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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Thanks for reading.

Writing Style

Hopefully, I'm not "preaching to the choir" on this post. Recently, PRSA Tactics (a monthly publication of the Public Relations Society of America) titled their Feb. 2009 issue "The write way." They've done a couple of these, and to me, reading about the latest "trends" if you will in writing style is very interesting.

I should preface this by saying that a colleague of mine told me something very valuable a couple years ago. He said that there's a big difference between writing for college papers and journalistic writing. Through my four years of college, I got accustomed to APA (American Psychological Association) Style. APA Style consists of long paragraphs and punctuation like you wouldn't believe.

Which was part of my problem. My English professor, bless her heart, drilled APA Style very hard. So much to the point that I became "comma crazy." Not just commas, mind you, punctuation altogether. But this colleague of mine reminded me that "less is more" and also that you don't want an incredible amount of punctuation to slow down your readers.

Another piece of writing style that drives me crazy is which words are hyphenated; and which are not. This colleague of mine once again taught me something very valuable - if the combination of words are written in an adjective form, then they are hyphenated. For example, "low-income housing."

Here's writing style you probably wouldn't see in an AP Stylebook; but would find in the PRSA Tactics January 2009 issue (15 for '09 - New media terms for a new year): media terminology. For instance, "cell phone" is two words; yet, BlackBerry is one word, note the upper-case letters. The same rule applies to MySpace, YouTube, and one that really drives me crazy: LinkedIn. Every time I see that one in an e-mail, I have to look twice. For me, the lower-case "d" and upper-case "I" being so close together makes it hard to read sometimes.

For the record, your Yahoo, Gmail or POP Mail accounts would be written as "e-mail." Here's one that was interesting to me, "blog," is short for "Web log," and therefore is not capitalized, neither is "podcast" or "videocast."

As we move into a world with less newspapers, and more blogs and social-networking sites; it is fun to examine how the rules are changing, right before our eyes.