Mike Fisher and Maven/SI

[j0Shi]

There really is no quality Mavericks news source right now. It's a market gap.

Follow the beat reporters, national, and Mavs.com guys on Twitter (Cato, Townsend, MacMahon, Stein, Woj, Shams, Karalla) for breaking news, interviews, and news from within the org. Podcasts (LockedOn, others) and blogs (MMB, others) for daily / game / general news coverage. Ringer/Athletic/ESPN Lowe for in-depth analysis and deeper topics.

There's no shortage of coverage, you just need to know where to look.

[jesusshuttlesworth82]

 His interaction with the community was cool as you felt closer to the team through him, but his reporting always lacked substance. Simply no quality content from a gist point of view.

Best contributor by far was David Lord.

This community was his substance and he lost it with the move. 

There really is no quality Mavericks news source right now. It's a market gap.

---

Agreed on Fish.  Now we don't have to beat around the bush.  Literally everyone outside of Fish's forum knows the dude just pumps out random stories under the guise of reporting.  He'd get a story once in a while since he technically does have a press pass.  I can't believe people actually paid for his "donuts."  Kudos to him I guess for making a living writing random stuff people thought was "insider info."

Dlord is an invaluable CBA/cap asset.  His basketball opinions though are about 20 years outdated.

[SportPsychMav]

Seriously there is no good Mavs source / analysis out there at all. 

Audience and interest is rising steeply though as Doncic and to a lesser degree Porzingis drag a lot of audience with them.

R/Mavericks on Reddit is growing super fast.
Realgm general board talks about the Mavs. 
Reddit r/NBA talks about doncic and Porzingis and Mavs game threads are in demand.

Mavs moneyball has a good community but lost its best reporter in Tim Cato to the athletic.

Bill Simmons is a Luka Stan and Mavs will be topic in the ringer more often than not.

Dallas Lost Mark Stein and has Mediocre Tim McMahon left who covers Dallas only as a side dish.

Probably Twitter / Reddit and RealGm have become the best NBA sources.

Stats.nba.com gives you all the stats you can ever want.

Media Information is accessible by fanse directly from NBA reports.

Rest of Media is becoming more and more Video and Podcasts.

Good written stuff is super rare.

[j0Shi]

Not sure what you guys expect. Cato went to Slovenia and provided a must-read. Ringer's KOC met the Generation Z Dallas Mavericks and yesterday Ringer talked about Dallas' supporting cast. That's three national features within two weeks. Brad Townsend is going to provide background stories, Isaac Harris will eventually start writing stuff like this for Mavs.com:

https://www.mavs.com/the-mavericks-are-b...ning-camp/

I mean how many true features did we get even when ESPN had MacMahon on the beat and Stein in Dallas? One per month, maybe two? I get that the excitement and interest is there, but we're talking about unreasonable expectations.

[SportPsychMav]

Not sure what you guys expect. Cato went to Slovenia and provided a must-read. Ringer's KOC met the Generation Z Dallas Mavericks and yesterday Ringer talked about Dallas' supporting cast. That's three national features within two weeks. Brad Townsend is going to provide background stories, Isaac Harris will eventually start writing stuff like this for Mavs.com:

https://www.mavs.com/the-mavericks-are-b...ning-camp/

I mean how many true features did we get even when ESPN had MacMahon on the beat and Stein in Dallas? One per month, maybe two? I get that the excitement and interest is there, but we're talking about unreasonable expectations.

As I said ringer likes the Mavs and Cato is decent.

[OBX Maverick]

 His interaction with the community was cool as you felt closer to the team through him, but his reporting always lacked substance. Simply no quality content from a gist point of view.

Best contributor by far was David Lord.

This community was his substance and he lost it with the move. 

There really is no quality Mavericks news source right now. It's a market gap.

