The following is long – surprise, surprise. But it’s also the initial prototyping in my mind for a paper due in Kathy Gill’s class this quarter. So if you’re wondering why in the world I would spend anywhere near this kind of time writing on FTM, first of all, shame on you for thinking such a thing! Actually I hear ya. I wouldn’t usually. But it’s going to pay dividends down the road so pardon it’s length and if you’re brave enough to traverse your way to the end, I’d be impressed. -MB

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Many of you probably know that I do quite a bit of blogging in my ’spare’ time. I use that term for two reasons. For starters, it’s just one of the several jobs I have as well as school. Secondly and more importantly, it’s no longer just about writing about football. It has morphed into a vast community with dozens and dozens of men and women from all over the country and world that I consider friends. So in that sense, doing ‘work’ on the blog is really like taking time out to socialize with a different group of my acquaintances and friends. There’s nothing at all special or unusual about that these days, particularly for excessively loquacious people like myself who lives at home, has no tv, and is still in corporate indentured inservitude to Verizon for 9 more months before I can get a phone Gphone or iPhone. Woe is me.

Anyway, It began as a hobby, now is part of my social life, but it has never been a job.

Plus, being in an urban environment like Seattle (famous for it’s dearth of sports success) around such hot knobs of technology, pop culture, art, new media and the rest, I don’t want to give people the impression that I’m some jock only interested in football.

Hell, I’m from Texas so I already have that strike going against me. Half kidding, but you’d never know it based on the effort I try to put into it and the time I’ve spent fostering the relationships within and outside the blog. All worth while, even for mere game withe bizarre rules, far too many commercials (read: beer and truck ads) and sadistic levels of violence.

Anyway, here are the two questions I receive most frequently from people if the subject happens to come up:

1) How do you find something to write about all year when there’s only 16 games or so.

2) How do you find anything to write about so far away from the city of Pittsburgh.

There’s a long answer, but the short of it is that it’s a year round news cycle and that the only thing limiting bloggers in any niche is mere creativity. There’s always some story to be told and it doesn’t take special access to breaking news either to be worthy of a daily read.

I gradually learned that it wasn’t important for me to worry about linking to every last piece of news. Somebody else in the community would do that. My objective instead was to find a small story to tell within the broader context of what was going on. Not a rebuttal of someone else’s point of view or a link dump with little commentary of my own. But my own fresh take. Because blogging is not a zero-sum game, I didn’t need to worry about being rebuked by readers because I was missing something. In other words, blogs aren’t competing for a finite number of eyeballs. Well, that’s not quite said correctly. There are a limited number of readers out there, but generally speaking, those readers want to read everything possible about their topic of interest and will make their rounds to all the content available, not just one or two of the blogs covering that topic. At least to all those who have declared themselves worthwhile reads not just aggregators of other’s voices.

Below is one example from my blog that highlights how I go about carving out a niche for myself by providing analysis that is not found in newspapers. Part of that is the medium and part of it, in my opinion at least, is columnists being stuck in the old stale mindset of fluffy story lines.

Before I get started, I’ll share something that I don’t really advertise to the majority of my readership: I’ve never been to Pittsburgh. Never had a parent or grandparent steer me towards liking this team either. Just decided that this one sport in particular looked interesting to me around when I was in high school, I picked a team, and when I had the tools around 2004 or so to publish a blog, I decided I might as well give it a shot since none of my friends either liked sports in the first place, or worse yet, liked Dallas, Pittsburgh’s oldest and most hated rival from the 1970s.

So anyway, that’s my brief story that in some tiny way hopefully sheds a bit of light on how blogging at its core, is all about story telling (and boat loads of work) in a way that provides a new unique version of the same story every one else is telling. There may be variations – different teams; or in the political blogosphere, different policy interests, or some more progressive thinking than others etc. But at it’s core, blogging well just requires providing one’s take on the story everyone’s there to read about – in my case professional football more generally, and the Steelers in particular. When writing about some of life’s truly important issues or challenges, it can be tough to lend a unique voice. On something more superficial like entertainment of any sort, the possibilities are entirely limitless.

So really, even though I’ve not been to Pittsburgh, who cares. I’d need to be from there for it to have an effect on my identity. Going back to my initial point – I told you that it wasn’t a way of life for me. The only time I ever lived anywhere near Pittsburgh was during my time at Penn on the eastern most end of Pennsylvania.  But I barely had the money for collegiate mischief and courting what turned out to be a girlfriend of eight years and was too disorganized or disinterested to plan ahead enough to make it happen.

I still had a voice to share but my perspective on the team was not molded by being around this hard once proud industrial smoke stack city steeped in football tradition. I’ve never seen the rituals involved with Sundays in the fall in Pittsburgh; or had my personal sense of place and home so agonizingly uprooted by the collapse of an industry; or how this diaspora could only manage to bring people closer, not separate them.

