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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIt's an unusually blustery Friday in late October, and the Dallas Cowboys are finishing a light morning practice before Sunday's game against the Atlanta Falcons. The Cowboys' twenty-two-acre training complex sits off a quiet side street in Valley Ranch, a master-planned neighborhood of McMansions and manicured lawns sprawling across a reclaimed floodplain northwest of the downtown skyline. Just up the road is the Barbara Bush Middle School, the Riverside Church of Christ, and a Dickey's Barbecue Pit, totems of an abiding Texas faith in Jesus, the Bushes, and smoked meat. But there's no more unifying religion in the Lone Star state than the Cowboys. The team's late-season surge is still a couple of months away, and they're off to a tepid 3-2 start. Not catastrophic, but also not what owner Jerry Jones had in mind for the debut season of his $1.2 billion, 100,000-seat stadium featuring a seven-story-high HD jumbotron, $9.50 Peroni beer, and $12 truffled mac 'n' cheese.\n\nCalvin Watkins, a 41-year-old reporter for ESPNDallas.com, one of four local Web sites launched by ESPN last year, stands near the end zone and watches special-teams coach Joe DeCamillis choreograph punt returns, his commanding bark rising above the howling wind. Watkins has a few days' worth of stubble and wears a green-patterned shirt and jeans. Already it's been a busy morning. He's filed three blog items and his Web column. Later he has an online chat with readers scheduled and a radio appearance on ESPN's 103.3 FM. \"The one thing on this beat,\" Watkins says, \"is there's always shit going on.\" He spots Cowboys chief operating officer Stephen Jones, the owner's eldest son, walking toward the field. Watkins corners Jones and asks him whether the Cowboys overspent on the stadium. A text message buzzes Watkins's BlackBerry. It's his friend Clarence Hill, a Cowboys reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, texting from the pressroom. Watkins texts back that he just interviewed Jones, a crucial source on the Cowboys beat\u2014news that will surely antagonize Hill. \"He's gonna run out here,\" Watkins says, flashing a raffish grin. \"Clarence was in my wedding; when his first kid was born, I went to see him. We're close friends, but I'm gonna whoop his ass. That's the bottom line.\"\n\nAfter practice, Watkins piles into his corner desk in the press room, a warren of cubicles down a long hallway from the locker room. He's the only ESPNDallas.com writer at Valley Ranch today. The other half-dozen journalists in the room are newspaper reporters, and Watkins knows them well. He did stints at both the Star-Telegram and The Dallas Morning News before bailing out of the newspaper industry. Watkins has journalism blood: His grandfather worked for Ebony and went on to produce a monthly African-American newsletter called Negro Heritage. He grew up in New York reading the Daily News every morning and decided on a newspaper career after college, landing a job at Newsday, on Long Island, and eventually working his way to the Morning News, a sports-journalism powerhouse that played far above its weight on the national scene. At its peak in 2000, the Morning News, under legendary sports editor Dave Smith, maintained a sports staff of more than one hundred reporters and editors. Historically, a guy like Watkins would have spent his entire career in newspapers, but last year he quit to join FanHouse, AOL's sports site, before jumping to ESPNDallas.com. \"As much as I like 'em, newspapers are struggling,\" Watkins says. \"They cut our pay. I'm a guy when you cut my pay and then you ask me to do more? Come on.\"\n\nI'm in Dallas because I'm curious to see how ESPN\u2014the self-proclaimed and undeniable \"worldwide leader in sports,\" with its six cable channels, sprawling Web site, biweekly magazine, forty-six international television networks, 750-odd radio affiliates, and seven restaurants (try the creamy spinach artichoke dip!), the juggernaut that launched the careers of Keith Olbermann and Chris Berman and Bill Simmons and utterly revolutionized the tone and format of sports journalism in America and across the globe\u2014is refashioning itself as a scrappy hometown outfit willing to hack through the weeds of local beat reporting. Last year it debuted sites in Chicago, Boston, Dallas, and Los Angeles, and the New York site goes live April 2. The idea is to cover local teams aggressively and to use the sites to break news. Each site features blogs and columns and a daily city-specific SportsCenter Webcast, along with clips pulled from ESPN's vast trove of video highlights and interviews. Given that newspaper advertising remains a $25 billion industry, not to mention the cultural clout papers wield even in their twilight, ESPN's local venture ranks with SportsCenter itself as one of the most paradigm-changing projects the network has conceived in its thirty-year history.