King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Radio vs. blogs, Round 2: Cowherd attacks another Web site. This is the closest thing to an idea the sports-talk industry seems able to muster.

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April 9, 2007 | ESPN radio dimwit Colin Cowherd has been at it again. When we last heard from him without coming across his show accidentally in the car, Cowherd was stealing bits from blogs without giving credit, then pronouncing the victims of his theft "whiners" who needed to "get over it." He eventually, nearly a week later and under pressure from upstairs, apologized.

Last week Cowherd, for no apparent reason other than to flex his muscle -- in the same way that clown down your street flexes "his" muscle by gunning his Trans Am -- told his listeners to go to the blog the Big Lead simultaneously. The overload shut the site down for a couple of days, as Cowherd had hoped.

The Big Lead is a frequent critic of ESPN.

It was the latest battle in an ongoing war between sports-talk radio and sports blogs, one that hardly seems like a fair fight. One side is a medium that's essentially unchanged since the 1970s, an industry whose only idea since the Carter administration has been to keep getting more "in your face." The other side is, so far in its brief history, constantly adapting, changing, self-correcting, reinventing.

History tends to be on the side of the latter. There's no reason sports-talk radio has to be an enemy of innovation, no reason it can't adapt to the times, meet the challenges of new technologies and changing audience needs. It just hasn't.

Talk radio's response to the World Wide Web, possibly the greatest communications revolution since Gutenberg built his printing press and certainly the greatest since television, was to say, "Hey, you can listen to our radio show on your computer now!"

Dazzling.

Shovelware, we used to call it when the newspaper industry -- which should have been a leader online, with its head start in information-gathering ability -- responded to the rise of the Web by dumping the stories from its pages onto its clumsy Web sites, coding and all. You'd be reading along online, dodging paragraph marks, and it would say, "Story continued on Page B-6."

The newspaper industry is still trying to recover from that slow response.

The Big Lead's editor told Deadspin, "We're on the playground with the rest of the first graders and, without provocation, some angry-at-the-world sixth grader comes over and drops you with a roundhouse you didn't see coming."

We're early enough in the process, and the natures of the beasts -- centralized radio, decentralized blogosphere -- are such that the schoolyard analogy still works. The radio guy's still a much bigger guy than any blogger. A better analogy, though, might be a large animal with a shrinking habitat swiping at the invaders.

Next page: Cowherd gets stern warning from ESPN bosses: Do that again, and watch out!