Off Wing Opinion: Is There A Future For Newspaper Sportswriting?:
Just what sort of future is there in the world for a full-time newspaper reporter?
I don't think it's an idle question. The newspaper business, though it is trying gamely to adjust to the new realities of online distribution, is still clearly struggling. But while adjusting to a tectonic shift in information technology is one thing, dealing with tens of thousands of new competitors that have collectively blown a hole in your business model is quite another.
There is a future -- it just doesn't look like the past, and it's going to be painful for the old style businesses, much in the way iTunes has been painful for places like Tower Records, Amazon and Barnes&Noble has been painiful to non-chain bookstores, McDonalds was painful for the mom and pop restaurant, and the automobile was painful for buggy whip manufacturers.
The good will adapt and survive, the great will thrive, and the rest will fade away and complain that it wasn't fair, as if they had some god-given right to succeed. This isn't new -- the only real constant is change, and these kind of market upheavals are constant through our history. heck, think about it; when I was growing up, a city like Los Angeles had dozens of radio stations and each one had its own staff of announcers and disk jockeys; today, it seems half the stations are collectively owned by four companies (Clear Channel, et al) -- and they all feed programming down our throats from central locations. Or 25 years ago, think how many department store chains there were, and how they were regionalized with merchandise to handle local needs and interest. Now? It's Macy's -- and it's a single national product line with national buyers, as if the winter clothes needed in Phoenix and Minneapolis were the same.
It seems to me that what used to be a "newspaper" is transmogrifying into three separate components -- components which overlap and with blurred boundaries, since life's never that easy.
One is the "national" aspect of news: Reuters, AP, Getty Photos. Many newspapers were, in fact, little more than places that took the national syndicated stuff and wrapped ads around it and printed it; in the day of the internet with direct access to the feeds, who needs that? To the degree that a news outet was merely a local redistibution of a national service; we're not going to miss those.
What's left? local coverage. Boring stuff like School boards, fun stuff like hockey games, scary stuff like car crashes and bridge failures.
Also, commentary. contrary to popular belief, little of what the bloggers do is "citizen journalism" -- it's "citizen commentary". It's not reporting, it's op-ed. That's not putting it down, either, but it's calling it what it is. That's starting to change somewhat as bloggers get into press boxes and start doing more reporting -- but most of the writing is still oriented towards commentary over, say, a beat writer. And so much of blogging is actually spawned by some newspaper or newswire story that we all comment on and build from; we can't kill the newspapers too fast, they're our primary source of material...
The trick is how to pay for the local stuff and the editorializing. We're figuring that out, and more and more bloggers are starting to earn decent income at doing it -- it's just not a financial model that newspapers use, or one they're easily able to map into. The change is scary, and it's going to leave a lot of corpses along the roadside.
I think the easy answer (and a deadly one) for newspapers is to cut costs by cutting the newsroom -- you see layoffs happening all around the industry, including Vic Chi at the Mercury News here recently. This unfortunately leads in the wrong direction, towards a greater reliance on newswire, and frankly, we're not very far from where Reuters might not WANT to resell its material to a newspaper, because it's more profitable to cut out the middleman and sell that feed directly.
A local newsroom has two markets: the local population and the national newswires. Reuters isn't going to keep a newsroom everywhere, it's going to buy local content that works for the larger audience. That's one potential revenue stream.
Then you need to build revenue off the local readers. That is, if you think about it, exactly what bloggers have been experimenting with and figuring out how to do. The successful newspapers will be the ones most able to shed the old-style habits and costs and move to a streamlined, online-oriented model. The NY Times paywall experiment failed, but there's a huge market in local advertising that nobody's quite figured out how to monetize; Craigslist took over classified, but the local furniture store? Still up for grabs. Newspapers need to figure out how to grab it before someone else does.
What you end up with is going to look a lot like a set of blogs, little like a newspaper; newspapers need to shed the ink and paper mentailty, or soeone will do it for them. I think we're fairly close to online groups buying newspapers for the name and branding in places where the papers can't adapt. We're not far from the first newspapers going fully electronic, either. there have been rumors in Seattle, for instance.
For someone going into journalism? I'd say -- DON'T -- unless you're specifically going into this new journalism and willing to buy into the pain of figuring this out the hard way. it's not going to be a fun time.
But for sportswriting? and hockey? Massive opportunity -- if they embrace the change instead of fight it. One immediate change I think you'll see is that there will be fewer travelling beat writers -- coverage will be by the "home" writers, not the "team" writers. It's hard to justify the cost of dedicating a writer full-time and putting them on the road half of the time. We've been seeing that with reduced attendance at playoffs, for instance. This isn't a bad thing, ti's an aspect of the changing face of reporting -- it's just different from what we're used to.
Frankly? with a good set of bloggers in every hockey town, working with various national organizations to distribute the writing, I think you'd get a lot better perspective and information than you get today by just reading a local beat guy or two and whoever's writing on espn.com from a national perspective (especially out here on the west coast, where I find most of the national guys don't know and don't much care....)
There are a lot of challenges here -- but even more opportunity. The question is really going to be who fights that changes (and ultimately loses) and who embraces it and figures out how to win with it. The one guarantee is that it's going to be stressful for all involved while this shakes out....
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