JT: It all really started with the Yankees. My uncles are huge Yankee fans, everyone in my family, it’s a Yankee family. I remember a little bit of the ‘81 World Series with Dave Winfield stinking up the joint. I remember the ‘80 World Series Phillies-Royals. I think my first baseball memory is that World Series, when Bob Boone bobbled a pop-up in foul territory and Pete Rose caught it. So it started with the Yankees, but I watched football and basketball too as a kid. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten into football more than anything. I follow the Yankees, Jets, and Knicks. One outta three ain’t bad.
HG: You work for Sports Illustrated but it’s online. Do you consider yourself an extension of the magazine?
JT: I think of the magazine and the web as two different entities. You just can’t do the same things. I think they have two different audiences, and I’m not smart enough to figure out how you make them one audience, that would be really good for me if I could figure that out, but online is this world that I don’t know if anyone was prepared for. It’s almost like online was made for sports with the scores, the stats, the news. And obviously the magazine doesn’t do stats and scores so they’ll just be two different entities.
HG: At last count there were a gazillion sports websites. How much is too much, will sports reach a limit on the net?
JT: Like I said before sports and the internet are the perfect marriage so it’s only gonna get bigger. We have a couple of guys here in the office and we can’t even imagine how we did fantasy before the internet. Everything’s gonna expand and get bigger. What’s good is, what’s good for bloggers like you and the quote mainstream sites is that the real sports fans want different outlets. I know for me, I like to go on Si.com and read a Tom Verducci column but I also wanna go on the blogs and see what’s going on. The web has something for everyone and I think for real sports fans, they’re the ones that get a bonus because there are so many things for them to read and check out and experience, and it’s just gonna keep growing.
HG: The highlight of your career has to be meeting Erin Andrews right? You two hang out, what’s that been like?
JT: It’s been fun. It came about in a natural way. It really started on her end because I was doing Hot Clicks one day and surfing the web as I do in the morning and I saw a link to a story on One More Dying Quail. They interviewed her and asked her what sites that she read and she said that she loved Extra Mustard. The people in the blogs know me for Hot Clicks but I run that whole Extra Mustard page. So she says she loves Extra Mustard, and after that I wrote something on Hot Clicks like “We love Erin Andrews and Erin Andrews loves us“. That day I actually got an email from her, and after that I did a Q&A with her, we sorta just kept up through email. Sometimes you wanna discuss things in email that are better said over the phone than email so we’ve done phone calls and emails. And she’s great. I don’t wanna come off as just a psycho fan but she’s been great.
HG: Do your friends stalk Erin through you? Like “hey, call Erin Andrews, let’s see what she’s up to?”
JT: Believe me it’s been done. I have her cellphone number in my cellphone and my friends will say “text Erin”.
HG: How many stories get sent to you on a daily basis for you to review for Hot Clicks?
JT: It’s pretty out of control right now to be honest with you. It was a slow build but now it’s pretty overwhelming. I feel bad because I wanna respond to people, I wanna link things, but I just don’t have the time. Once Hot Clicks is posted at about 10:30 in the morning I have to start doing other things. So on a daily basis I get sent around 100 stories or links. I get a lot of stuff and I have to whittle it down. It’s tough but there are tougher jobs out there.
HG: What audience are you trying to reach with the links on Hot Clicks?
JT: What I’m finding is..I’m serving two different audiences. Obviously I’m serving the blog audience and the bloggers. Who are tremendous. They’re huge and I wouldn’t be able to do Hot Clicks without them. I’m also serving this audience that comes to us from CNN.com. They might not really care about blogs, but they want interesting stuff, funny stuff. I might get something sent to me from a blogger that’s sort of “inside bloggish”. Like the Will Leitch/Buzz Bissinger thing. Outside of the blogs that’s not really a story. So I’m serving two audiences, yes I’m serving the sports fan, but there are things that the bloggers are into that I don’t think the average sports fans are into so I gotta try to go with the stuff that’s gonna appeal to both audiences.
HG: How do you determine or what determines if a story is qualified for Hot Clicks?
JT: You have to know what’s gonna fly and not gonna fly. I know in the back of my head what I won’t link to or can’t link to. Most blogs out there, for the most part, are linkable. There’s only a couple of topics that I think it’s best to stay away from just because we have advertisers, we have readers that we don’t want to piss off. I don’t think it’s rocket science to figure out what’s gonna fly what’s not gonna fly. You gotta use judgment, but I like to push the envelope, which I think you have to do. You don’t wanna be boring, that’s the worst possible thing you can be. You gotta be careful, but you still gotta try to push the envelope a little bit.
HG: Do you have a soft spot for any subjects, things that are guaranteed to get a blogger a link?
