Less and less, it seems the answer to this age-old riddle is newspapers.
Speaking from personal and practical experience, we have cut the stand-alone sports section at my weekly publication; instead I write the occasional sports-related piece. One kind old soul called to complain. He suggested we ditch the obituaries and put back the sports page.
As regular newspaper readers knows, the publications are shrinking. Sure, the bust of ’08-’09 had a lot to do with it, a vicious cycle of companies not advertising because their revenue was in decline, and having their revenues decline because they weren’t bring in customers because they weren’t advertising.
A newspaper’s sports section has historically and anecdotally been referred to as “the toy department.” Not a whole lot of advertising there, save for tire and auto supply stores and perhaps the occasional “gentleman’s club.” And, to be fair, there did seem to a a lot of duplication of effort: How many writers do you really need to cover the Mets or Jets or Nets or wax philosophical about the ethics of athletics and other social concerns?
Nevertheless, it was disturbing to read “Is Newspaper Baseball Coverage Dead?” from Fangraphs.com.
Written by Marc Hulet, a native of Ontario, the article serves as a chat board for baseball fans and readers across North America. The commenters are as telling as Hulet’s piece. Many, I suspect, by dint of their responding to a website, are younger and less apt to pick up a physical newspaper as opposed to getting their intel online or on an iPad or some other device. Not to go too far off-topic, but David Pogue, the New York Times‘ tech guy, writes today about the problems of trying to keep up with new products and methods that seem to come at us faster and faster. In this case, Pogue worries that he won’t be able to transfer his “old” Mini DV tapes to his apple because the company no longer features a FireWire jack on its laptops. In a conversation with Steve Jobs, Apple’s head honcho himself, Pogue is told that he will never actually get around to editing those tapes, despite his best intentions. (This is a complaint my wife has all the time about the digital photos we take. They only occasionally get transferred to the computer, and if they do, they almost never get printed out. I’m sure this is a fairly common occurrence.)
Where was I? Oh yes.
The Times used to print its sports as a daily section. Since the downturn (not sure of the official date), they stick it in the back of the business section, except on Mondays, when it remains on its own. As such, there are fewer stories. When the Yankees lost their season opener against the Red Sox — a night game — there was a large picture “above the fold” on page one the following day. When the Mets played their opener — an afternoon contest which they won — nothing. Not even a mention on the bottom of the page. I don’t know if this is as much an issue of space as front-running Yankees bias.
But editorial decisions — and sacrifices — have to be made. And at the risk of sounding too pessimistic, I fear that even as the nation slowly comes back from the financial crises, the print industry — books as well as newspapers and magazines — will continue to fade away, very slowly, perhaps, but inexorably.
And kudos to Frangraphs, by the way, a site ostensibly concerned with statistics and fantasy baseball for even posting such an entry. The divide between sites such as this and those that deal more with historical and narrative issues has been a bit wide, shall we say.
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