WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Mike Florio defies almost every stereotype affixed to bloggers.
No braces. No pimples. No sitting in his underwear tapping away in his parents' basement.
Floria is an accomplished, 42-year-old attorney with zero journalism training and perhaps the most popular and profitable sports blog in the nation.
"I'm just some guy in West Virginia with a computer, but we've got the premier NFL blog out there," said Florio, whose ProFootballTalk.com drew more than 600,000 individual viewers in March. "I never did like the word blog, but I've accepted that that's what our Web site is."
Florio's nearly 6-year-old site attracts more than fans — it's a must-read for many NFL players, management types, agents and media members.
"Every day, several times a day, I check on ProFootballTalk," said Miami Beach-based agent Drew Rosenhaus, who counts Dolphins Zach Thomas and Jason Taylor among his impressive and expansive client list. "It's very entertaining. He tries hard to break news and he's got good sources. He's very credible. I've been reading his stuff for years now."
Florio is at the forefront of the blog movement, a growing and preferred source of news and opinion for many fans, athletes and league and team officials. Athletes also are creating their own blogs, bypassing traditional media outlets to get their unfiltered message to the public.
Boston pitcher Curt Schilling, never shy around a microphone or notepad, has been particularly candid on his blog, declaring his support for U.S. troops in one post and in another entry (inaccurately) accusing Barry Bonds of testing positive for steroids and also criticizing him for cheating on his wife and tax returns.
Bloggers and media analysts attribute the medium's burgeoning popularity to its accessibility and sheer volume. (Technorati, a company that tracks a variety of Web-related topics, reports that more than 60 million blogs are created every year.)
"We have the technology for anyone to instantly broadcast their opinion and have everyone comment on it," said David Permutter, a professor of mass communications at the University of Kansas. "Talk radio or publishing a newsletter were the only channels of that expression before.
"Sports fans are ready-made for the technology because they already love to talk and argue. The 'cheap seats' tradition is a long-honored one. People orally blog the whole game, with advice on what the coach should do from 10,000 feet up."
Florio had enough thoughts about pro football to launch NFLtalk.com, which caught the attention of some league executives. Those contacts led to meatier insight and an eventual gig as an ESPN.com "Insider.''
But Florio went independent again with ProFootballTalk, and a growing number of NFL players and executives started feeding him information. One source was a Dolphins player who forwarded to Florio the farewell e-mail Nick Saban sent his team before he left Miami for Alabama, allowing the blog to break a major story.
Florio has stayed on top of the most sensational pro football story of the year, earning props from radio/TV analyst Boomer Esiason, a former NFL quarterback.
"This guy has been all over this Michael Vick dogfighting thing since its inception,'' Esiason said on a radio show Wednesday. Esiason went on to call ProFootballTalk a "rumor mill'' and sometimes "downright mean.''
"But in terms of covering the Michael Vick story,'' Esiason said, "it's unbelievable how in-depth he goes. And he's a lawyer by trade, so he looks at things from the legal aspect as well.''
Like Florio, Eric McErlain, 39, built a booming blog from scratch.
In 2002, McErlain launched his Washington Capitals blog, OffWingOpinion.com, from his one-bedroom apartment in Reston, Va. He occasionally went to games and watched the rest on television, blogging whenever he wasn't "busy with stuff that paid the bills."
Three years later, his blog was ready to yield rent money.
As McErlain retells it, Capitals owner Ted Leonsis discovered it at the beginning of the 2005-06 season while doing a Web search on Washington left wing Alexander Ovechkin. Intrigued by the site, Leonsis invited McErlain to join him in his luxury box for a game.
"I asked him questions all night long and he was very forthcoming," said McErlain, who works in Web communications for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a policy organization. "As a follow-up, I wrote to him that blogs are a great way to reach out to the fans."
Eventually the dialogue between McErlain and Leonsis turned to the topic of a season-long media credential. Like any pro sports team, the Capitals already had a clear policy for mainstream media members, but not for bloggers. As a condition for access, the Capitals asked McErlain to write a "Bloggers' Bill of Rights" — bloggers must demonstrate a solid track record of covering the team, submit readership statistics, and act professionally while in press areas — before agreeing to issue a full-season credential in 2006-07.
"I wrote about anything I might see," said McErlain, who drew more than 50,000 unique visitors last month. "As soon as the game ended, I published my notes and then ran down to the locker room. More often than not, we were the first site with coverage up after the game.
"I'm to the point now where I have to declare income from my blog on taxes. The profits outweigh the expenses and the blog has driven other work to me that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten: a weekly column on NBCsports.com and I'm the lead blogger at NHL Fanhouse on AOL."
While most major sports leagues have balked at credentialing bloggers — some say they are reviewing their policies and may make changes — the publicity-hungry NHL is pioneering the idea. Several hockey bloggers were credentialed for last month's draft in Columbus, Ohio, and the New York Islanders recently announced they will open a Blog Box and credential Web writers for up to 20 home games.
The day of that announcement, the Islanders received more than 100 applications for the Blog Box, which the team touts as "sort of like a press box, but away from all the scribes ... because we know you want to cheer, shout, have a pretzel and enjoy the game."
