the only newspaper i read, is Baseball Weekly (now called Sports Weekly and distributed by USA Today). i’ve been reading it religiously, every single week, for a good 13 years now.

it keeps me company at dinner and i enjoy doing the crossword puzzle in the back. i sure hope it stays in print forever! everything else, i get online. and not by way of the “paper” anymore. mostly blogs.

i do enjoy flipping through Newsday, when i go visit my parents, but i think it’s more of a childhood tradition/memory kinda thing. sucks that Joe Pos doesn’t get paid for his *amazing* blog. i would hope Pete Abe gets paid for his. i surely know Cliff, Alex and the rest of the gang here, should be compensated for their ‘above & beyond’ efforts.

other than that…Jennie Finch was drop dead breathtaking on the mound for USA tonight in the World Cup of Softball !!! : o

I think we need a few Banterers to go to some games to win the other two.

As long as Flash doesn’t call any games from the booth, I think we’re golden!

: )

[5] No problem. Joe Pos’s answer to your question was phenomenal. I did NOT see it going in that direction, but it plays right into my intellectual wheelhouse.

[6] PJ … at the rate I’m posting this week, going by your theory, I’m thinking an 8-win homestand is in order.

Too bad you didn’t return prior to the Angels series, though!

Heh heh

: )

Perhaps what makes BB so compelling is that is brings together people with a common interest ie. the passion of a sports team to create connection, the opposite of fragmentation. Being identified as a banterer made me feel included, also the opposite of fragmentation. I suppose that we’re the modern day book club.

On another note, I hope journalists who are top notch, who do inform and do their research deserve a proper medium to relay information, whatever form it takes.

I also have a bookcase filled with baseball books which the library doesn’t want. And what do I do with my Baseball Encyclopedia, Total Baseball, Baseball Timeline; and Neft and Cohen?

I wonder if the newspapers’ business model was always destined to fail. They used ad revenue to keep the cost to consumers cheap – did they think ad revenue would never disappear? That was pretty stupid. Less ad revenue = higher cost to a product people are used to paying very little for = fewer subscribers and buyers = cycle of doom. The presence of so much of the content online, for free, just helps it along.

I would gladly pay more for a newspaper than I did before, and I bet many other people would too. But the real problem is that so much of what’s in newspapers these days is garbage. Its not actual reporting, its stenographing. There’s almost no value-added. Kepner is right – don’t just tell me what’s going on, tell me why, and most importantly, dig into the facts to separate reality from bullshit.

To use an example we’re all familiar with, if an executive with a sports team that just built a new stadium tells a reporter, the dimensions are the same as the old stadium, don’t just give me the quotes from the exec in the article, and then say that someone else says something different. Talk to sources – the architects, the construction workers, the maintenance guys – someone knows what those dimensions really are, how tall the wall really is. Find the blueprints for the place. Get that information out there in the story – and if it turns out the exec’s quotes are bullshit, report that. That’s what the reporter can do that I can’t.

I won’t even get into what corporate ownership of the media, and expectation of profits, has done. I think that’s the root cause of a lot of the problem, but this post is long enough.