The Unwitting Father of Sports Blogging

For those who are deeply immersed in the world of sports blogs, its may be hard to remember how the genre came to be. Before there were Deadspin, Fire Joe Morgan, and Kissing Suzy Kolber, one sports-blog ancestor simply aggregated interesting sports columns from around the country, and did so—if you can believe it—snark-free. Steve McKee was the original writer of the Wall Street Journal's Daily Fix online sports column (a post now held by Gelf co-founder Carl Bialik and his colleague Jason Fry), and when it launched in 2001, the idea of a newspaper's sports page linking to other sites was still a novelty. McKee tells Gelf that he was asked to do what no other major newspaper could, "write a column wherein we asked the reader to go to other sites to read other columnists."