---

Agreed on Fish.  Now we don't have to beat around the bush.  Literally everyone outside of Fish's forum knows the dude just pumps out random stories under the guise of reporting.  He'd get a story once in a while since he technically does have a press pass.  I can't believe people actually paid for his "donuts."  Kudos to him I guess for making a living writing random stuff people thought was "insider info."

Dlord is an invaluable CBA/cap asset.  His basketball opinions though are about 20 years outdated.

You guys hit the nail on the head. On dallasbasketball.com I had stopped reading Fish’s articles a long time ago.  All fluff and innuendo. I always used to say his writing was like reading a riddle. What made that site is what has been re-constituted here....fans offering opinion and discussion about the Mavs. 

Also, is it just me, or does it seem that Fish is frequently getting into tussles with different people in the sports media? Seems that he is pushing other people’s buttons or they are pushing his which results in a lot of twitter trash talking......find it kind of humorous.

[jesusshuttlesworth82]

 His interaction with the community was cool as you felt closer to the team through him, but his reporting always lacked substance. Simply no quality content from a gist point of view.

Best contributor by far was David Lord.

This community was his substance and he lost it with the move. 

There really is no quality Mavericks news source right now. It's a market gap.

---

Agreed on Fish.  Now we don't have to beat around the bush.  Literally everyone outside of Fish's forum knows the dude just pumps out random stories under the guise of reporting.  He'd get a story once in a while since he technically does have a press pass.  I can't believe people actually paid for his "donuts."  Kudos to him I guess for making a living writing random stuff people thought was "insider info."

Dlord is an invaluable CBA/cap asset.  His basketball opinions though are about 20 years outdated.

You guys hit the nail on the head. On dallasbasketball.com I had stopped reading Fish’s articles a long time ago.  All fluff and innuendo. I always used to say his writing was like reading a riddle. What made that site is what has been re-constituted here....fans offering opinion and discussion about the Mavs. 

Also, is it just me, or does it seem that Fish is frequently getting into tussles with different people in the sports media? Seems that he is pushing other people’s buttons or they are pushing his which results in a lot of twitter trash talking......find it kind of humorous.

He is a weird dude.  Bob and Dan (on The Ticket) have told stories of interacting with him in real life.

He has to keep up his "insider" status to keep collecting money from dumb people.  So he gets in fights with people who doubt his "reporting."

[TATU]

 His interaction with the community was cool as you felt closer to the team through him, but his reporting always lacked substance. Simply no quality content from a gist point of view.

Best contributor by far was David Lord.

This community was his substance and he lost it with the move. 

There really is no quality Mavericks news source right now. It's a market gap.

---

Agreed on Fish.  Now we don't have to beat around the bush.  Literally everyone outside of Fish's forum knows the dude just pumps out random stories under the guise of reporting.  He'd get a story once in a while since he technically does have a press pass.  I can't believe people actually paid for his "donuts."  Kudos to him I guess for making a living writing random stuff people thought was "insider info."

Dlord is an invaluable CBA/cap asset.  His basketball opinions though are about 20 years outdated.

You guys hit the nail on the head. On dallasbasketball.com I had stopped reading Fish’s articles a long time ago.  All fluff and innuendo. I always used to say his writing was like reading a riddle. What made that site is what has been re-constituted here....fans offering opinion and discussion about the Mavs. 

Also, is it just me, or does it seem that Fish is frequently getting into tussles with different people in the sports media? Seems that he is pushing other people’s buttons or they are pushing his which results in a lot of twitter trash talking......find it kind of humorous.

He is a weird dude.  Bob and Dan (on The Ticket) have told stories of interacting with him in real life.

He has to keep up his "insider" status to keep collecting money from dumb people.  So he gets in fights with people who doubt his "reporting."

Curious, what did BAD say about him?

[SleepingHero]

He is a weird dude.  Bob and Dan (on The Ticket) have told stories of interacting with him in real life.

He has to keep up his "insider" status to keep collecting money from dumb people.  So he gets in fights with people who doubt his "reporting."

