TMZ Sports: A bit surprised at how much pub TMZ Sports has received in the last week. They began contacting bloggers a few weeks ago. TMZ Sports will provide blogs with  more ammo and athletes will obviously be annoyed. It will however, destroy the Huffington Post. Remember the hype for that site? What a bust. If it didn’t focus strictly on SEO and dominate google, we wouldn’t even know it existed. Where TMZ Sports will really come into play is if some character shows up with photos that prove athlete X is gay, and TMZ buys those for thousands of dollars. (Just a guess, but TMZ won’t be the go-to place for photos of, say, Jimmy Clausen playing beer pong or Brady Quinn dancing at AJ Hawk’s wedding.) Then ESPN and the rest of the sports media will be at a crossroads on whether to report about something that the internet will be buzzing about. And yes, if TMZ and Deadspin are willing to pay for newsworthy, exclusive photos, then so are we. [NYT]