The NHL doesn't deny that poor television ratings and declining coverage from mainstream media helped drive its blogger-friendly approach.
"Our coverage is certainly down since pre-lockout,'' said Chris Botta, the Islanders' vice president of media relations.
Media attention isn't a problem in the MLB, NBA or NFL, where bloggers are lobbying for more acceptance.
"I get far more mainstream requests than I can accommodate and that makes it difficult to add anybody," said Harvey Greene, the Dolphins' vice president of media relations. "We reach out to as many fan blogs as we can, but we just don't have the space. You can't have 500 people in the locker room ... nobody will be able to get their job done."
The Islanders will allow limited interaction between bloggers and the players and coaches and no access to visiting teams.
"The (newspaper) writers have deadlines to make and I'm not going to have anybody who doesn't, like a blogger, get in the way," Botta said. "That would be stupid on our part. We still need the traditional media. They hit millions of readers."
A major hurdle facing bloggers who want more access are questions of credibility and accountability. Many sites lack old-school journalism standards regarding fairness and ethics.
"In the independent blog, you are your own boss, so you're not going to fire yourself," said Perlmutter, the KU professor. "Technically, bloggers are accountable to no one."
Nonetheless, when it comes to libel law, bloggers can be held to the standards of traditional media.
"The same rules apply, but it might be that nobody cares about a nut on the Internet," said attorney Sam Terilli, a former general counsel of The Miami Herald who teaches media law and ethics at the University of Miami.
"If you get absolutely slammed in The Palm Beach Post, (the newspaper) has a pretty big readership and significant impact in Palm Beach County. But there's a lot of blogs out there and maybe nobody's reading them but the guy's mom or his girlfriend.
"Consequently, while you may sue the blogger, to what degree has it really caused any damage?''
Newspapers, which are losing print readers and trying to bolster Web site traffic, often give their beat writers extra latitude on blogs to offer insight and analysis. Newspaper blogs also can include small news items that can't be crammed into the paper, observations from team practices, and interaction with readers.
The obsessive approach and constant updates of independent blogs often force newspaper beat writers to match that intensity in their own blogs.
"It does and it shouldn't," said Bill Dwyre, who was sports editor of The Los Angeles Times for 25 years. "We've assumed we're fighting over the same readers, so we've abandoned those who like to read newspapers and like the credibility of a reported story."
If not the same audience, blogs and newspapers are certainly competing for young readers.
"It tends to be more educated, more male, more middle income," Perlmutter said of blog readers. "Media used to be newspapers and the evening news, but that has a much older demographic. How do you reach younger people so you don't die with your readers?''
Edginess and sarcasm, for starters. Thanks to anonymity and a general lack of protocol, blog sites have far more freedom than mainstream media to redefine etiquette and ethics.
Florio's pro football site is as famous for its sharp wit as it is for breaking news. Younger fans flock to the "Turd Watch," which tracks the misbehavior of players and coaches off the field. Visitors can catch the latest legal details surrounding Vick's indictment for dogfighting, but they also can find digitally altered images of the Atlanta Falcons quarterback dreaming up a horse-fighting ring, playing poker with dogs and teaching pups to play football.
"We wanted to cover the NFL in a way no one else does — with attitude, insight and analysis," Florio said. "We make it humorous and edgy, which is why 25-to-35 is our core demographic."
The formula seems to be working.
"You'd be surprised how many guys in the NFL love reading that — I'd say at least 25 percent of my clients," Rosenhaus said. "Greg Olsen never misses anything online. Drew Stanton, Lawrence Timmons — my rookies are all over it. The younger generation reads anything they can on the Internet."
Another way blogs gain popularity is by finding an untapped niche.
Sites like AwfulAnnouncing.blogspot.com, FireThisPerson.com (where blogger Marshall Park lays out the case for figuratively "firing" sports figures) and ThePinkSeats.com (a Vancouver-based site offering a female perspective on sports) maintain their audiences by filling a unique role.
"Bloggers have time and energy to research things that reporters, working on a deadline, can't do," Perlmutter said. "There has to be new stuff."
Henry Abbott aimed to do that, and wound up becoming part of corporate America.
Abbott's NBA blog, TrueHoop, drew nearly 7,000 visitors per day before ESPN took notice and signed the blog for its own Web site in February.
"People call me back more often now," Abbott, 32, said with a laugh. "It's pretty cool, and I know how I'm going to pay the bills. Now I'm sitting in Vegas covering the summer league and they're paying for my ticket and my hotels. It's not what I set out to do. It just became the smartest way to make sure I could keep doing a job I loved."
ESPN's acquisition of TrueHoop is one of many pieces of evidence pointing toward even greater growth for the sports blogging world, both in terms of impact and readership.
"It will become, eventually, a really important part of sports," Perlmutter said. "You're going to have a lot of news stories about athletes that originate on blogs. On the negative side, you'll find a lot of rumors that will need to be squelched because of blogs. In either case, they're here to stay."
Jason Leiser writes for The Palm Beach Post.