Tuesday Morning Quarterback returns!
Easterbrook just posted a notice that a new Tuesday Morning Quarterback is up at Football Outsiders. Football Outsiders will be hosting TMQ for at least a little while, until the column finds a more permanent home.
Easterbrook basically donated his column to the site, to help a struggling site “establish itself as the Web’s leading indie football site”. In return, Easterbrook has an additional, football-only forum. Most interestingly, TMQ has a link to an archive that someone has kept of TMQ’s ESPN days. The return of TMQ illustrates a couple principles about information in this age: one is the old statement that the Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it. The other is that widely dispersed information is incredibly hard to destroy.
The former principle makes me relatively sanguine about media consolidation: we have this amazing technology that allows anyone to publish for minimal cost. This technology allows ways around repressive governments, but also helps destroy privacy; I like to believe that the benefits far outweight the costs, especially if we’re interested in liberty. The second principle is harder to evaluate. Criminals will leave electronic footprints for investigators to follow (such as Enron email), and may find it difficult to sweep away these footprints. Also, the ephemera of this most ephemeral medium may also be preserved, somewhere, though perhaps this is a bit more hopeful than we should allow. What are the downsides? Again, privacy probably gets reduced or becomes more difficult, because once the information goes out into the world, it can’t be retrieved or destroyed. This changes the way we interact with people: off the cuff remarks made by email may come back to bite people. Such issues are a bit deeper than I want to think about right now. All I can say is that I’m glad TMQ is back.
Update: TMQ’s more permanent home is at NFL.com, which looks more big-time than any other place he’s been before. I suppose we can go into the whole “when a door closes, another opens” thing, but we won’t.