Five Media Things: Cowgirls Prep for Giant-Slaying Opportunity

We are in my favorite 30-day stretch of the year. Spring football, March Madness, baseball starting and, of course, the Masters. As always, you can find OSU’s weekly athletics schedule here, but let’s take a look at the week that was and what’s upcoming for the Cowboys (and Cowgirls).

What I’m excited about

The easiest prediction in all of sports is filling out a Women’s NCAA Tournament bracket. Seriously, go look at one. They’re all chalk every year. If a 6-seed beats a 3-seed, it’s considered an upset of UMBC proportions. So the opportunity Oklahoma State has on Monday night as a 9-seed against 1-seed Mississippi State (which is 33-1 on the year) is enormous. The good news? No expectations. If you lose, well every 9-seed loses. But if you win? That’s one for the annals. *Whispers OSU only lost by three when the teams met back in December. Hopefully Seth Davis goes sharpie early.

Oklahoma State Cowgirls vs. Mississippi State: 8 p.m. on Monday, March 19 (ESPN2)

A media thing I think I believe

Here are the two most-overlooked, least-popular ways to be good at covering anything: Observe and write down everything, read as much as you can. Human art is not a static thing. It emanates from somewhere. It is a derivative of something. If you stop consuming, well, life then you have nothing to draw from when you sit down to write/podcast/speak. The well runs dry. The more details you know, the closer you are to your subject, the better you’ll be at distilling the information.

These are tenets of #bloglyfe I’ve never necessarily been great at but that I’ve internalized as important over the years. I thought when I finished college I was done taking notes. Wrong. College was actually the best note-taking preparation for this future.

These principles are not limited to Big-J or even little-j journalists, either. I think you could make a reasonable argument that the most interesting, driven people you know in your life are often great note-takers and readers. Maybe that’s not categorically true, but I believe it’s a necessity for those of us in the media business in 2018.

What I’m reading

I finished Underground Airlines. It was good, not great. A fun thought experiment that engendered care, sympathy and frustration within me, so that’s good. I started When to Rob a Bank shortly after I finished up. It’s excellent so far. I’ve never read a Freakonomics book all the way through. This is my favorite part so far.

One great thing about starting a blog after you’ve written a book is that you can continue the conversation that the book began. A book, once it’s published, is pretty much set in stone. But the blog can be updated every day, every hour. [When to Rob a Bank]

I’ve never written a book (although I have contributed to a yet-to-be-released one ?), but I identified with this excerpt. It makes sense to me and is one of the reasons I love blogging so much.

Contribution and Site Updates

We are at 320 contributors. Thanks to the five of you who have signed up over the last two weeks. I’m currently in the lab right now cooking up a 2.0 version of what our system is going to look like and will report back soon. I’ve also been incredibly frustrated with the fact that our site has gone down multiple times in the last week. I’m sorry for that. We are working on a short-term fix as well as a long-term solution.

Site Growth

Pageviews through Mar. 19, 2018: 2.8M
Pageviews through Mar. 19, 2017: 3.2M
Most popular post of March: Gundy offers to pay for school safety
Most popular post of 2018: Spencer out as DC

Other Stuff I’m Writing

• Rory as the best theater