Books | Media | Sports

June 7, 2011

Putting Bristol on the Map

James Andrew Miller discusses his controversial new book and how ESPN became synonymous with sports.

Michael Gluckstadt

There aren't many ways to build a multibillion-dollar media company out of nothing. You can invent Facebook, be Michael Bloomberg, or, as ESPN founders did, bring wall-to-wall coverage to what most people consider an organized hobby. With the network's ubiquitous appearance in contemporary culture, it's easy to lose sight of how revolutionary an idea an all-sports channel was back in 1979. And no amount of self-reverential clips of a younger (but strangely, not too much younger) Chris Berman mumbling, bumbling, fumbling around behind a desk could ever re-create the sense of novelty that a viewer must have felt the first time he came across an entire channel devoted to what had previously been the province of some guy with a wacky name at the end of the evening-news broadcast.







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Article by Michael Gluckstadt

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