Truex Sports Insider posting daily, Free subscriptions coming soon
Truex Sports Report has been posting for five years, offering edgy commentary on all the sports I covered as a newspaper sportswriter. I’m trying to transform print journalism into a multimedia experience that millennials and boomers will like: short-form and long-form sports writing and sound bites and videos all from one outlet.
Sometimes I fret about significant messages being lost in sports cyberspace. The demise of so much print media in the past 10 years is sad because the digital replacements are so inferior. I continually click on articles missing the fundamentals of journalism: who, what, when and where not always there. Not to mention big-league box scores that fail to list winning and losing pitchers.
Until now TSR has been a weekly blog, but it’s time for the next step. People want news that’s timely and constant. Website experts say you have to go daily to build a large viewership base.
So we’ve relaunched as Truex Sports Insider, with daily posting.
The url is www.truexsportsinsider.com
My claim to be an “insider” is based on covering professional and college sports for three decades, with the Orlando Sentinel, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Houston Chronicle. I was a correspondent for several years with The New York Times, Sporting News and Sports Illustrated. My proudest moment: In 1999 the AP Managing Editors awarded me first place in Texas sports writing which my mom said was long overdue.
My beats included NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and two college football teams that won national championships. I’ve also covered Triple Crown horse racing and NASCAR and U.S. Open tennis. I’ve maintained contacts with coaches, scouts and reporters who will answer questions for me that aren’t being answered elsewhere.
Sorry to sound so Trumpian, but I was taught by my dad that “you have to toot your own horn sometimes.” Wanting youthful input, I’m partnering with two talented millennials, Mark Roberson and Judge Sallans.
Mark is 26, a graduate of the U of Texas school of journalism. He covers, primarily, college football and golf. He’s especially qualified to analyze golf, as he’s a 9-handicap player himself. I’m especially proud of the on-site Masters coverage he gave us this year at Augusta. He has an understanding of golf that I will never have.
Judge Sallans, 25, has the perfect name for a lawyer. And so fittingly, he’s taking classes at the South Texas College of Law. He creates, selects and edits the graphic arts, posts unusually informative videos.
He reminds me of what Cezanne said of Monet: “Only an eye, but what an eye.” And I don’t mean to sell Judge short as a writer; he’s an avid follower of the NBA and a humorous analyst of its analytics.
Our website occasionally features guest writers, most notably Beckett Frappier giving us coverage of March Madness. He correctly predicted before March Madness began that Villanova would emerge as champion.
Eventually we will charge a minimal amount for subscriptions, but for now it’s all free. These things I promise: We will never distract you with pop-up ads, and we will never share your e-mail address with anyone else or offer you cookies of any kind. My hope is that this will be your sports blog of first resort, a springboard to other websites that offer reliable sports information. Let us be your guide to sports cyberspace.
With the football season here, we offer value plays for pro and college football. Roberson is especially sharp in the bowls, and I was 8-5-1 ATS for the 2017 postseason.
We generate our own opinions but welcome yours and will connect you to as many different fact-based viewpoints as we can. Our brand — “All the Sports News You Really Need” – is based on the assumption that it takes about an hour to derive full benefit from this blog once you click on it. If you’re spending much more time than that on sports journalism, your life, like mine, is unbalanced.