I was one of those "dumb people" who paid for a premium subscription for about 4 years. My main justification was it was cheap! And I looked at it more as paying to support the board than reading Fish's premium articles. I considered those a bonus. Once in a while Fish would actually give a premium story that was worth the money (I remember him detailing the Mavs interest in Luka in 2017), but on the whole it was mostly fluff that never got to the point it was trying to make. 

But I don't regret supporting Fish all those years. I thought my money was going to keeping a place I frequented several hours a day alive. It wasn't until the move to 247 did I figure that no matter how much money I paid, the board's security would never really be safe from constant moving, and Fish would always go to the highest bidder (which isn't bad business wise). 

Lo and behold when the move to Maven happen did my fear come to fruition and I was glad I didn't renew my subscription. Its unfortunate that Fish didn't recognize the importance of the community he had, and chose a platform that was so drastically different it alienated his base.

[ntpeak]

I also was one of these dumb guys, because back then i considered it as a worthy resource for news which aren't available here in Germany.
Stopped my subscription several years ago nevertheless since value for money wasn't really there. 
That been said, I assume that Fish and Maven were fully aware of the great community and maybe this was even an important reason for Maven to hire him. I bet they thought that "his" community would directly and fully migrate into their own.
People tend to accept small degradations as long as they won't have to change or leave their comfort zone of a known environment.  
This last switch was plain and simply too big of a let down and now instead of a full living community, Maven has hired a desert with some tumbleweed ;-)

PS:
I only had about 100 posts in the old board cause whenever i thought i might know anything, someone else was already faster. ;-)

[Dahlsim]

https://twitter.com/bryancurtis/status/1...1898146816

https://www.theringer.com/2019/10/31/209...orts-media

It's not only sports writing. Basically it is economy 4.0 where companies try to benefit from their customers work.
The customer does the work and a platform earns the money. They only provide an infrastructure.

This can be found in almost any economy but especially in heavily content driven endeavors.

As if limbic capitalism wasn't enough already. Future looks dull and probably will lead to another dark ages as good content will be hard to filter and hard to access. Quality will be limited to the upper class.

It's resulting in a form of addictive and psychological slavery. Somehow they don't provide services for customers but make them hook on something and then milking them. 

It's gross.

Good points.  In the big picture however don't you have to consider the explosive growth of FREE content that we the public now benefit from? 

The effort that went into real hard work news, reporting and writing now has to compete in pool of free content and hope that the public can recognize the difference and is willing to pay something for it.

[ClutchDirk]

He is a weird dude.  Bob and Dan (on The Ticket) have told stories of interacting with him in real life.

He has to keep up his "insider" status to keep collecting money from dumb people.  So he gets in fights with people who doubt his "reporting."

I was one of those "dumb people" who paid for a premium subscription for about 4 years. My main justification was it was cheap! And I looked at it more as paying to support the board than reading Fish's premium articles. I considered those a bonus. Once in a while Fish would actually give a premium story that was worth the money (I remember him detailing the Mavs interest in Luka in 2017), but on the whole it was mostly fluff that never got to the point it was trying to make. 

But I don't regret supporting Fish all those years. I thought my money was going to keeping a place I frequented several hours a day alive. It wasn't until the move to 247 did I figure that no matter how much money I paid, the board's security would never really be safe from constant moving, and Fish would always go to the highest bidder (which isn't bad business wise). 

Lo and behold when the move to Maven happen did my fear come to fruition and I was glad I didn't renew my subscription. Its unfortunate that Fish didn't recognize the importance of the community he had, and chose a platform that was so drastically different it alienated his base.

I also donated monthly to support our community...now I am going to give that donation plus a couple more dollars on top to help keep this site alive and help relieve the financial burden Magick has assumed to keep us together...

Now for something I see that ClutchFans does as they are independent of a major sports outlet is they give labels to those who have or continue donating over there by having a contributor type description under their username to distinguish them from the rest of the users...just a thought and my personal opinion...

