Blogs Versus MSM--Sports Edition

As we kill time before G-Day--which, in a rare inversion of the usual handicap of being a Dawg fan in California, I will get to enjoy over a late breakfast in my jammies--I have a basic and probably naive question that's been nagging at me: how big is the talent/cultural gap between sports blogs and what passes for MainStreamMedia sports coverage these days? 

I'm a political blogger by trade (and no, I won't talk politics here), and am familiar with the many arguments between bloggers and MSM types in that arena.  But as a relatively new consumer of sports blogs, I'm getting the impression that the divide is, if anything, larger in sports journalism and discussion.  By and large, sports blogs seem to have more expertise, better writing, and a vastly greater sense of style and humor, than sports pages or electronic media, even though sports blogging, other than in media-sponsored sites, seems to be almost entirely uncompensated.  And I also gather that print-based sportswriters are more likely to have completely atavistic attitudes towards this Internets Thing than their non-sports counterparts. 

Yes, there's the WWLS with enough money to produce occasional nuggets (just as there's the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and the television networks in political news--though ESPN is sort of like a combination of all of them), and some of the better newspaper sportswriters do their better work online (viz. David Hale, whose writing makes you wonder how the Macon papers manage to keep him), which is also the case with most political reporters. 

But by and large, conventional sports coverage is often so bad, and online sports coverage is often so good, that I really do wonder if the balance of power is about to shift in some fundamental way.   I'm really interested to hear what other Dawg fans have to say on this subject.