Another one bites the dust: The end of The Sporting News as we know it?

November 10, 2011

When I was a kid, about 10 years old, I used to get a weekly allowance of 50 cents, which I normally would use to purchase a baseball magazine.

One week, while running errands for my mother, I took the audacious step of using some of the change to supplement my stipend to buy both a copy of The Sporting News and the current edition of Baseball Digest. It was only another 50 cents. But my mother went ballistic and was angry with me for days for overstepping the bounds. In retrospect I have come to learn that our financial straits were pretty dire, but  even so, this was 50 cents in the late 1960s, not the Great Depression.

The memory was brought to mind by a piece by Samir Husni, aka “Mr. Magazine” about TSN‘s decision to move from a bi-weekly to a monthly publication. He’s mostly concerned with the ethics of subscription fulfillment (or the lack thereof) as the magazine undergoes the transition. Seems TSN is trying to shortchange their readers by cutting back on the remainder of issues they’re allowing based on how much of the subscription remains because the cover price will be increasing substantially. How the mighty have fallen.

TSN, which has gone through numerous incarnations in the last several years (currently under the auspices of AOL?), used to be considered “The Bible of Baseball.” I used to buy it because they had recaps of every game from the previous week along with the box scores. Then it was just box scores. Then they were gone. Suffice it to say, it is lo longer the sports publication of my youth.

Baseball-fever.com posted this history/lament in 2009.

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