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SportsMediaWatch was founded by Matt Gaventa and Miro Kazakoff in the fall of 2005. The site was an immediate sensation, quickly turning the sports media landscape on its ear and surging past five million unique monthly visitors early in 2006. Rewards followed: grain-fed beef, diamond-studded gasoline, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry – the two visionaries were standing on top of the world, or, actually, a world-shaped pile of money.

But all was not smiles & tax bracket mobility. Living the webmaster lifestyle took its toll: all-night Mambo parties and weekend Frontpage binges began to whittle away at Kazakoff’s health. For two months in summer 2007 he was at Betty Ford, cut off from friends and abandoned by Gaventa, who, by now, regularly accused himself of violating the journalistic standards of Edward R. Murrow and occasionally mistook himself for legendary golfer Bagger Vance.

As their health deteriorated, the site suffered. Under the daily leadership of Mad Magazine veteran Tina Brown, SportsMediaWatch abandoned its commitment to principled, objective reporting and instead turned to sarcasm, irony, and outright lies, all in the pursuit of more new readers and the precious advertising revenue that followed. Turned off by such hackery, and especially in the wake of the now-infamous Tony Reali sex tape incident, those precious readers instead began to slip away.

By 2009, SportsMediaWatch was only a shell of its former self, but Gaventa and Kazakoff had finally fallen to earth. Reunited and reconciled, they have again set themselves to the task of housing the Best Damn Sports Media Watch Show in the Internet. And possibly doing some producing.

Matt Gaventa
Co-Founder and Executive Editor
Matt is an itinerant writer, filmmaker, designer, and graduate student currently living in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 2002, he attended games in all thirty MLB stadiums in fifty days, and then got shafted by the online journal committed to publishing his account. That in mind, SportsMediaWatching is his idea of revenge therapy (and of trying to get paid for something he does anyway). When he’s not watching sports media, he watches actual sports, and has lingering anger with Atlanta Braves nemesis Kent Hrbek.

Miro Kazakoff
Co-Founder and Publisher
Miro is an entrepreneur, business consultant and occasional bon-vivant based in the Northeastern US. While that may not seem like a very specific location, Miro spent a year living in an old school bus he helped convert into a motor home while traveling across North America. Miro has got a rebellious streak that is pretty much confined to undermining the authority of old businesses by building profitable start-ups that generate significant returns for investors.