The headline in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) couldn't be any more dramatic: "Baseball writers brace for the end."Wire reports and bloggers are rapidly replacing beat writers in all but the most die-hard cities, and financial problems at newspapers are leading to mass layoffs of sportswriters made less essential by technological progress and a generation of sports fans who don't read the newspaper.
Blogs are great and it's certainly true that outsourced reporters watching games on television can provide recaps well enough. It's also hard to lose too much sleep over the the decline of sports reporting at a time when support for investigative journalism that exposes corruption in Washington and on Wall Street is in peril, as well.
But none other than Mark Cuban -- hardly a Luddite when it comes to changes wrought by technology -- has written on his blog that newspaper coverage of sports teams is vital to their continued financial viability, and has announced he is working to put together a "beat-writer cooperative" to make sure that coverage continues unimpeded by the industry's current slash-and-burn practices.
What I'll miss most in the post-newspaper sports coverage world are the confrontations between reporters and the athletes and coaches they cover. Who could forget Hal "Phone Tosser" McRae in Kansas City or, more recently, UConn men's basketball coach Jim Calhoun fending off a freelancer who had the nerve to question his salary.
On the other hand, the decline of sports reporting in newspapers won't necessarily mean a decline in sports reporting. If there continues to be demand for beat writers, the internet -- with its potential for more targeted advertising and lower cost structure -- will pick up the slack. Blogs like FanHouse.com, owned by BloggingStocks parent AOL, have been aggressively hiring sportswriters with print experience.
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