Are Sports Sites Outdated or Am I Not the Audience?
russell: I have to believe it's you (and me:-).  Most people are attracted to images more than texts.  espn.com is rich in images and the text is low density.  Otherwise it is reasonably clean and not too garish.  I suspect that a lot of money went into the design and testing.  US Today took the same approach to image rich design when it came out.  It was criticized for looking more like a tabloid than a newspaper, but it quickly jumped to number 2 or 3.