But mainstream sports journalism made its own bed when they shrank column space and dumbed down coverage for the sake of their decreasingly intelligent readers. I was doing research for an article on the history of club football in Toronto a few weeks back and I was amazed at the sea of print in the sports section of the Globe and Mail back in the sixties and seventies. The writing was ribald, the metaphors colourful, the analysis sharp and unpretentious. That's been replaced with blather.

Some blogs have risen to fill the void but there is a problem with pay equity. Blogs by their nature are free to read, and if any money changes hands its from annoying advertising links and not on a per-word, per-article basis. Writing should still be a paid craft, like acting, music, and art. How the internet can nurture young and intelligent sports writers remains to be seen…

Kissing Suzy Kolber actually seems to me to possess more social value than a lot of Buzz Bissinger's recent profiles, for exactly the same reason that a good comedian is more valuable than a mediocre columnist. They're injecting some id into a system that's choking on superego.

This diatribe does not surprise me in the least, though. Seriously, sports "journalists", at least in the USA, are some of the most reactionary types in the mainstream media. Most of the rest of the mainstream media caught on to blogging several years ago, and don't seem to have major issues with it (many of them have become bloggers as well). Sports journalism has more than its fair share of dinosaurs who are a bit out of touch with today's reality (these tend to be the worst of the soccer-bashers, as well).

You're also right that I wouldn't normally wade into a debate like this. Bissinger's diatribe about bloggers not sweating over language probably felt like a thrown gauntlet, and then the fact that he thinks amateur sportswriting is ruining American discourse while apparently not having a problem with, say, Colin Cowherd or Jim Rome, just struck me as impossible to pass up.

I find it extremely interesting that in the same period of a few weeks that Bissinger has chosen to so publicly identify Deadspin as the root cause of all that is wrong with American society, Pat Jordan, another of the country's most distinguished sportswriters (and one with a rather more extensive and consistent oeuvre than Bissinger), has chosen to use a new medium for both a brilliant article on Jose Canseco and a long serialized interview.

That's right, Deadspin.

And yes, I know that Belth edited Jordan's new book, and that Belth and Leitch go back to the Black Table (and perhaps even beyond), but that neither explains why a writer of Jordan's quality chose Belth as an editor nor why he has chosen to engage with the new reality in a diametrically oppposite way to Bissinger.

Here's a more considered version of his position, from a newspaper article a couple of years ago:

Blogs especially, Bissinger says, "disgrace the written word. No one sweats over a sentence anymore, no one really cares if a sentence has good grammar or bad grammar. No one really cares if it has the right or wrong word. Blogs are all about opinion, all about getting in your face, and the fact that people love them says they're really not interested in facts, not interested in beautiful writing; they're just interested in having our own opinions certified.

"With the Internet, there's too much information out there, and we've become a very mindless country. I don't know how else to say it: We really revel in ignorance and disinformation."