With the Bills changing coaches mid-season and ESPN way too busy dissecting whether coach Belichick should of went for it on 4th down against the Colts. If you wanted to hear or read wall-to-wall coverage of the Bills, you would have to go the local route.
When you have breaking news like the firing of Jauron, your audience wants to be able to get as much information as quick as possible. For the most part, you’d have to give the local media good grades, but some of the publications still were lagging.
WGRZ
It was nice for a change to see the WGRZ.com finally exercise there online coverage that I thoroughly enjoyed last season. Within hours of the breaking news, the website had a video package up with interviews with Chris Kelsay and Marv Levy. They also had columns up by Stu Boyar and Ed Kilgore, to go along with an eight minute round table discussion about the firing. Kilgore was the first reporter to break the news that the Bills were interested in bringing in big names from his sources.
WIVB
The website was very disappointing in their coverage. First, the channel decided to dust off Rich Newberg to do a news story about the Bills potential candidates. Sorry, but Newberg shouldn’t be doing any news stories about the Buffalo Bills, if anything, go find out why property taxes are so high and why businesses are leaving Buffalo. Secondly, the majority of his story consisted of talking to ESPN analysts by phone about the Bills candidates. Um, Rich, if I wanted to know what they thought, I would of just tuned into “NFL Live” on ESPN at 4pm to find out. Lastly, someone in the photo department at WIVB should be fired, the photos they used for the candidates looked like they were taken in circa 1995. Bill Cowher had a full set of hair in one of the photos for god sakes. I can’t discredit all of WIVB, as they did turn around and break the news of the Bills talking to Jon Gruden
The Buffalo News
I was a little disappointed in The News to be honest. I understand that it’s tough to update your website when the paper is your bread & butter, but to not even have a chat or an editorial column until the next day is a little too dated for my taste. Besides their regular story up on the firing, I would of like to have had the News at least have a reporter who didn’t have to cover the Bills run a chat. Having the first Buffalo News reporter to chat with readers three days later was a mistake. In breaking news like this, they should of pushed up their Friday chats to Wednesday
WGR
The clear cut winners in my book. They were on the ball the entire day with their coverage. They had over seven hours worth of local programming starting at 2:30 when the news broke of the firing and concluded at 10pm. WGR was also able to get interviews with John Clayton, Tim Graham, Jim Kelly & Thurman Thomas during that time. Whether you like Schopp or the Bulldog, it’s a moot point, because it’s good to hear wall-to-wall coverage about the Bills.
ESPN
The funny thing about ESPN is that they really didn’t give any sort of love to the Jauron firing until news broke the next day that the Bills were interested in Mike Shanhan. Before the news broke of Shanahan, the network was still in the depths of coverage of the Colts/Patriots game fiasco and whether Lebron James would make a good football player. I’m sure the relationship that Shanhan has with Adam Schefter was the reason why the coverage was finally turned up a notch.
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