ESPN.com. And from talking to Rob King, the editor in chief of ESPN.com, and John Kosner, senior vice president and general manager of digital media at ESPN, it's clear that the blogosphere is not a particularly high priority for ESPN.

The decision-makers at ESPN.com see three things as the top priorities for the site: Video, fantasy games and using the web to integrate all of ESPN's different platforms (TV, radio, magazine, etc.). Blogs are way down on the list of what ESPN.com cares about. It's not that they're anti-blog, it's just that they don't have all that much interest in blogs.

King (whose background is in newspapers) said that journalism is central to what ESPN.com does, and although he mentioned that he thinks highly of the work done by Henry Abbott, my general sense is that ESPN is a lot more likely to hire more beat writers like Mike Sando than it is to hire more bloggers like Abbott.