The Bloggers Blogs
Its difficult to be a New England Patriots fan in West Virginia. It seems like it's nothing but Steelers with a sprinkle of Browns and Bengals. People accuse you of being a fair-weather fan for supporting a successful team a thousand miles away and you need to be up on your Patriots to stave off any such accusations. Seeing as how coverage is absent in the papers, on TV and on people lips, West Virginian Patriots fans need coverage from closer to the source. Luckily, ESPN has not one but two quality blogs to keep fans around the world informed about the New England Patriots
ESPN Boston Patriots Blog
This blog does a good job of making the average Patriots fan feel like an insider. The writers, led by Mike Reiss, give the Patriots fan everything from feature pieces about players to positional analysis to practice reports. And, of course, with the resources of ESPN behind it, the blog is very trustworthy and chock-full of credible stats and information.
Fan interaction is also a big part of the ESPN Boston Patriots Blog. They have the typical methods, such as fan polls, but also have a weekly mailbag series where the Patriots Bloggers (typically Reiss, but sometimes other contributors such as Field Yates or Mike Rodak) answer questions sent in by fans about depth chart issues, last weeks game, whatever is pertinent. This, combined with weekly podcasted chats with experts make the reader feel like they have an inside track to being on top of what is going on with their favorite team.
The wide-spread readership of the blog is apparent when reading the hometowns of fans sending in questions for the mailbag. Of course there are plenty of New Englanders, but fans from as far away as Arizona, Austrailia, China or even deployed military personel trust the bloggers of ESPN Boston to give them quality, reliable reports and answers.
ESPN AFC East Blog
This blog, somewhat similar to the Patriots blog, covers the division in which the Patriots play. From a Patriots fan point of view, this is a less-focused blog that give you a chance to look at the competition inside the division (if you want to call them competition). It also gives the fan a chance to see the Patriots from a point of view outside of Boston.
The main difference between the blogs (ESPN Boston and AFC East) is that the AFC East covers four teams rather than one. At first glance it would seem like with the exclusively Patriots blog on ESPN Boston the AFC East blog would be useless to a die-hard fan, but using them together actually give a more complete view of the Patriots.
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