Jay Mariotti has quit the Sun Times, after a trip to Beijing convinced him that there is no future in print media. Jay says sports reporting has already moved entirely to the internet and that he is in talks with “lots of websites” to start a new, promising career as an online sports reporter.

Well, Jay, as a sports show that has only existed online, The Visitors Locker Room would like to welcome you to cyberspace with a free guide on what to expect, now that you are in online, rather than print, sports reporting:

• You are never going to be paid. Absolutely no one has ever figured out a way to make money online. The internet is the only place on Earth where you can entertain 300,000 people –more people than the Who charged in given year– and not make a dime.
  

• Everyone lies. This will be your biggest adjustment. As a print writer, you probably assume that bloggers are gossipy liars, but, what you don’t know is: the men who run the companies are actually the biggest liars. Collapsing governments are more honest with their employees than most internet companies. You are going to be greeted with the same line, every day, by your new boss: “Ready to take over the world?!”. He will then yell out the latest, suspiciously-large figure of cash he just secured, before telling every one to “buy the lakehouse now!”. The following Monday, you will walk in and armed security guards will be rolling computers out of the office on a dolly.
  

• List. Do not write. The internet would rather see a list of the ten greatest Bond cars, then an entire Vonnegut novel. You will initially consider this push to be artless, and you will resist the format. Do not make that mistake. This format is the most freeing device since the dish washer: no longer, are you bogged down in the flat, mundane task of beginning or concluding your thoughts. Instead, bullet points replace entire threads of concept. Never again, will you have to ask, “Does this relate?”, “Did I make my point?”, or “Does this even count as a thought?”. Rather, you will place bullet points before each, unconnected, pulse of a thought and the reader will know to move on.
  

• Hot girl tournaments, tangentially related to sports. This is important. There is no way to get readers with actual sports talk. Instead, you have to fictionalize tournaments of breathlessly-hot women who are barely connected to sports (The 20 Hottest Wifes in Baseball; If the Girls of Baywatch Made up the NFC North; etc; etc). Each of these posts should have less words than a Hustler spread. It should be pure pictures, with, at most, the boilerplate caption, “If I came home to THAT, I wouldn’t care about <INSERT EMBARASSING SPORTS ACTIVITY> either!”

  Editors Note: You can, technically, get away with fake tournaments of GI Joe Characters or Thundercats, instead of hot girls. From a traffic perspective, it works nearly as well, but, invariably, your comment section will be overloaded by cyber dorks correcting your references to the characters’ home countries or super powers. Thusly, we recommend you simply stick to half naked celebrities

  Editors Note #2: Editor notes can be used in place of bullet points.
  

• Everything is linkable- be obscure. You will never need to write another punchline. Every baseball player with a mustache, and every punter with a crazy name, is online- use them! Are you still trying to write the prefect simile for how greedy Kobe Bryant is being about his contract? Why? Get a photo of Scrooge McDuck and be done with it! All previous theories on comedy have been folded into a single, internet rule: nothing makes us laugh harder than a photo of some one we minimally recall from our childhood.
  

• No one cares. In some ways, this is an amalgamation of all the points, but this sum reality –no one cares– is often lost during the highs of the previous experiences. Jay, you will write a popular piece that gets 500,000 readers- not a single one of them will return the next day. These people are locusts. Napster asked users to start paying for songs and we forgot them in less time than <AUTHORS NOTE: can some one find me a picture of Jeffery Maier catching that fly ball>. No one cares about anything on the internet.

Editors Conclusion:

We sincerely hope this helps, Jay. It’s a new world, bro <need video of Michael Douglas using dated cell phone in “Wall Street”, here>. Over the years, you have been, to the Visitors Locker Room, what George Bush has been to the Daily Show. I don’t want to take this analogy too far because our owner is “literally minutes from closing a 50 million dollar deal with the city”, thus I can’t talk politics. But, as a sports parody show, I don’t need to tell you, Jay: you are our Chaucer. We are forever in your debt. We are available –day and night– should you need advice on this transition. We eagerly await your return to absurdly false reporting.

Leave a Comment