ESPN's Michael Wilbon Explains His Feelings Toward Blogs: 'I'm Old'

A look inside Monday Night Football.

In the bowels of the Metrodome before the Bears-Vikings Monday Night Football game, I was introduced to Michael Wilbon of ESPN and the Washington Post. Knowing that Wilbon isn't a fan of blogs, I asked him to explain why.

I was surprised that his response was more about his own personal preferences than about bashing bloggers, although he did a little bit of that, too.

"I'm old," the 49-year-old Wilbon told me repeatedly. "You build up your reading habits over a lifetime."

Wilbon explained that he has always been a newspaper man and that he will always believe that if, for instance, there's breaking sports news in Boston, he's much more likely to get the full story from reading the Boston Globe than he is from reading any blog. In Wilbon's view, the Globe has access and blogs don't, and therefore the Globe will have information that blogs won't.

Wilbon also brought out a lot of the usual criticisms of blogs -- no editing, no standards, no accountability, but at that point a couple of (younger) ESPN staffers sitting with him interrupted to point out that he was painting blogs with too wide a brush. At that point, Wilbon mentioned Deadspin and The Big Lead, and he seemed to realize that those blogs are higher in quality than the ones he dismisses as lacking in standards.

I don't think Wilbon is ever going to feel fully comfortable with blogs, just like I don't think Shirley Povich ever would have been fully comfortable with sports writers arguing on TV. But I think he's more like the dad who doesn't understand the music his kids listen to than the dad who organizes boycotts of that music.