[Magickian]

I greatly appreciate all of your support. From the kind words and encouragement to the donations.

My initial idea was to help Fish and I never really knew exactly this would thrive so great as it has and I’m quite humbled and also proud to give my best. This semester has been kicking my butt a bit so I haven’t had much time to work on the code for a few weeks, but I will get back on it soon and make some improvements.

I am always taking these suggestions to heart and will do my best to satisfy as many as I can.

I know the themes aren’t great yet and could be bigger so I will find a solution to that soon. 

Thank you all. I didn’t do this for any capitalist endeavor, I just wanted to keep the band together, and now that I’ve seen where this is growing into, I’m taking it very seriously and will continue to improve this site for us all!

Thank you everyone!

[Hooper21]

 His interaction with the community was cool as you felt closer to the team through him, but his reporting always lacked substance. Simply no quality content from a gist point of view.

Best contributor by far was David Lord.

This community was his substance and he lost it with the move. 

There really is no quality Mavericks news source right now. It's a market gap.

---

Agreed on Fish.  Now we don't have to beat around the bush.  Literally everyone outside of Fish's forum knows the dude just pumps out random stories under the guise of reporting.  He'd get a story once in a while since he technically does have a press pass.  I can't believe people actually paid for his "donuts."  Kudos to him I guess for making a living writing random stuff people thought was "insider info."

Dlord is an invaluable CBA/cap asset.  His basketball opinions though are about 20 years outdated.

The thing about those 'donuts' is that he used to pull a good number of them from discussions on the board.  Not a bad idea, since there are a lot of good bball minds on here, but not necessarily journalism.  Stuff like that made me take the '75 member staff' comments to mean he used everyone on the board as his contributors instead of literally having that many employees.

[j0Shi]

I don't mind paying for journalism. The issue I always had with Fish is that he was basically just a glorified blogger that rarely put out original or investigative stories. Most of the stuff you could get elsewhere for free. I like paying for TheAtheltic because they bring pieces that you can't find anywhere else. Sure the cap things by DLord were amazing, but not worth a sub. And I guess Fish knew, because he was master at throwing stuff against the wall and yelling "WE HAD THAT FIRST ON DB.COM" in case anything stuck. That's just seeking for attention (and subs). Let the writing stand for itself.

That said, I also don't blame him for transitioning over to SI. He fits what they're trying to do quite nicely. So he'll thrive and that's fine, I wish him all the best. It's just not something I'm going to read regularly.

[SportPsychMav]

 His interaction with the community was cool as you felt closer to the team through him, but his reporting always lacked substance. Simply no quality content from a gist point of view.

Best contributor by far was David Lord.

This community was his substance and he lost it with the move. 

There really is no quality Mavericks news source right now. It's a market gap.

---

Agreed on Fish.  Now we don't have to beat around the bush.  Literally everyone outside of Fish's forum knows the dude just pumps out random stories under the guise of reporting.  He'd get a story once in a while since he technically does have a press pass.  I can't believe people actually paid for his "donuts."  Kudos to him I guess for making a living writing random stuff people thought was "insider info."

Dlord is an invaluable CBA/cap asset.  His basketball opinions though are about 20 years outdated.

The thing about those 'donuts' is that he used to pull a good number of them from discussions on the board.  Not a bad idea, since there are a lot of good bball minds on here, but not necessarily journalism.  Stuff like that made me take the '75 member staff' comments to mean he used everyone on the board as his contributors instead of literally having that many employees.

To be fair: Most so called journalists take their stuff from social media these days. Or at least get their ideas from there. They read Reddit and RealGm in the NBAs case.
This forum is also public and journalists will read here and I bet a lot of us are experts in some fields.
I don't know all your educations and experience. Your expertise.
Forums provide everyone with an idea of the public interest and discussion. They get an idea about what people are interested in right now.

Journalism is almost dead. Opinion pieces drive most things.

