December 08, 2007

Comparative advantage: fight writing edition

So, the New York Times has not even mentioned tonight's Hatton-Mayweather fight, far less run a piece on it. Not even in a Sport in Brief column. Doubtless some people will argue that this confirms boxing's eclipse; I'd suggest it's evidence of the New York Times' irrelevance. Sure, I'd also say that the Times is failing the average, casual sports fan (but then its sports section does that on a daily basis anyway, so why be surprised?) but that's a question for the Times not me.

But it's not really a problem: Google News aggregates all the fight news you could hope for, including views from more than a dozen specialist boxing sites. And since, as best I know, the NYT doesn't have a must-read boxing writer, their failure to cover the fight scarcely matters beyond the extent to which it damages their jealously-guarded-but-unsustainable image as the paper of record.

8 Dec 2007 18:39:53 | Boxing, Newspapers

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
A Blue Moon Over Vegas Tonight No-one seems to know quite how many Britons have flown 7,000 miles to be in Las Vegas this weekend, but most estimates suggest it's at least 15,000 and possibly as many as 25,000. Since no more than 4,000 of them can actually have tickets for Saturday's fight between Ricky Hatton and Floyd Mayweather this is an invasion army of impressive proportions. But then the British - and especially the English - have always loved their fighters and their fights and Ricky Hatton today enjoys the sort of celebrity once known by the great prize-fighters of the nineteenth century. If a spot of foreign travel can be thrown in then all to the good. Hatton's ticketless fans have come to Vegas for some sunshine, plenty of beer and an adventure, just as their ancestors left sodden Britain for the Bay of Bengal or the Cape. Back in the Day the Boys on Tour t-shirts might have read Khartoum, Mafeking, Calcutta. these day it's the Costa del Sol and, this week, Las Vegas. But the aim is much the same: a dust-up with the locals, a rollocking good time and the chance to share in glory and, if they have their way...
PREVIOUS POST
The Fall of France? (Again?) So, unsurprisingly, Time Magazine's cover story (international edition) on The Death of French Culture is making waves on the eastern side of the Atlantic (once upon a time, Time might have devoted space to French culture in its US edition: that it wouldn't dream of doing so now tells us as much about the United States as it does about France). Given that all countries enjoy introspection - what's the subject of any attempt at writing the fabled Great American Novel, if not America herself? - it's not shocking that Le Figaro should devote three pages to responding to Don Morrison's silly, exaggerated article. Silly and exaggerrated and irritating, I mean. It can be disconcerting to find oneself agreeing with Bernard-Henri Levy but his analysis of this foolishness seems, in its guts, right to me. In this instance the portrait tells us as much about the artist as it does his subject. And it's not a pretty sight. The most striking aspect of Time's foolishness is its provincialism. Americans don't think of France as a home of culture anymore (where do they think might be then?) so obviously the Frogs have gone to the dogs. Consider these alleged proofs of...

alex massie

Search

My Online Status

Recent Comments