Where do people go for sports news?

Yahoo! Sports is pretty damned neat. It's been my sports news home for a few years now (since around the time they first released sports content on My Yahoo!). Even as they do things that frustrate me, I keep finding others reasons to love it.

Their sports section, like any in a metro area newspaper pulls from many sources, the big difference is that they have no visible editorial staff (no Yahoo! generated content). The version we see in the US is focused almost entirely on US Sports, with a smattering of International events (mostly because someone from the US is playing there). They rely on AP and Reuters (what happened to UPI?) for basic live information. In sports with significant news organizations of their own (mostly American professional sports, but they also tap into special event feeds here in the states), they have established close to live data feeds for event data (scores, basic statistics, etc.) and in some cases, occasional content. Finally, they add in opinion feeds from several leading sports word shops (The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated and USA Today for most things).

They flow all this data into their own front end and then wrap it all with some interesting functionality and access to a variety of coordinated data feeds. For instance:

• All player and team names are flagged automatically (for certain sports), links to player and team pages are added.
• Lead articles (yes, here is where the editorial group has a say) are linked to the box scores and if it exists, a preview article (and vice versa).
• A recent feature is a link panel to series information as was used during the NBA playoffs (which used to be a tiny link somewhere which brought up a pretty bare page). It's a nice way to catch up on how we got here for the busy sports fan.

The downside to all of this is that they reflow a lot of data. And things can go horribly wrong at times. Mostly, wild emphasis and italics which carry on for the rest of the page; sometimes things that leave articles hanging somewhere in the middle.

The bad part is that the content doesn't have a link to the external source (as many partial articles are done on Yahoo! News). If I were in charge of these data contracts, I would insist on having full article links. Otherwise, your content is being submerged inside your aggregator. A top level link to CNN/SI does me little good when I want to see the article links inside a Paul Zimmerman article (especially since the people doing content navigation at CNN/SI ought to be told farewell; there is very little coordination happening there). I need to go stumbling all over a place I had avoided intentionally to find (or in CNN/SI's case, often not find) the article I wanted to follow links from.

My other constant bitch is that like the rest of Yahoo!, they decided a few months ago to put all the article text inside a tiny font, so I need to resize every window. I decided I could live with it, obviously.