Our Mission
If you want insight & analysis from the nation’s leading experts, this website is not for you. If you want to watch Jaws break down film, or if you need to know which QB to start in your fantasy league, go visit the networks – they do a bang-up job.
On the other hand, if you want to actually participate in the national sports conversation, let your voice be heard and possibly make a name for yourself, then please join us.
We are not your typical blog. In this website, you can read our staff’s commentary about the hot topics in sports. However, we invite our viewers to contribute their own opinions (long or short -- intelligent or misguided), and our editors highlight the best pieces. We plaster good articles and the most intriguing smack talk on our front page; and we keep statistics and archives, so that the world can see ‘who has contributed what’. WeTheSportsPeople.com will be the moderator – not to mention organizer and promoter – of the great ongoing sports conversation.
WeTheSportsPeople.com is very different from the network sites. Their purpose is to deliver news and insight to you. They invite viewer "posts", but these are merely an afterthought ... a long line of quick hitters at the end of the featured articles. There is not much interaction in their world, and amateur authors do not gain recognition.
WeTheSportsPeople is also different from other audience-driven blogs, which provide interaction and rely on the users for content. If you visit these sites, you find that the sports pages here are fluid and decentralized. The problem is, they are too fluid ... too decentralized. There is no common thread that unites them, no editorial voice that organizes and moderates. Readers must jump from heading to heading, hoping they find something worthwhile. It's just one title after another -- chaos.
Our site is the best of both worlds. We offer the organization and strong voice of the network sites, but we still rely on the audience and cultivate interaction. We seek to find the most entertaining balance between centralization and fluidity. In the end, we hope our audience sees us as a home for quality sports material and an opportunity for amateur sportswriters to write on their own terms.
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I formulated the idea for this website years ago, when I was working in medical sales and listening to sports talk radio in the car. An avid sports fan seeking distraction from my daily duties, I would listen to all the discussion. When I disagreed with the radio show hosts or if I had a point to make, I wanted to email the shows … but I could not always break away and get to the Internet. And, like most people, I had better things to do than call radio programs. Only after the workday was over did I have a moment to hop on email or sift through the sports websites. By then, that day’s sports discussion had past, and a new discussion was poised to begin.
Sure, there are plenty of sports message boards where one can post opinions and verbally slap one’s rivals. But the problem with message boards is that there is no structure ... no organization to the smack-talk melee. There is no rhyme or reason to the dialogue, and more often than not, the message board pages consist of one humorous, witty piece of commentary lost in the scrum of a dozen “your team sucks, my team rules” messages.
Thus, I rallied a few troops in the name of democracy and created WeTheSportsPeople.com. My vision, as I have said, was to entertain our audience by allowing them to actually participate in the sports conversation, and possibly make a name for themselves. Our website seeks to be moderator of the great sports conversation – and to be champions of "True Sportsocracy," as I like to call it. At the same time, we will be sure not to make the mistake of taking ourselves too seriously.
Thank you for your viewership.
-- Matt Allinson, Founder – November 5, 2007
