Questions With A Professional

Interview with local Sports Blogger, Travis Hughes.

1. What is the New Media company you work for?

Travis: I work for SportsBlogs Nation (sbnation.com), a network of over 200 team-specific sports blogs that cover pretty much every professional and college sports team in America. My site is Broad Street Hockey (broadstreethockey.com), SBN's Philadelphia Flyers blog.

2. What is the exact job in that Company?

Travis: I'm the editor and head writer of Broad Street Hockey.

3. What's your job title and what does it include?

Travis: ^ Above. And to clarify, I'm part of SB Nation and they pay me, but my site is independent in that they don't tell me what to write or anything like that. I have complete editorial control over my site, as does every other site that is part of the network.

4. Why is your job important?

Travis: Well, sports blogs in general are important because they provide the voice of the fan. In most mainstream sports media, the voice of the fan is the one that most often goes silent. That's not a knock on the media necessarily, but they are bound by certain things that bloggers aren't -- mainly, they aren't allowed to show bias. As a blogger, I can openly be a fan of my team while still be a journalist.

5. Why did you start working in the New Media world?

Travis: I started my original blog because the Flyers are a team that is covered very well in the media and they are a very popular team, but in the "blogosphere" they were severely under-represented. The voice of the fan, as I mentioned in the last question, was essentially absent.

6. Why do you feel that New Media is more important than other media types?

Travis: I wouldn't say that sports blogging is more more important than other sports journalism, but it fills a void that the mainstream media cannot fill (again, the voice of the fan).

7. What is special about the New Media industry?

Travis: We're not held to the same constraints as the mainstream media. we can express our opinions more freely. Of course, that can be a negative thing too. Often times, the word "blog" or "blogger" is looked at as a negative thing. and there are a lot of "bloggers" out there that give us all a bad name by starting up sites and reporting "news" without substantiation. But there are a lot of bloggers, like myself and the rest of us at SB Nation, that take what we do very seriously, and we hold ourselves to the same standards as other journalists.

8. If you had special powers for a day, and could change one thing about the New Media industry,what would it be and why?

Travis: I would change the perception of sports blogging among the majority of people in this country. It's getting better and through our collective hard work we're getting more legitimate each and everyday, but there is still work to be done. I have not been able to get a press pass to cover my team, but some teams are more open to us than others. For example, our Washington Capitals site has complete access to their team. The National Football League recently gave SB Nation two press passes to cover the NFL Draft this upcoming weekend. We're syndicated on Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated's website, and most recently, we struck an agreement with the National Hockey League themselves to provide content for their website. Just today, one of my stories was published on the NHL website. So we might not be looked at by everybody as completely legitimate just yet, but we have very large audiences that are constantly growing and that's because we do quality work just as mainstream journalists do. If we keep doing that, the teams and the league won't be able to and won't want to ignore us.

9. What media resources do you consume on a regular basis? How does that media source affect your life?

Travis: Wow, too much. I'm consuming some kind of media all day long, practically. I watch ESPN and local sports channels all the time, I read all the Philadelphia area newspapers that cover the Flyers everyday. I also read a ton of mainstream media websites that cover the Flyers and the the NHL as a whole. I have about 300 different internet sites in my internet reader that I keep tabs on all day, and those sites vary from other blogs from other teams to other Flyers blogs to other hockey sites and other general sites for social networking, news, and entertainment.