JOCK WEBLOGS RENDER REILLY, OLBERMANN DEFENSELESS: Rick Reilly guested on Dan Patrick’s ESPN radio show this week to promote his latest book - and the subject of blogs authored by athletes came up (thankfully, the SI columnist wasn’t too ashamed to appear on a network that he recently accused of ripping him off multiple times).

So Reilly retired his paranoia in order to relay a recent, rather painful exchange he had with a fan in an airport. Reilly said a random sports aficionado told him that thanks to blogs by superstar athletes like Curt Schilling and Kobe Bryant, his profession was rapidly become obsolete.

Fan to the SI writer: “They’re kind of eliminating you.”

Take out the “kind of” and the fan was dead-on.

Reilly’s laughably flaccid defense to Patrick: “Most of them can’t spell and they’re really, really bad writers, except Curt Schilling. They’re really boring, they need us.”

Reilly obviously doesn’t read or communicate with many folks in the sports print media, ‘else he would know that most of them (not all, mind you) are spelling-impaired and “really, really bad writers”.

He also has no clue that MILLIONS of typical internet users in the last two years have discovered that the majority of people they read in newspapers are no better than those penning for the net’s most popular sports blogs.

Reilly will always have a place in the sports journalism pantheon, but the vast majority of his professional brethren are lazy hacks who are saved on a regular basis by the real heroes of the print media: night desk editors.

We’re also well aware that the majority of the best reporting still rests with the print media, but that is slowly changing by the day. Why would so many top-flight reporters and columnists be fleeing to online outlets if that wasn’t the case?

Patrick continued the discussion by citing an absurd scenario presented by Keith Olbermann on the show the day before. Olbermann had pathetically attempted to marginalize athlete blogs by saying he wouldn’t be surprised if Kobe Bryant and other high-profile sports stars started charging fans money to obtain “exclusive” information about them.

We’re guessing Olbermann’s inspiration was ESPN selling the columns of these journalistic titans this week as part of its frightfully lame “Insider” package: