OT: The Future of Sports Journalism

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Jojogunne
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OT: The Future of Sports Journalism

Post by Jojogunne »

From the Washington Post, "Amid layoffs and furloughs, sportswriters wonder what will be left of a storied profession":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2 ... profession

Hope this is not an obituary for sports journalism.
EvanJ
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Re: OT: The Future of Sports Journalism

Post by EvanJ »

It will always be possible to write online, but it needs to pay in order to be a career. I told my mom that even if I wrote things people were interested in, I wouldn't make a website that makes money from ads because I would only want ads that I approved, which isn't possible. I search for a book and get an ad for it on the next site I go to. It's not like websites pick which one of ten or dozens of ads to show you. Websites with millions of viewers a day show many thousands of ads to at least one person.

I understand newspapers wanting to make money online, but it's annoying to get Twitter links to the Washington Post, which doesn't provide any free articles. I'm not going to pay (or sign up for a free trial and cancel) for one or few articles. Furthermore, it's annoying to have to pay them for national news that the have an advantage at getting. It's not like I'm trying to read about issues specific to D.C. Newsday prints articles from the AP, and I don't think there are any international or national stories Newsday writes with information that isn't in many other newspapers and/or online for free. An except is quotes from New York's Congresspeople about a national issue, but that's not something that people in other states would care about. If Schumer makes a statement, it's in the national news as coming from the Senate Minority Leader, so you don't need a New York source to find out what he said.

The Athletic already exists, and sports journalists could work together to make a mutually beneficial website. I will pay for a site that does original resource and/or has content that interests me when I read it that I would not think of searching for.

In addition to gender prejudice, now-Yankees radio announcer Suzyn Waldman was hated by the other reporters because she had a radio show after games, and the male writers couldn't be read until newspapers the next day. That was before the internet.
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