ESPN bought them out. If you look in the search engine, you should be able to find some threads that can give you more info.
ESPN snatched their services up for their Insider promotion. It's $30/year, I think, for access now. More at http://insider.espn.go.com/insider/
This from bootlegsports.com - the site where the sportstalk.com editors went to after they folded but before ESPN bought 'em out. An interesting read... BS, ST & Mickey Mouse Gotten a few people asking me what the deal is with BootlegSports vis a vis the "old" BootlegSports as well as the dearly departed sportsTALK.com (and there's some sort of ESPN thread running through there somewhere). You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! Here it is anyway: Q: What really happened to sportsTALK.com? A: Not much. Classic story of a dot-com gone bust. They ran out of money. Q: So they sold out to ESPN? A: Sort of! While I wasn't part of the negotiations (and had stopped working for sportsTALK a month before they closed the doors), it looked to me like they were dead at least a month before ESPN made a solid offer -- and at that point, I'm sure that it was the Mouse who named the price. At the end of the day, the old ST partners concluded their venture significantly poorer than they started it. Q: I thought that BootlegSports hired on the old editors and writers -- how come they ended up at ESPN Insider? A: BootlegSports had tentative financing, but it was pretty tentative. Mickey Mouse has deep pockets. The editors who had originally come together to start BootlegSports were faced with a tough reality: go on faith that Bootleg was going to work out, or sign contracts with the Mickster that would allow them to, for instance, feed their kids. The fact that it really was a tough decision says a lot about how much the Bootleg idea meant to those guys, but ultimately personal responsibility won out. Go figure. While those wretched sell-outs are obviously committed to their new positions, we all still keep in touch and are on great terms. Q: Wait -- so who are you then? A: Uh -- yeah. I'm Brian Dunn, born in Tacoma, Washington on March 8, 1972--. Back in the ST days, I was the original Baseball Editor (beginning October 1999). After spending almost one full, great year getting up at 4 o'clock every morning to see whether the New York Post was claiming that Steve Howe was about to make a comeback (but would it be with the Yanks or the Mets?!), I went part-time with sportsTALK (in a more managerial role) so I could go back to school and get an MBA. (I'm not sure anyone at the ol' ST groused about this publicly before, but I went for TEN MONTHS without a SINGLE day off -- no weekends, no Christmas, no Thanksgiving, no vacations, no anything -- but I mostly loved it anyway). As such, I wasn't really part of the crew anymore at the end. When ST went down, though, my old buddies and I got in touch with each other and decided we could pull some of ST's almost-investors together and find ways to stay employed a while longer. We had some great ideas on how to make the concept work, but our financial grounding was shaky. When ESPN finally made their offer to take on the old editorial staff, there wasn't a place for me in the deal (not that I was altogether interested anyway -- I mean, the last thing I need is some guy in Connecticut calling me every afternoon to question my use of the word "fiat"). Anyway... After I figured out that the ESPN Insider wasn't going to be anything like the old ST (the rumor had been that ESPN would maintain a format very similar to ST -- seriously, I really heard that), I figured that, you know, it might be interesting to see if there really was a worthwhile business model that could capitalize on a highly reformed version of the ol' ST-way. Q: So you're just a soul-less corporate slug yourself? A: Yeah, that's about the look of it. Although I prefer "lackey" to "slug". Q: Awesome. A: I'm excited to see what we can do here and feel there are many synergies we can leverage if only we can keep our paradigm from shifting out of control. Right, so if there's not a "business model" that can support BS being a site similar to what ST was, then I want to see how much we can still offer without running up a major tab on my Visa. My Visa is dedicated to tuition this fall anyway. One of my motivations here is that I can't stand the idea that a bloated corporate amalgamation like Disney thinks it can own the Internet sports market just by throwing money at it. That blows. ESPN has a lot to offer, SportsCenter is a lot of fun for instance, but they sure the heck don't have everything. And they sure aren't operating out of the fan's best interest -- if they were, they wouldn't be showing aerobics championships on ESPN and ESPN2 just so there's no competition for ABC's occasional CART broadcast. The purpose of a corporation is to create and manage market inefficiencies for the benefit of their shareholders, after all (see: "monopoly pricing"). The purpose of the Internet is to allow some goofy MBA student in SoCal to think he can compete with Mickey. Wish me luck. Q: So what can we expect in the future? More tirades against ESPN? A: Nah, I'm pretty much done with that. Maybe tirades against Joe Morgan's ego and Dennis Miller's hair, but that's not quite the same. Right now, I'm working pretty much by myself. I got the Rants put together and they seem to be functional at least. The next step is to build a content management system so that we can start posting original features. Then after that, I'm going to try and come up with something that can replicate the rumors and notebooks without the labor-intensity that existed at sportsTALK (10 months, 0 days off!). At some point, I'll be trying to attract some venture capital in order to add an e-commerce component which, I'm hoping, would generate enough revenue to make this a viable business. If the money's not to be had, though, like I said, I want to see how big a dent I can put in Mickey's ego without it killing me. Q: How fast is this happening? A: Not so fast. I have a great (paid) FULL-TIME INTERNSHIP this summer and BS isn't it. But the time I have available (which will hopefully increase when school starts up again in a couple months) is dedicated to BS. Boy is it ever! My time is dedicated to BS! I'm calling my parents with that news... Well, that's it. Any more Q's, you know where to find me (here: bdunn(at)bootlegsports.com). And I'm still interested in hearing from anyone who might want to work "here" once we start existing on a somewhat higher plain. Resolutely, Brian Dunn Bootleg Conspirator-in-Chief
thanks guys that makes it all clear to me now. You guys know of any new other sites that are similar to nbatalk and others...?
Try RealGm.com. Bootlegsports.com haven't started yet, but it appears that sometimes soon they will be the "Rebirth" of Sportstalk.com
Thanks for the tip, Mango. That's a nice-looking site ... just getting started, it seems, but I've bookmarked it to see how it develops.
