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This is my first blog post to be republished on Bleacher Report.
Hi! I’m going to bring some quirks to my writing, which I hope to (re-) introduce you to over the next few days and weeks. I just relaunched my Web site, MorganWick.com, where I talk about a wide variety of topics, including some you might never have heard about, and even the topics that are familiar I often talk about from a unique perspective, because I’m constantly thinking about them.
On my site, the motto is “Ideas every day”, and to celebrate the launch of the new site, this is Ideas Every Day week month at MorganWick.com. Because I got the idea for Ideas Every Day week over a month ago, I’m going to start it with some ideas for posts that are not as topical now as they were then.
We are in a period of painful transition in journalism. We are in a period where the Internet is big enough to take a bite out of newspapers but too small to effectively replace them and too young to know what, exactly, will replace them, or how it’ll be paid for.
It’s outside the realm of a single blog post for me to proclaim to have all the answers for how to save newspapers or maintain the standards they set in the Internet Age. It covers too much ground, touches on too many aspects of our everyday life.
One day I hope to write a book on all the changes the Internet is bringing to society, and maybe I’ll try to find the answers there. Nonetheless this post is on just one symptom, one aspect, of this larger problem, and it unavoidably means talking about the larger problem and thinking about how to fix it.
The second sentence of the preceding paragraph is an important way to describe and look at the situation. For all the trouble that newspapers are in, they still reach many more people than most websites and even most TV news shows.
The slow disappearance of newspapers isn’t just about the in-depth journalism that will be lost, which itself is less about the disappearance of newspapers and more about our increasing demands for immediacy.
There are still a lot of people, people without any access to the Internet, that are reliant on newspapers (and, admittedly, TV) to know what’s going on in the world. At least in the short term, losing access to newspapers could mean complete disconnection.
The flip side of that is the reality that whatever it is that replaces newspapers, it will exist in a greater number, diversity, and precision than what exists now. The diversity of voices on the Internet has a lot of advantages. But it also has a number of problems.
For many, including me, it’s easy to assume that the future of the Internet and journalism in general will follow the mold set by television, a future largely supported by ads. There are a few problems with this supposition, but one of them is that very, very, few web sites will have the mass penetration of a leading daily newspaper or TV station.
The value of advertising lies primarily in the number of eyeballs you can have seeing your ad; the fewer eyeballs, the less value.
While it’s theoretically possible for people to follow more websites than they subscribe to newspapers or watch TV shows, the fact is that there are going to be more voices fighting for a piece of the pie, and there’s a limit as to how big the pie can grow, especially when a lot of the eyeballs are going to be the same people over and over again.
Not all journalistic functions that are going to be changed by the Internet are time consuming. Some are just expensive, underwritten by less expensive sections of the paper. Something that requires a lot of traveling may attract a significant number of readers and eyeballs, but it’s still going to be harder to pay the bills that go along with it which in turn, means fewer people are going to be willing to take the plunge.It’s doubly hard when we’re talking about something that requires a lot of traveling yet is still local.
Which brings me to July’s series in the Sports Business Journal on the declining sizes and budgets of newspaper sports sections. Sports sections have reduced staff and page counts, cut travel expenses on beats (especially by not sending writers on the road), and even when they haven’t reduced beat coverage, cut coverage of big events as well.
A one-two punch of the Web and ESPN has put a crimp on local sports sections, and given its frivolity compared to the rest of the paper, I wonder if sports sections will be first to be cut entirely.
Hardcore sports fans who once were reliant on the local sports section, or the sports minute on the local newscast, for sports news from anywhere in the country have found ESPN a godsend. A self-reinforcing pattern of people flocking to ESPN for sports coverage in the wake of shrinking coverage in the local paper has started to emerge.
There’s now a significant group of people like me who consider themselves general sports fans, rather than necessarily fans of any particular team. The team I have the closest attachment to is the Mariners, and that’s because I’ve been going to a couple of games every year since I was a little kid and feel a sentimental attachment to keep going. I probably couldn’t tell you half the names on the team.
ESPN will tell you when Brett Favre is coming back—they’ll cover the big stars and the big-name teams. That’s why its detractors like to call it the “Eastern Seaboard Programming Network”, despite its willingness to cover LA teams even before opening a studio there.
They’ll cover leagues at the macro level, at least to an extent, but as Don Ohlmeyer noted in his first ombudsman column for the boys in Bristol, “programming and commentating for a national audience made up mostly of local interests is a treacherous balancing act.” ESPN itself has suffered from becoming “America’s sports section” in a nation more patriotic about local teams than any other.
To get the same level of coverage of individual teams requires a local-level operation whose patrons only expect them to cover two or three teams. There’s less money in those local level operations, so travel expenses have been cut and coverage has suffered.
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