ESPN.com Makes My Life in Milwaukee Easier
I like living in Milwaukee, for the most part. Being a native Illinoisan, though, keeping up on Chicago sports can be a pain in the keester. Things that stand in my way:
- The newspaper is fairly useless I certainly don’t blame the Journal-Sentinel for being biased towards the Packers/Brewers/Badgers/Teabags. That’s their job. We don’t get the JS on weekdays anyway, so the paper is not a viable solution.
- We don’t have cable This one I can’t really complain about because obviously it’s my own choice. Even if I did, however, I would either have to watch the WGN news or a half hour of Sports Center on ESPN to see the highlights of Chicago teams.
- AM radio is only so helpful When I’m in the car with AM on, 9 times out of 10 I’m listening to a Chicago station. AM radio in Milwaukee is somewhat lacking, as the only station moderately worth tuning into is 620. Their news coverage is okay, and they have the Brewers games. (Some baseball is better than no baseball.) Typically, though, I’m listening to 720 WGN (Cubs!) or 780 WBBM (the best news around, and, of course, the Bears). This means that 1) I am extremely up to speed on the traffic conditions of the greater Chicago area and 2) I occasionally get blips about Chicago sports. That is, unless the Bears or Cubs are being broadcast, coverage on those stations is few and far between.
So what’s a displaced flatlander to do, besides whine on his blog about the unfairness of it all?
I’ll tell you what, it’s go to ESPN.com. Why? Because all I have to do is put a little “/chicago” at the end of the URL and I get a page that seems like it was written specifically for me.
ESPN’s Chicago site has all of the scores, headlines, and articles for all of the Chicago teams aggregated into one spot, which is outstanding. Not only that, but they have a specially-recorded ESPN.com Chicago Sports Center reel that gives me a high-quality five minute broadcast of highlight reels and scores for Chicago. It’s like having Sports Center on, whenever I want, with only the content I want sifted out.
Which makes me so, so happy. The video update is ad-free, so I don’t even have to sit through any mildly annoying Hulu-esque “This video was brought to you by Snuggies” advertisements. I would be happy to, though, as I think that the experience ESPN.com is offering is extremely useful.
End result: One Happy Hermes.