JT: This is the question I get asked the most and I always give a crappy answer and I feel bad. I can’t say that it’s one thing but I can give you multiple things. At the end of the day if it’s something unique, something original, if it’s something that stands out and it’s not on 1000 blogs already, that’s a good place to start. There’s two sites I’ve been linking to a lot lately Tirico Suave and this one site, I still don’t know how to say it’s name Flatusyahu or something. They do some unbelievable photoshopped stuff. Good photoshops are great, that’s great stuff for Hot Clicks. We do a lot of lists because people who are reading Hot Clicks at work, they come on ten minutes, or they’re killing a half hour while they’re eating lunch so they can read a list because it’s a quick hitting thing… I can tell you what not to send me. I really feel bad about this but somebody will send me a link to something, it’s really good writing, really in-depth reporting, and it’s a 800 word story that’s an analysis of something.. that’s not gonna get on Hot Clicks. We already have that on the site. Somebody sending me why the AL East will win the World Series this year is just not for us. I still get stuff like that sent to me and I feel bad because these people put so much work into it but it’s just not a fit and that usually gets left on the cutting room floor. If I see the word steroids, 99 percent of the time I will not read it. I just could not care less. We get a decent amount of traffic from CNN.com so anything that’s borderline, like the Brady Quinn picture on the gay website, it’s not worth it for me to go there.
HG: Have you been enjoying the perks that come with working at SI?
JT: A little bit, not a ton. I interviewed Derek Jeter two weeks ago which is pretty much the highlight of my life. I don’t think I had a chance of doing a good interview with him because I was blown away by just doing the interview with him. It’s been good though. I’ve interviewed Alyssa Milano, Minka Kelly from Friday Night Lights, Jeter, Joba Chamberlain so it’s been cool. It hasn’t been an overwhelming amount of perks so I can use more perks. More perks!! Actually a company sent me something and I meant to post this on Hot Clicks, but I got some disposable flasks. That’s a cool perk.
HG: What would you fill the flask with?
JT: Probably some vodka and Seven-up.
HG: What brand of vodka?
JT: I’m not one of those people that can tell the difference. Absolute, Kettle One, Grey Goose, it’s all the same to me.
HG: Do you get emails complaining about the subject matter on Hot Clicks? I mean from players or teams that mistakenly think you’ve written something that you’re only linking to..
JT: I don’t think there are any teams or athletes that know my name. I’m not that important. Here’s something though. A lot of times I get emails from readers, not necessarily bloggers but readers who get very mad because sometimes the videos don’t work in Hot Clicks. All you have to do is refresh the page two or three times and the video will work. You don’t have to call me an asshole or an idiot or say ‘what’s the point in linking to these if they don’t work’. They actually work, it’s a You Tube glitch, not a Hot Clicks glitch. You just need to refresh the page two or three times.
HG: Speaking of glitches.. You’ve crashed my site a few times with the Hot Clicks traffic. Is this something you take pride in? Knowing you can bring down a website with a link..
JT: Yeah we’ve gotten that many times. That’s something I can’t really control. What’s funny is, the guy who sits next to me at work, Gennaro Filice, he calls getting linked at Hot Clicks “The gift and the curse“. Obviously the gift is the traffic and the curse is we’ve crashed some sites. So whenever a site gets crashed he does a routine about the gift and the curse and we get a little chuckle out of it. We’ve probably crashed 10-15 sites. The only time it’s really a problem for me is if it’s the lead item in Hot Clicks and the site gets crashed. We usually have a very attractive female up there and that’s what people wanna see and they click the link and the site doesn’t work and I start getting those angry emails again.
HG: You don’t have comments on Hot Clicks.. You could open up the comments and let people speak to you that way instead of by email.
JT: I have to say this and I know this is blasphemous in the blog world and I’ll probably get ripped for this but I don’t get the whole comments thing myself. Maybe I shouldn’t say don’t get, I never read them. I guess because I’m moving so quick from blog to blog but I’m not a big fan or reader of the comments. What I like about not having comments in Hot Clicks is that if somebody actually emails me a criticism or praise, I know they mean it a little more. They’ve put their name to it and email address. I have no problem with criticisms but I’d rather the criticism comes from somebody that has an email address, sends me something, I can send something back to them instead of some guy in the comments named davidsternblows.
HG: We’ve talked about the good that comes with working for Sports Illustrated, Extra Mustard, there has to be some bad too.
JT: If you ask me what’s the one thing I dislike the most about Hot Clicks it’s that I can’t curse in them when I write them. I’d love to be able to say, well I better not say it, but for instance, if somebody falls down I don’t know anyone, any co-worker, any friend, any one in my family that would say “he fell on his butt”. Everyone would say he fell on his ass. I can’t do that.. And you guys use so many pictures that I can’t use just because of copyright issues. At SI, we have lawyers and they follow all laws. So for instance if there’s a picture of Kyle Orton with a Jack Daniel’s bottle or Matt Leinart in the hot tub, I can’t use those. Which is why I think Hot Clicks is really cool because I can link to the sites that use those pictures but I can’t use them. I get very jealous of the bloggers for that, I would like to use some of those pictures but I can’t get Time Inc. sued.
HG: Never say can’t. Jimmy thanks for your time.
JT: No problem. Thanks for asking me.