\n\nWatkins breaks from his blogging and scans incoming e-mails on his BlackBerry. Charean Williams, a veteran NFL reporter for the Star-Telegram, sits at a nearby desk chatting with an intern assigned to shadow her for the day. Williams, a petite blond with wide eyes and a sonorous Texas drawl, is in no rush to finish that day's story, since her deadline won't come until 5 p.m. In August the Star-Telegram, owned by the ailing McClatchy newspaper chain, instituted mandatory one-week furloughs for all staff and thinned its online department. \"All of our Web people took buyouts,\" Williams says. \"We haven't really stressed the Web, since we have nobody left.\"\n\n\n\nThat evening I attend a high school football game with Randy Jennings, a laid-off reporter who's stringing for ESPNDallas.com. High school sports are one of the remaining strongholds for local newspapers, but here, too, bruising economics have led to deep cuts. In 2000 the Morning News had more than a dozen full-time high-school-football reporters earning full salary and benefits. Today it's just four. Jennings was one of those Morning News reporters, but he was let go in April 2009 during a purge of 500 employees from the paper's parent company. A quiet man of 56, he has a wide nose, dark eyes, and ruddy cheeks. \"I'm rooting for defense tonight,\" he says struggling to keep up with the game\u2014the Arlington Colts versus their crosstown rivals, the Arlington Bowie Volunteers\u2014though he isn't getting his wish: The Colts rack up thirty-eight points in the first half. Jennings peers through a pair of scuffed-up binoculars to the field below. \"I need binoculars to see the field, but I need glasses to see what to write,\" he says. \"It's terrible.\" Jennings hasn't bothered to look for another newspaper job. He never married, and when his mom got Alzheimer's fifteen years ago, he moved home to the house he grew up in. He says he's trying to open a Subway franchise with a reporter from the Morning News.\n\nIs ESPN killing the sports section of your local paper? No. Not by itself, anyway. Much broader factors\u2014plummeting ad revenue and falling circulation, both attributable to changing consumer habits\u2014are taking care of that. After the rise of radio, television, and the World Wide Web, all manner of logic and economics pointed to the fact that distributing news\u2014day-old news!\u2014with fleets of belching trucks was absurd. For the sports journalist, there is only one way to cast his current predicament: as a long winning streak coming to an end. \"Sports journalism is dead,\" says New York Post sports columnist Phil Mushnick. \"The games have become props; the sports have become props. I think at the start of every day, ESPN's motives are pure, but before it's put on the air, on the Web, or in the magazine, it's all been ESPN-ized: It's there to self-promote, cross-promote. I'm frightened for whistle-blowers. It'll be a good time for bad guys when newspapers go down.\"\n\nNewspapers began dying long before ESPN conceived its local sports venture. But the Bristol, Connecticut-based colossus is definitely making sure it's there to pick up the pieces\u2014and the market share\u2014when newspapers finally go. More than a few journalists hired by ESPN local sites boast a newspaper background. In Dallas, five of the six staffers came from the Morning News. In Boston, ESPN poached popular Patriots blogger Mike Reiss from the ailing Boston Globe. The Los Angeles site is staffed by former writers from the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Daily News.\n\nESPN's local incursion started in 2006 when ecutives began brainstorming ways to increase the content on the websites of ESPN's five sports-radio stations, which then featured bland advertising promotions and streaming audio. By rebranding the radio Web sites as city-specific ESPN sites, they figured they could build robust local news organizations. So far, so good.\n\nBut the local effort faces its biggest test with the debut of the New York site, which will battle not just The New York Times but also an infamously nasty sports-radio and tabloid culture with a deep bench of opinionated sports columnists who would love nothing more than to take a high-priced carpetbagger down a notch. Fittingly, perhaps, ESPN looked to the tabloids when they hired well-respected Daily News sports editor Leon Carter to helm the New York site. \"When ESPN called, I took a pause,\" Carter tells me. \"It wasn't an easy decision to walk away [from the Daily News].\" He said that ultimately he decided to leave for the chance to build something from the ground up. To succeed, he says, ESPNNewYork.com will need to give its readers content they won't be able to find anywhere else. \"That's what New York is all about: When you fall asleep at night, you're thinking about what the competition will bring the next day. When you wake up in the morning, it's still on your mind. You chart your day based on what you have or what you didn't have.\"\n\nSo far, ESPN's competition is taking a diplomatic tack. Tom Jolly, the Times's sports editor, was conciliatory when asked about the impact of ESPN on the local media scene. \"Competition is great,\" he said. \"We welcome that.