(to borrow a film title).

We all know the difficulties the newspaper industry are going through. I look at the sports section for the Star-Ledger and find stories take from the NY Daily News. Reporters and columnists are being bought out.

So I guess it should come as no surprise to learn that the “Sport of the Times” column in The New York Times is being phased out.

In the Aug. 18 issue of The New York Observer, an article by John Koblin heads, “For the Old-Fashioned Sports Columnist, It’s Game Over.”

“The Sports of the Times is a great brand, and I hate to see that brand disappear, but it clearly is changing,” Mr. Jolly said. [Tom Jolly is editor of the Times‘ sports section.]

He explained that The Times’ sports page will use fewer general-interest writers to generate columns, and will instead rely more on beat writers to provide expertise. He wants them to blog, he wants them to use Twitter and he wants them to write analysis pieces.

I wonder what kind of studies were done to determine that 140 characters was the optimum amount for Twitter? And what is the poinbt of that if users are going to write six or seven consecutive Tweets?

The article continues:

“That thoughtful, reflective, reported opinion that we used to see has basically vanished,” said Selena Roberts, a writer with Sports Illustrated and a Times columnist from 2002 to 2007. “This leaves the reader, especially since the reader is going to the Web for the analysts’ point of view, with a shallower perspective of what’s going on.”

Ms. Roberts foresaw another, more practical problem with The Times’ plan to ask their access-dependent beat writers to be more authoritative and opinionated.

“Here they are covering a team on a daily basis,” said Ms. Roberts. “What if they blog something or tweet something that comes off as an opinion and it’s very much taken as an opinion by that organization? Do they run into problems because they make a joke about the GM?”

Either way, it’s clear that The Times has rendered its verdict. Now it’s just a matter of time until the end.

Former Times’ baseball columnist Murray Chass obviously has an opinion on this.

In his. Aug 26 post, Chass writes

…a eulogy for a column that is dying after 82 years…. The Times seems intent on killing the column before the newspaper itself dies. It’s like parents, knowing they are going to die, killing their children because they won’t be able to live on without them.

The problem with this warped thinking in the case of the newspaper is the demise of the column and the thinking behind the act will help hasten the newspaper’s demise.