What, The Sporting News is still a thing?

(Note: I published this piece on one of my other blogs, The Worried Journalist. Just call me Double-Duty Kaplan.)

When I was a kid I once got in in trouble for spending twice my allowance because I bought the latest issues of Baseball Digest and The Sporting News on the way back from running errands. This amounted to an extra fifty cents. Mind you, this was back in the late 1960s. I only realized much later what dire financial straits my family was in. So those extra two bits (kids, ask your parents) was a big deal.

I was just tooling around my email and saw a thread from the SportsJournalists.com site earlier this month announcing further layoffs at TSN (including apparently “two of its three baseball guys”).

One sad comment:

I honestly didn’t realize the Sporting News still existed until just now.

I thought it had gone under years ago.

Two of its three baseball guys.

Thanks a lot, millennials. You think you invented pop culture? It’s people like you who are killing off pop culture. Just because it doesn’t apply to you doesn’t mean it’s not important. For decades The Sporting News — founded in 1886 — was known as the “bible of baseball.” The writing was top notch and covered not just the majors but the minor league as well from the highest level to the lowest bushed. Granted, the publishers may not have been the most progressive when it came to reporting on minority ballplayers, but it was a symbol of America. Newspapers would carry photos of soldiers in World War II reading TSN to get a taste of home.

Now it’s barely a website, covering multiple sports in the most vanilla of fashion.

Sad indeed.

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Tagged as: Baseball Digest, The Sporting News