The Access Abyss

WARNING: The following post is intolerable inside-baseball, navel-gazing stuff about Thrashers blogging. Don't read it, ever.

Anyway. Some of you, I'm told, are wondering why the Chronicle didn't take part in the most recent Thrash-blogger event thingy over at Philips Arena this past weekend.

The short answer: We really just didn't feel like it.

The longer answer: We've done every other blogger event, and I think we did a reasonably good job of interviewing Coach Anderson and Evander Kane, but this one just didn't feel right. As awesome as sitting in the press box probably is, there are some places we belong and some places we don't. I'm very glad to see that the Thrashers have gotten serious about giving bloggers press credentials every now and then. It's good that they're recognizing that blogs can produce important content.

But you have to consider what kind of content each individual blog produces. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the Chronicle is the scuzzy down-market tabloid of the Thrashers blogosphere. Like many tabloids, there's some sharp writing and quality insights every now and then (if I can dispense with false modesty for a minute and say so), but it thrives off of the bizarre and the trashy. If you thought of the Thrashers blogs as actual newspapers, Bird Watchers Anonymous would be the quality daily, the Times or the Guardian, and we would be the Sun or the Daily Mirror. I'm sure you can think of your own analogies.

If I were given free reign in the Thrashers press box, I would, like many others chose to do, type a live-blog of the game. But I would do it in the style of the Chronicle, and something tells me the Thrashers organization wouldn't be entirely comfortable with that. And that's completely fine with me.

When there's several million other Thrashers bloggers doing a live-blog of the game, and the game is on TV, and many of you are actually AT the game, there's less than zero point in the Chronicle doing a normal "oooh good chance for Slava but FLEURY SAYS NO!" type live-blog as well. UNLESS, of course, we could do it in our peculiar style and tone, which isn't exactly suited to a space for the credentialed press.

So basically the only way we could truly do what sitting in the press box requires is if we watered down the Chronicle's style, domesticated it a bit, etc. And that, kids, ain't gonna happen, ever.

I hope we get invited to future Thrash-blogging events (interviews with players and coaches, etc.), but the press box isn't for us. There are Thrashers blogs that fit very well there, of course. They're all listed under "Thrashers Liberation Front" in our blogroll and I urge you to check out not only their reports of the recent blogging summit, but their regular, daily output.

Another reason we couldn't bring ourselves to sit in the press box: We were playing the Pittsburgh farking Penguins, for chrissakes, and we wanted to drink and make tortured animal noises and high-five our comrades. Anyway...