ESPN vs. SI

I was doing a side by side comparison this morning of some sports illustrated baseball coverage and ESPN's coverage of the same story and realized why i like ESPN so much better: they give you everything you need on one page.

SI tends to have nicer pictures, I'll give them that, but in terms of information ESPN gives you pretty much anything that you could want from a story on one page.

SI basically gives you the story, a picture or two, some links to relate stories, and maybe a table sometimes.

ESPN gives you the story, pictures, video (to be fair, SI probably can't get the rights to the video sometimes), tables, etc etc. I really like their scoring summaries and their box scores, both of which SI could definitely have. It's all factual information, so ESPN couldn't copyright it. SI would just have to find a different way to do it. Same thing with the box scores. Sure, SI links to a box score, but why not just include one at the top like ESPN does? It really doesn't need its own page.

Another thing that ESPN has that i really love is links to player data. Again, I can't see a reason why SI couldn't do something like this. On ESPN the first mention of any player's name is a hyperlink to that player's profile, which includes stats, pictures, and all sorts of stuff. I like to look at that stuff, so having the link there is very convenient. On SI you have to go back and run a search to find that information.

It seems to me that SI is really missing the boat on a lot of extra information that they could be including in their stories.

And oddly enough, despite the fact that it has way more information on the page, i find that ESPN's page design seems to look way less cluttered than SI's.