\" But Murray Chass, the former longtime Times baseball writer, sees a potent threat to his former employer. \"The Times has clearly put its emphasis on its Web site, so if they're now going to be confronted by another Web site that does a better job, they're not going to look too good,\" he said. \"I think the Times reporters can be beaten by ESPN reporters, because tabloid reporters already beat them.\"\n\nSpeaking of the tabs, consider the opinion of the New York Post's Mushnick, an almost comic-book caricature of the crusty sportswriter and a longtime ESPN hater. \"ESPN is the monster that devoured the monster!\" Mushnick snarls. \"I'm a sports fan, and when I turn on ESPN, their experts have no greater understanding than a 12-year-old. Everything is a sell. And the hosts become the shopping clerks and cash-register punchers. They want it both ways: They want to be seen as journalists when it suits their purposes, and they want to be seen as bootlickers and entertainers when it suits their purposes. How intelligent do you have to be to understand you're listening to an infomercial?\"\n\nBy now ESPN has grown accustomed to being criticized by columnists and pecked at by blogs like Deadspin, which had a field day covering former ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips's sex scandal with a 22-year-old production assistant last fall. \"I don't look for sympathy,\" says Rob King, editor-in-chief of ESPN.com. After a two-decade career in newspapers\u2014King was deputy managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer\u2014he joined ESPN.com in 2004 and understands his former colleagues' competitive jealousies and angst. \"When I was at the Inquirer, I had the experience where you're sitting there and here comes ESPN, who's doing a segment, and now we have to wait for [Allen] Iverson to be available, because he's talking to ESPN?\" King understands the fear of ESPN as the price of success. \"I've never worked at Walmart, but I've shopped at Walmart before, and there are many people there when I walk in the door, and they all seem happy,\" he says. \"People have feelings about enormity. They do. It's just the nature of business.\"\n\n\n\nI'm sitting in ESPNDallas.com editor Barry Vigoda's office in the network's Dallas bureau on Monday morning, October 26. Vigoda is looking at a pair of flat-screen monitors, planning coverage for the week ahead. A plastic Florida State Seminoles helmet\u2014Vigoda is a Florida native\u2014rests behind him on an empty shelf, but otherwise the white walls are bare. ESPN moved into the office only weeks earlier, and there are still rows of unoccupied cubicles down the hall.\n\nVigoda talk about sports coverage without the High Church righteousness commonly voiced by newspaper veterans. He espouses a stripped-down, consumer-based view of journalism. He wants his reporters to churn out readily digestible nuggets for readers who are most likely bored office jockeys clicking \"refresh\" on their browsers at work. \"Readers have limited time,\" Vigoda says. \"They aren't gonna sit there and spend a lot of time, I don't think, unless it's the most compelling read they've ever seen online, especially if you're talking about sports fans. They wanna get in and get out. To me, we get more value out of quantity. We want as many quick hits as we can.\"\n\nVigoda picks up the phone and dials into the weekly conference call with editors from Boston and Chicago. Each Monday, Kevin Jackson, ESPN's ecutive editor for digital media, brings the local editors together to coordinate coverage across the sites. They discuss lineups and developing story lines, along with ways to best make use of ESPN's video clips. Jackson's orders spray out of the speakerphone in staccato bursts. \"I imagine today is the type of day that Bears fans are just ready to tear Soldier Field down, they're so mad,\" he tells ESPNChicago.com editor Keith Sgariglia. (Cincinnati crushed the Bears yesterday, 45-10.) \"We should do as much as we can to tap into that anger.\"\n\nJust then Vigoda ducks out of the call to answer his cell phone. It's Watkins, calling with a tip that the Cowboys are hastily scheduling a news conference for later that afternoon. Rumors are swirling around Valley Ranch that the Cowboys are preparing to announce a major contract extension for star linebacker DeMarcus Ware. \"Damn! I knew that was gonna happen,\" Vigoda snaps. \"I was just thinking about that not just ten minutes ago. Okay, let me know as soon as you hear something.\" He hangs up and frantically scrolls through his Twitter feed, looking for news breaks. \"That's a huge story for us. Nobody's got anything yet,\" he mutters as his eyes trace the screen. His expression drops when he sees a tweet confirming the news from 105.3 FM, the Dallas sports-talk station and ESPN's chief rival.\n\n\"105.3 FM has it!\" Vigoda yells over to Scott Noll, his number two editor. Noll asks Vigoda if they should dispatch Watkins and Tim MacMahon, the junior reporter on the Cowboys beat, to follow the story. Vigoda has a problem: Watkins has yet to confirm the news, and MacMahon is driving to a radio interview with ESPN radio host Randy Galloway. Vigoda tells Noll to alert ESPN's radio producers that their rival has reported the story.