Sports writing - a thing of the past?

Recently, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that shocked me a little, but not as much as I thought. The article ran in the April 7, 2009 issue in the sports section. It was titled, "Baseball Writers Brace for the End." The image is from 1962, a packed pressbox at Yankee Stadium.

The article goes on to tell how pressboxes at ballparks are getting emptier. Jack O'Connell, who is the secretary of the Baseball Writers Association of America was quoted in the article as saying, "I certainly see the dark clouds," in regards to the future of baseball beat writers.

But, what about other sports? Maybe it was just me, but at last weekend's NCAA Final Four in Detroit, I didn't see as many spots on press row as usual. Sure, maybe I didn't notice because the Final Four setup places the floor on a 14-inch-high platform, therefore press row seems to be in an orchestra pit. In past years, usually there are three rows of press tables along both sides of the floor. This year, I only saw two on either side.

The WSJ article went on to talk about the Beaver County Times, a paper published just outside of Pittsburgh, and that the paper is no longer covering Pittsburgh Pirates spring training, and is covering only a limited schedule of road games. The paper quoted the New York Times as spending $6,500 a month to cover the team on the road (the WSJ did not specify whether it was the Yankees or the Mets). And a trade-off seems to be in order in the nation's capital: the Washington Post will rely on the Baltimore Sun for coverage of the Baltimore Orioles; and the Post will rely on the Sun for coverage of the Washington Nationals.

This is just baseball. Of course, a baseball season is twice as long as an NHL or NBA season (162 games for Major League Baseball), so will this become something that happens to other sports coverage as well? Who knows? The WSJ article quoted Mark Cuban, the young, iconic owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, who wrote in his blog recently that for newspapers to "die" would be a "recipe for disaster." Cuban believes that newspapers are the NBA's best medium to reach a large audience; and the decline as of late for newspapers can also hurt a team's marketing.

Here's one interesting statistic the WSJ wrote about papers in Detroit. Both of the city's newspapers (Detroit News, Detroit Free-Press) have cut their home delivery to three days a week. The Detroit Red Wings of the NHL conducted a survey, and they found that 65% of the team's season-ticket holders get their news from the newspaper.

So, maybe some good news still remains for sports beat writers in our local daily newspapers. But with the increasing use of social-networking sites, blogs and other user-created mediums, the president of the Baseball Writers Association of America might not be too far-fetched when he was quoted as saying, "We're waiting for that first domino to fall...."

You can read the full WSJ article by clicking on this link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123906424665995337.html.

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