New York Times notes that TMZ is a hot new player in sports news

Have you noticed that there’s a new player in the sports media field? It’s TMZ, which broke the Ray Rice elevator video this week. TMZ also had scoops with the Donald Sterling audio this spring and the news last year that Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston was being investigated by police for an alleged sexual assault.

The New York Times wrote about how TMZ, which began and thrived as a Hollywood celebrity gossip site, has moved into sports:

TMZ decided to move beyond Hollywood and into sports after it helped break the story of Tiger Woods’s extramarital indiscretions. The logic was simple, driven home by the public’s seemingly unending interest in Woods’s off-the-course activities: Sports are now their own form of pop culture, and some of our biggest celebrities are athletes.

I think TMZ moving into sports and quickly becoming a major player is a reminder that in today’s fast-changing media world, you never know where your competition—or your next potential employer or partner, for that matter—is going to come from.

I often repeat the advice, which hardly originated with me, to differentiate yourself, make yourself valuable by doing something that nobody else does. But even if you manage that, you can be bopping along, thinking you’ve got the market cornered on something, and here comes someone you didn’t even know was in the game to beat you at it.

It’s a tough racket, all right.