All Over It

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
--PETER STEINER cartoon in The New Yorker, July 5, 1993

What are we, crazy? Running a story sending readers to rival sports sites on the Web? (Writing Up a Storm, page 58). Call us confident. The truth is that the Web is significantly changing the way sports are covered, and SI.com is both driving and deconstructing that rapid evolution for readers. Of course you have to be careful out there. Think information delivery; now think Wild West.

There is an old joke that the Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it can be a complete substitute for life. Well, yes, but for the sports fan it can also contribute mightily to a new information utopia. There is just so much sports stuff online--scores, news, stats, video, opinion, jokes--and it just keeps coming. Bill Gates has said that at some point in the '90s we passed "a milestone ... with regard to the Internet achieving critical mass"; if so, we're probably halfway into a two-decade cycle that will swallow several generations of new digital technology. Yahoo indeed.

That's the landscape. The trick is finding what you want in some kind of manageable format without getting ambushed by plastic fish singing Pretty Woman or sites offering suggestions for Brangelina's baby's name. And then there is the matter of credibility. Did I mention columnists who seldom leave their couches holding forth like George Plimpton, athletes breaking their own "news" on personal websites, and rampant rumormongering? There is a dumbfounding amount of creepy and just plain wrong information, some of it about sports, which can make the Internet feel like a delivery system for bad craziness. The demand for an alternative to all that is why there is an SI.com, and why the magazine is running a package this week rounding up interesting and illuminating voices and sites on the Web. We want everyone who loves sports as much as we do to know that good Internet journalism is about more than logos with a Web address. It truly is the content, etc.

SI's man on that job is Paul Fichtenbaum, who has been managing editor of SI.com since January 2004. He oversees a 24/7 news operation that delivers more than 200 original stories each week, in addition to up-to-the-minute scores, breaking news, statistics, analysis and humor--not to mention SI Swimsuit features. "What makes the Web so irresistible is that on the same day we dissect every minute of an NCAA tournament game we also have room to dig deep on people like Terrell Owens," says Fichtenbaum, who has been with SI since 1989. "We have the ability to tap into SI's journalistic and ethical DNA on a constant basis. What could be better than that?"

Reader satisfaction is soaring, and so are the numbers: SI.com had a record-breaking 440 million page views last month and a revenue increase of 104% last year. Yes, the Web, we're all over it.