\n\nVigoda calls Watkins and leaves a message on his cell phone. \"Calvin, it's Barry. Hey, the Fan has it on their Twitter page. It is in fact a DeMarcus Ware contract extension. That's the only place I've seen it right now. Gimme a ring back when you can.\"\n\nNoll races back into Vigoda's office. \"Tim is gonna have to go to that news conference,\" Vigoda says, \"but he's already on his way to see Galloway. I need Tim there.\" He decides to yank MacMahon off his radio appearance and send him out to Valley Ranch to work the story.\n\nHe calls MacMahon's cell. \"Hey, you saw the Ware stuff? I think you should probably be there,\" Vigoda tells him. \"There's just gonna be a lot to write on this thing. I think you can do some blogging from there and let Calvin do the story. Sorry, dude. Okay, I appreciate it.\"\n\nVigoda clicks off. Just then, Fox Sports adds to Vigoda's distress when he sees their flashing headline: Ware has signed a $40 million six-year extension, one of the NFL's highest. Now Vigoda's been beaten both locally and nationally. Meanwhile he has internal tensions to deal with. Galloway and the radio producers are furious that Vigoda pulled MacMahon off his show at the last minute.\n\n\"All right, God damn it. That's a dynamic I never had to worry about before,\" Vigoda says. \"If I need to send somebody out somewhere, I send them out somewhere. They're spread so thin\u2014they're doing radio, they're doing television, they're blogging\u2014so pulling them off means more than what they're doing for me. Randy Galloway is pretty pissed off.\"\n\n\n\nIt's a huge question clouding the future for ESPN's local project: Will the sites get the resources they need to replicate the heavy lifting that newspapers have historically done? So far, the answer is: not yet. Each site is staffed by a half-dozen or so reporters and editors to cover the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, the MLS, and high school sports. It's a shoestring effort, given that sports desks at some of their newspaper competitors have staffs ten times that size, even after layoffs. The sheer number of bodies that newspapers can throw onto a story is one of their final remaining arguments for sustained relevance. \"We have many more reporters on the street than they do,\" says Dallas Morning News sports editor Bob Yates. \"They've placed their bets on the Cowboys, which makes sense in this market. And after that? Spread thin\u2014this is an accurate description.\"\n\nRight now, ESPN is having to fight for local credibility one newsbreak at a time. It's an odd position for ESPN to be cast as an underdog when in every other medium it's been dominant for years. When the Cowboys opened their new stadium this season, the press office assigned Watkins and MacMahon terrible seats in the press box, shunting them off next to The Gilmer Mirror and KTXS News 12 out of Abilene, Texas. (\"We got fucked,\" MacMahon griped.) And two weeks before I visited Dallas, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban flipped when he learned that ESPN hadn't been sending MacMahon to all Mavericks road games. (Partly because ESPN has national NBA writers covering every game, and those stories are posted on ESPNDallas.com as well as the flagship ESPN.com.) Cuban took to his blog, as he usually does when he has a grievance. In a post titled \"The Dallas Morning News is killing ESPN Dallas,\" he railed: \"The World Wide Leader in Sports is without question minor league when it comes to ESPN Dallas... Its hard to offer any coverage when you don't actually have anyone at the games.\"\n\nYet the tendency of ESPN's local critics to focus on head count is missing the larger point: ESPN might not need many bodies on the ground to revolutionize local sports coverage. More than any major media company, ESPN excels at repurposing and cross-promoting its coverage across every medium, from television to mobile to video games to local sports. The fiefdoms and turf wars that have hobbled so many media companies are largely absent at ESPN. \"Synergy,\" that much-maligned new-media mantra, actually exists\u2014and thrives\u2014at ESPN. Concedes veteran Morning News columnist Barry Horn: \"There's a lot you can do with smoke and mirrors.\"\n\nBut here's maybe the most important reason not to underestimate ESPN's city sites: Consumers just can't get enough of the brand. ESPN's ironic sensibility has supplanted the ire of the jaded ink-stained wretch\u2014sorry, Phil Mushnick\u2014with the deadpan of its on-air personalities, immortalized by the late-'90s ad campaign \"This is SportsCenter.\" Having reinvented sports reporting around the world, ESPN wants to own your hometown\u2014and everyone else's hometown, too.\n\nGabriel Sherman is a New York-based journalist. He wrote about Barry Bonds in the April 2009 GQ."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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