Tony Lombardi's answering machine ends with the message, "Remember, do what you love and love what you do."
Which pretty much sums up why the now-47-year-old Perry Hall man quit his job leasing equipment to corporations three years ago to go full time into blogging about his favorite team, the Baltimore Ravens.
"It doesn't pay what I used to make, but I'm optimistic," said Lombardi, whose business card reads simply "Tony Lombardi, fan." Page views of his Ravens24X7.com are up to 3 million this month, up from 40,000 when he launched it five years ago after encouragement from friends who enjoyed the opinionated e-mails he would send them about football and other topics.
More than a half-dozen active independent bloggers are busily typing away about the Ravens, who open their 2008 season at M&T Bank Stadium on Sunday afternoon against the Cincinnati Bengals.
Jarrett Carter, assistant director of public relations at Morgan State University by day and Ravens blogger by night, thinks Baltimore's team, often characterized by drama and a mean reputation, provides unique fodder for the craft.
"When Brian Billick was [coach], that was easy pickings; there was always some minicontroversy," said Carter, 27, who writes for the year-old EbonyBird.com. "Another thing is the Ravens are not on the NFL's radar as one of the consistently good teams, yet nobody would want to play them at their best. It's a 'we get no respect' thing."
The bloggers are fueled mostly by a passion for the team and the game. The NFL also gives them little respect and no credentials. They compete with the team's official Web site - which is handsome and bland.
They're also pitted against the much more heavily fortified Ravens blogs run by the mainstream media. The Baltimore Sun's Ravens coverage, for example, is among the most popular material the newspaper produces online, drawing more than 3 million page views a month by itself.
Overall, sports blogging isn't as fertile a territory as one might suspect, though. Among the top 100 blogs ranked by Technorati.com, not a single one is about sports. Technology news, politics and Hollywood scandal are the brightest stars in the blogosphere.
One theory might be that long before blogs - even before the Internet - tabloid newspapers, sports talk radio and ESPN were writing the playbook that blogs have adopted. At least in sports, "old media" virtually invented the features that have made "new media" so popular and entertaining: writing with attitude and snark and my-team-is-better-than-your-team confrontation.