Many great sources are publicly available and easy to access.

Stats.nba.com
Scholar.google.com
Stats from the US government
Instagram accounts of players
Everyone can publish his opinion and work

Access isn't as limited as it once was. Writing great pieces is still super difficult but it is hard to find your audience and one that is willing to pay for it in times of declining real wages in the western world.

The challenge of the internet age is one of filtering and limiting access out of almost infinite sources and options.The best days of the www are likely over.

This forum format is a relict of the past. But it is a great format that gives the user control! It's not emphasizing a quick fix as most things do now.

[j0Shi]

To be fair: Most so called journalists take their stuff from social media these days. Or at least get their ideas from there. They read Reddit and RealGm in the NBAs case.

This is most certainly not true. Real journalists still get stories from within the org, from players, or sources. Your "so called journalists" are bloggers and that's a different breed. It's hard to differentiate nowadays because the latter have taken over the news cycle.

[fifteenth]

Seems like things are moving towards all real journalism being behind a pay wall, which makes me sad.

Regarding Fish, no doubt, he is a real journalist.

[SportPsychMav]

To be fair: Most so called journalists take their stuff from social media these days. Or at least get their ideas from there. They read Reddit and RealGm in the NBAs case.

This is most certainly not true. Real journalists still get stories from within the org, from players, or sources. Your "so called journalists" are bloggers and that's a different breed. It's hard to differentiate nowadays because the latter have taken over the news cycle.

Online Media does not have much journalism left. You are from Germany as well right? Most stuff is from agencies or opinion pieces. 


That's why I said so called journalists instead of journalists they were supposed to be.

Many opinion pieces aren't flagged as these anymore even though it's bad conduct not to. Rarely articles contrast different positions but drive just one. It's become manipulative and feeding to the masses. It has become Infotainment in most cases.

"Real" journalists have a hard time fighting for recognition and position. 

Even science has become about story telling. This age is just whack.

And yes it's just my subjective impression which I don't back up with sources and data.

I might be totally wrong here.

[jesusshuttlesworth82]

 His interaction with the community was cool as you felt closer to the team through him, but his reporting always lacked substance. Simply no quality content from a gist point of view.

Best contributor by far was David Lord.

This community was his substance and he lost it with the move. 

There really is no quality Mavericks news source right now. It's a market gap.

---

Agreed on Fish.  Now we don't have to beat around the bush.  Literally everyone outside of Fish's forum knows the dude just pumps out random stories under the guise of reporting.  He'd get a story once in a while since he technically does have a press pass.  I can't believe people actually paid for his "donuts."  Kudos to him I guess for making a living writing random stuff people thought was "insider info."

Dlord is an invaluable CBA/cap asset.  His basketball opinions though are about 20 years outdated.

You guys hit the nail on the head. On dallasbasketball.com I had stopped reading Fish’s articles a long time ago.  All fluff and innuendo. I always used to say his writing was like reading a riddle. What made that site is what has been re-constituted here....fans offering opinion and discussion about the Mavs. 

Also, is it just me, or does it seem that Fish is frequently getting into tussles with different people in the sports media? Seems that he is pushing other people’s buttons or they are pushing his which results in a lot of twitter trash talking......find it kind of humorous.

He is a weird dude.  Bob and Dan (on The Ticket) have told stories of interacting with him in real life.

He has to keep up his "insider" status to keep collecting money from dumb people.  So he gets in fights with people who doubt his "reporting."

Curious, what did BAD say about him?

Was a long story. 

it was Jake, his fiancé, her dad sitting somewhere for dinner. Was during Cowboys training camp. Fish came over and sat down with them. They didn’t really know each other. Then he asked if he could draw a picture of Jakes fiancé. So they sat there awkwardly while Fish did the drawing. He got to her neckline/cleavage and made it even more awkward. Jake has to explain to her dad later that Fish wasn’t his friend. He still dislikes him to this day.