Press Row

Theory Post 1: The reports of my death were…actually, right on target (death of the newspaper industry)

I talked last time about the rapid decline of the newspaper industry, along with some interesting numbers to back up just how much hot water the print media is in.

This time, let’s think a little bit about the impact this has on the online sports industry—that is, the sports blogging world. The jist: the death of the print media should be a bigger deal to sports blogs than it appears to be.

I’m among the many thousands of people (millions?) who read Pro Football Talk every day. I have a window of it open at work that I’ll refresh whenever I’m sitting at my desk, just to see what the news of the moment is.

In its few years of existence, PFT has become one of the most influential and powerful sports blogs on the Internet. It was one of the first “Internet sites” to really begin to conversation of sports blogs forcing their way into the mainstream media community. Many members of the media—and of the teams themselves—won’t admit it, but they’re probably constantly surfing PFT, too.

The bread and butter of PFT is the Rumor Mill, an often-updated reporting of recent NFL news and happenings. You can usually find snarky commentary and pretty intelligent, insightful analysis about anything and everything that has to do with football.

Remember how we talked last time about how more people read about the AJC’s findings about Michael Vick on a sports blog than they did in the AJC itself? Let us keep one key fact in mind about that course of events: nobody would have read about it anywhere if the AJC didn’t find anything out in the first place.

Let’s keep that in mind for a moment. What if the AJC never followed up on the investigation? Say for whatever reason, they didn’t pursue the Vick investigation the way they did. Nothing ever appears in the AJC about Vick and his dog fighting activities.

What would the sports blogs have talked about?

Or, let’s take PFT’s last post, for example—which, as of 7:45 PST on Monday, June 30, was about Chris Henry and the next step in his permanent banishment/return to the NFL. While Mike Florio does provide some quality analysis with the news blurb—as he usually does—notice the lone hyperlink in that post. It’s to a print story by the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Kimball Perry, reporting the latest on the Chris Henry verdict.

Take a quick surf down some of the main stories on PFT’s Rumor Mill. Counting back 25 stories from that one above, 15 of them originate from the beat report of a team, an AP report, or from NFL.com or ESPN.

Before I go any further, let me say this: this is not at all an indictment of Florio, PFT, or any sports blogs at all. (I can’t really be a sports blog that sets flame to other sports blogs, can I?) If anything, Florio and PFT may be an exception to this rule I’m about to float out there—they routinely get rumors and news out there that no one else has, which is why they’ve become such an Internet phenomenon.

But if a site as influential and powerful as PFT has so much of its own content essentially influenced (for lack of a better word) by the beat reports of others, think of what some of the other, more worldly sports blogs are relying on? That’s right—100% print news.

Sports blogs cannot survive without the print media.

I’m not sure how widely realized this point is yet, especially by the sports blogging community (or their readerships). One group that surely has realized it is the sports print media. Imagine being part of a fledgling newspaper, constantly getting quality news and columns out to your paper. As Beat Reporter, your articles are put on your newspaper’s website, thus linking you to sports blogs all across the Internet.

A site like PFT picks up your news and, as they always do, follow credible journalism, and post a link along with an actual text attribution of what reporter made the report.

How many readers do you think actually click on that link? They got all the news they need. It’s a newspaper article, truncated.

So, even though Beat Reporter may have readership that spans all across the world for his pretty good reporting about his team, he’s potentially on the chopping block because the newspaper industry is losing money.

Yet, it’s actually his reporting that’s causing such a nosedive in newspaper sales: blogs.

It’s a tough future to forecast; will the newspaper conglomeration/crunch/buyout frenzy hurt the sports blogosphere, or will the bigger papers and nationals (ESPN, FOX, etc.) pick up the slack? To ESPN’s credit, their recent (intelligent) trend of hiring former NFL beat writers—Matt Mosley, Mike Sando, Paul Kuharsky, etc.—undoubtedly helps in his regard.

But from a pure “quality of reporting” standpoint, you always want more people on the scene. Imagine that the situation gets so bad, that each NFL team only has one beat writer. (Obviously, never going to happen, but follow along with me here.) If you know that you have 100% of the readership for your team—and the big wigs at the newspaper know that too—they’re going to hire a) the cheapest beat writer they can because they know b) what else are the team’s fans going to do for their news? There’s no competition. You hear NFL coaches say it all the time—competition breeds talent, in a sense.

Sports blogging has risen, in a sense, from the benefits of this competition. Beat writers jockeying for the best news and writing about their NFL team—and getting posted on the Internet because of it. If all the good sports writers get fired and bought out, what news will the sports blogs have to link to and analyze?

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