Russell Adams and Tim Marchman have an article in today’s Wall Street Journal about the grim future of the newspaper beat writer:
Beginning this season, the Washington Post will rely on the Baltimore Sun to cover the Orioles, while the Sun will leave its Nationals coverage to the Post, part of a broader content-sharing deal being replicated at papers around the country. The Hartford Courant quit sending a reporter on the road with the Red Sox, and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette has cut its Red Sox road presence to between 35-40 games from 70 last year. And the New York Times now sends only one person on certain road trips that in the past would have called for two, Mr. Jolly said.
Still, some major dailies are not about to take reporters off the baseball beat. The cash-strapped Boston Herald has cut its city desk by more than half in the past five years, but tinkering with Red Sox coverage “was never really an option,” said Tony Massarotti, who covered the team for the Herald for nearly 15 years before moving to the rival Globe last fall. “It would be suicide, quite honestly.”
Some teams and organizations say the decrease in newspaper coverage may hamper their ability to promote themselves. Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, wrote recently on his blog that to let newspapers die is a “recipe for disaster” for professional sports leagues because newspapers, however weakened, remain the leagues’ best and only link to a mass audience. He said he has spoken to other sports executives about creating a league-backed “beat writer cooperative” to guarantee a minimum number of daily stories on each local team.
Today, Oscar Madison would be a blogger. Think his roommate would leave comments signed F.U.?
"Today, Oscar Madison would be a blogger. Think his roommate would leave comments signed F.U.?"
That part of the movie still makes my stomach hurt! I laughed for ten minutes the first time I saw that scene!
I think print news is going the way of great jazz, Alex. You will have to look for the greats to find them... in libraries and archives online. Too many have access to all of the games these days. One mere generation ago, that wasn't the case.
Sorry I didn't get this up first.
I can't take it anymore, Felix, I'm cracking up. Everything you do irritates me. And when you're not here, the things I know you're gonna do when you come in irritate me. You leave me little notes on my pillow. Told you 158 times I can't stand little notes on my pillow. "We're all out of cornflakes. F.U." Took me three hours to figure out F.U. was Felix Unger.
Guess I'm part of the problem. I haven't read a newspaper or watched a news show in years. The last time I regularly read newspapers was for sports and comics, and both of those are easily found online now. No need to get a paper.
I guess I don't care about the industry failing because if it can't support itself it doesn't really deserve to be around. It's a bit obsolete. The only redeeming quality about local papers is a bit more in-depth local news coverage... but I'm not too involved in that sort of thing either since I'm in college and don't expect to be around here too much longer.
Love the Odd Couple reference. Thanks,guys.
What's essential about the beat reporter is accountability. They uncover, reveal and research like no other animal. I have a friend who while a reporter covering the mayor with the NY Post was in Guiliani's face so much, he could see his nose hairs.
Now, he's a popular journalist with the Washington Post. Apropos to this post, he called the other day to find out I would hire him to clean our toilets. He's joking, yes, but where will they find innovation in reporting, so journalists can continue their craft as paper no longer suffices?
[4] This is a recurring topic in my posts. I plan on making this a central piece to my next column. Please e-mail me here to submit questions, etc., on this topic. It'd be great to do a Q&A. I'll also pool some former colleagues who face this reality every day to get their take from the trenches.
[4] I don't think the traditional beat writer is essential for accountability, especially with fewer and fewer people reading newspapers. Information is what's essential, not the means by which it is delivered or the people who deliver it (although many journalists might not want to believe it). The demise of the newspaper industry is no more lamentable than any other business that is slowly becoming marginalized. Because newspapers are writing the story of their own demise, however, it has taken on a more noble and ominous tone.
Will, I'd be curious as to how working beat writers feel about their futures--how do they think they can or will survivie?
here's a really interesting blog post on the topic: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
excerpt (read the whole thing):
The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.
As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn’t we try a carrot-and-stick approach, with education and prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.
The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
[8] Great link. I was going to post it if you hadn't.
Newspapers are dying. Something will eventually replace them, but it's going to be chaotic in the meantime.
I read yesterday that the Boston Globe might be shut down. So many papers are shutting down or going web-only. The Christian Science Monitor, the Detroit papers, the SF Chronicle, the Rocky Mountain News, the LA Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times. Gannett cut its workforce by 10%, then made more cuts. Bloggers can't replace print journalists (yet, anyway), but print is going away.
Newspapers need to find a way to further monetize their web content without charging subscription fees. I'm way too stupid to figure out how to do that, but I think someone will figure it out over time.
[10] As the link in [8] argues, it will probably be several different things that replace newspapers.
And we do need the press. What [3] doesn't get is that the web news he depends on now is basically a parasite on the print and TV news he disdains. He will miss them when they're gone, even if he doesn't realize it.
[6] People might not be reading newspapers as much, but once a story breaks, it spreads like a virus, good or bad. Plus, it's usually the journalist who uncovers it. Then, it gets disseminated. Where will the stories come from if they're not snooping? Can newspapers exist in a web-based form? As [10] says, how will it be monetized?
I think the basic premise of journalism is that since writers work for an established publication, they are held to some standards of "truthiness" or fact checking, although if I read the NY Post, I question that statement as fact. Bloggers, on the other hand, while relevant are basically self-regulating.
Since there are no clear answers at this point as the link [8] suggests, time will tell how this gets sorted out with uncertainty being the starting line.
I can't even think about this question now after the Odd Couple reference, just hysterical..didn't Jack Klugman have a lawsuit going to win back royalties from Quincy?
A sign of the desperation described in [8]:
A.P. Seeks to Rein in Sites Using Its Content
Drudge Report? All they post is the headline and a link. So now it's going to be illegal to link to news articles, unless you pay up?
IMO, they know this is stupid, but they are so desperate for money in this bad economy they don't know what else to do.