Web turns sports fan into talk show host

A May 2006 graduate of USC, the 24-year-old Mattis did a little research and discovered that streaming his show online was relatively inexpensive. He broadcast his first show last October and, for the first few months, only family and friends would listen or call in.

Sometimes i think my general approach is too nuanced, too intellectual, to make for really good radio though. If nationally #1-rated WEEI’s drive time shows are the Rush Limbaugh of sports talk, i’d want to be the NPR. You know: every issue has one angle, and then another, but if you dig deep some of the people from the second point of view can see merits to the first one, but there’s still some unresolved issues, but wait! there’s a third point-of-view disagreeing with the first two…. That’s how i think. I reserve black and white judgments for only the few essential issues. Sports radio exists by making black and white judgments about everything. Either you’re a Bledsoe guy or a Brady guy. Either Manny is a bum who’s not worth the drama he brings, or he’s a hugely valuable piece of the Sox puzzle. Great for ratings, bad for nuance.

But in The Long Tail Chris Anderson convinces us that the Web is helping us discover markets that were always there, but too decentralized to discover. I like the way Anderson thinks. Maybe there’s a demand for braniac sports talk.