These are not my stories. I don’t even make an attempt at trying to write these kinds of very personal and telling stories about what the Steelers organization means to so many people, especially in these tough economic times when not much else is going their way. It’s not my story for me to try to force or pretend.

I only hope to tell my own while fostering a spirit of collaboration and community amongst our small tribe for our collective enjoyment. Interestingly enough, the MCDM talks about how social media is tearing down long standing hierarchies by giving people the tools and ability to connect, collaborate and tell their own story. But it’s easy for the same types of hierarchies to form on blogs that aren’t truly grounded in community. That’s often the case on blogs written by really amazing innovators that are speaking on such an incredibly different level than most of us that there’s little room for other voices. But for the majority of blogs and communities, if people have congregated and inherently self organized within whatever tribal formation the blog is centered around in the first place, chances are all have something to offer to the group.

So while others tell their personal stories around my occasional reflection about this or that, I typically realize that my niche is to tell a part of the story that no one else is doing. In a game that’s so delineated by admittedly ridiculous displays of testosterone and show boating, bloggers often try to emulate the players with a sometimes entertaining but usually hollow diatribe that’s really contributing nothing to the story. Not saying I never have, hehe, but I try to do a variety of things that nobody else is doing, one of which I’ve shown an example of below. I’ve purposefully selected a mundane play to emphasize how I make a conscious effort to lend voice to the parts of the game that aren’t part of the narrative of the press or the majority of the blogosphere.

The stills were compiled by me simply by being patient and hitting pause-fast forward-rewind, etc from an online video posted after the game; then taking a snap shot of the screen, pasting in MS Paint, adding my own graphics when necessary, then explaining what we’re seeing that is literally impossible to detect without DVR considering how fast the game is played.

I have pasted the post in its entirety below, though I’m sure you’ve had enough if you’re even this far at all. I have a paper on a topic similar to this due this quarter, so thank you FlipTheMedia for the test-run.

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Let’s take a look at a 1st down play in the 3rd quarter of Sunday’s 23-14 AFCCG victory by the Steelers this past Sunday. I go through the effort of capturing the stills of this play to highlight how small a margin of error there is in the National Football League between a successful play and an unmitigated disaster.

In the opening frame, we see Ben setting up play action. Darnell Stapleton is highlighted, and we see him pulling to his left from his Guard position to help sell the run but to also pick up a pass rushing Ravens defender. As you can see, so far so good for the offensive line across the board.

Oh no. Darnell has overstepped where he needed to be, lunging too far too his left and not forcing the Ravens defender (Terrell Suggs) to beat him on the outside, which obviously would have been the desired way to direct him so as to lengthen the amount of time it took to get to QB Ben Roethlisberger. We can already tell that by over running by just a half a step, Stape is off balance and easy to push out of the way by the pass rusher who has ducked inside.

Ben is now toast. Obviously it’s too late for Ben to circle back the other way in such short notice – particularly because the play was designed fro Ben to float to his right slightly. With his shoulders not even close to square to begin with, there’s just no time to change paths and avoid the sack.  Ben might have been better off sprinting to his right (opposite direction then way he’s facing) and throwing it away once outside the pocket, but that’s not really his fault. Or the point of this.

Instead, I show this to illustrate just how close the Steelers were to maybe making a huge day down the field. See how the rest of the linemen have more than created a suitable pocket for Ben to throw from? And notice how Stape had plenty of help from his buddies on the left side had he not been off balance and gotten tossed out of the way? So close…

Yet so far away. As you can see, Stapleton knew he was the guilty party and more than likely, he knows exactly why things fell apart in a hurry. You rarely see a player clap his hands in frustration after getting beat physically. On a small mental miscue that is easily correctable, more likely for 300+ pound behemoths to ‘fess up and show some frustration. In his defense, it wasn’t a matter of effort – he was too fast and zealous getting to his spot. That’s a correctable mistake moving forward for our young guard who’s done such an admirable job learning and competing on the fly this year.

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Thanks for reading and if you’re interested in blogging a topic that’s heavily saturated by others, remember to always find a way to say something unique about what’s going on. There’s a million people out there doing link dumps to the mainstream press and to the more visible members of the blogosphere. But that doesn’t keep people’s interest. Be it fashion, politics, sports, etc – find something fresh to add to the conversation. In my opinion, it’s why the best newspapers and journalists will never be out of a job; and it’s also why the best bloggers will continue to have a place at the table with them moving forward. No professional training can supplant hard work and keen, fresh insight. There’s plenty of room for both at the table for those who look hard enough for a story to tell.