Salon's Article on Media At The Final Four Highlights Conflict Between Old and New Media

• Seth Davis came across as a politician–didn’t realize his father was Lanny Davis–as he also throws comments to women that pass while being interviewed, from high school aged girls to Leslie Visser;

• Gregg Doyel, sporting a soul patch, doesn’t want you to know he’s old enough to have  two teenagers, for fear online readers won’t find him hip. He also gets in a little dig at the ego of Mike Lupica, hardly news (well, unless Gregg was referring to someone else at New York Daily News);

• Marlen Garcia of USA Today talks about going through the stages of grief over the print industry dying. [Disclosure: USA Today Sports Media Group recently purchased this site and Big Lead Sports as part of the online movement]. She also says that the old-timers in the industry were fabulous to her as a woman in a male-dominated profession, but that the younger guys “can be a bit arrogant”;

• Pat Forde was not happy about the Yahoo seats on press row being in the third row, while the St. Louis Post-Dispatch got front row. “nothing against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, it’s a very fine paper, but our circulation is probably 9 million times what theirs is!” (earlier in the piece, it was noted that the NCAA didn’t even release the seating assignments until an hour before game time, to minimize media complaint time);

• Pete Thamel of the NY Times is proud of his affiliation, and had some interesting comments about former work at ESPN the Magazine: ““There’s more of an appetite to dig in. ESPN the Magazine wasn’t banging down the doors to investigate. It’s a good magazine but also has a lot of puff pieces and glorification of athletes. They try to be hip and edgy, and we don’t try to be hip and edgy, obviously.”

• The star of the piece may have been former outsider Jerry Palm, the RPI guy. Using what is described as a “cruddy” laptop and a Blackberry with a cracked screen, Palm seemed very down to earth. Later, on press row, sitting right in front of Jay-Z, Palm was fired up to share “‘You’re not gonna believe this … I’m charging Jay-Z’s phone!’ Apparently Jay-Z spotted a compatible charger on press-row, and requested juice.”;

The over-arching tone of the piece, though, was the comments related to the relationship between old and new media, print versus online publications and national beat writers versus team-specific sites. At the center of it was Matt Jones of Kentucky Sports Radio, who calls “the chief media villain at the Final Four” because of his conflicts with traditional types like Pat Forde and Pete Thamel.

Mark Blaudschun of Boston Globe described the relationship between new online media, which has grown substantially in the last several years: “It’s almost like a caste. When you look around, the young guys are sitting together according to print and Internet. Or by geographical areas, like all the New York guys will sit together. It’s cliquey. It’s just natural.”

Those interviewed frequently tell younger writers to get off their lawn, and wax poetic about a time when people didn’t care about getting the story first and were more concerned about accuracy. Because I feel charitable and it’s a weekend, I’m not going to dust off the Google News Archive Searches yet. I’m sure it would be pointless and I would find no rumor-mongering and occasionally incorrect reports on college coach comings and goings before the internet was invented by Al Gore. It was, I’m sure, a truly noble profession.

Matt Jones sums up the draw of the piece when he jokes, “If there’s one thing the media likes to talk about more than sports, it’s themselves.” Now, that’s something that all media, new and old, should be able to agree on.

[photo via US Presswire]