I think they've changed it up a bit, but ESPN Insider's bread and butter has been gathering stories from other news outlets.
Eh ... not exactly, although maybe it was that way in the past. Mostly now it seems like they reserve articles and some of their statistical analysis (a lot of Hollinger's stuff) for Insider, and there's other stuff, but Nate's right, it's definitely not worth purchasing by itself.
But if you can get a 26 issue subscription of ESPN magazine for $18 with Insider, it's well worth it.
It's been a while since I worked for them, and I stopped reading their content after I quit, so you could well be right. I think they were wanting to get away from the "dude in a basement" staff as I was leaving.
As I recall, ESPN launched their Insider service years ago by buying NBA Trade Rumours and just re-branding it. Over the years, they've expanded it by simply adding more and more of what used to be free (various columnists) to the Insider section and over the past few years, they've made some amount of Hollinger's work Insider.
Yup. They bought Sportstalk.com. Really what happened was Sportstalk crumbled with the internet collapse of 2001. Chad Ford, one of the founders of Sportstalk with Jason Peery, was hired by ESPN to be a columnist, and they ended up inheriting Sportstalk for nothing. At first they retained a lot of the original writers, but eventually they phased them all out and brought in regular ESPN columnists. I was one of the last remaining Sportstalk employees before I left in 2006. However, they STILL use the same system of information gathering for rumors.
I think it's totally worth it. It's, what, $40 for a year? I drop that when I buy a few drinks when I go out on a Thursday night. Being able to get all of the info without having to ask someone to copy and paste it for me or to give me the gist is TOTALLY worth $40 a year. Might I be able to get it more cheaply? Sure. Would it be worth $40 a month? Not to me. But $40 a year totally is. Ed O.
I got burned out on sports writing back in 2006, and now I'm actually back in school working on a bachelors. I'm looking at a career in emergency management (FEMA type stuff). I'm really involved in the Portland Neighborhood Emergency Team (NET) and the Portland Office of Emergency Management. I really enjoy teaching, and training, so I would like to have a career in training first responders like Portland Fire and Portland Police. I still love writing, but it wasn't in the cards. I hated working with people like Jason Quick and John Canzano. Egotistical pricks, the whole lot of them.
It was definitely worth it to me when it was bundled together with my ESPN mag subscription. I was just saying I'm not sure there's enough content there to make it worth forty bucks a year if that was all you got out of it.
