THIS PAST MONTH, I discovered that I am no longer getting a weekly Sports Illustrated.
After more than 60 years as a weekly sports magazine, SI went to biweekly publication. You get a few more pages in each magazine, but you have to wait two weeks to get it. This comes on the heels of SI’s decision a year or two ago to let go of its photography staff and just use freelancers.
Cutting back to biweekly will likely save SI millions of dollars in distribution and paper costs. Paper is a huge expense and the bane of many publications’ bottom line.
ESPN has cut hundreds of jobs in the past couple of years (and yet, somehow Stephen A. Smith remains employed), and newspapers are cutting sports reporting around the country. Many dailies no longer send beat writers on road trips, using wire copy to cover their own teams.
The last newspaper I worked at in Montana doesn’t even have an official sports editor any longer. He was laid off and the staff was simply told to “do more with less,” whatever that means. Recently, I visited a newspaper office where I once worked. My two- to three-page sports section umpteen years ago (It was mine, all mine, because I was a one-person staff) had been cut to a single column on a back page. One. Lousy. Column. Of sports. In the entire paper.
It’s all frightening. And it’s all signs of tough times in the sports reporting world.
I don’t expect that to change. Print media has been in a long, slow and sometimes painful struggle for 20 years. Our industry is having to adjust to become more of a web-based and social media source of information. Because the cost of trees isn’t going down anytime soon.
In perusing major daily websites, I’ve noticed they give some pretty cursory coverage to the smaller preps. They also don’t do much coverage of smaller colleges, focusing primarily on UW. They will cover the 4A and 3A schools, but completely ignore the 1A, 2B, 1B schools.
Fortunate locally
So, here we’re lucky. Those smaller schools do get some coverage. We can’t get to every game, but they get more coverage than they would if they were in the Tacoma or Seattle areas.
I’m grateful to the readers for their support, their story ideas and even their criticisms. This has to be one of the most sports-supportive communities I’ve ever lived and worked in.
I’m grateful to the Peninsula Daily News for its commitment to sports and in particular local sports. They get that sports in many ways puts “local” into local newspapers. We have two bodies on the sports desk, which doesn’t sound like much, but that’s more than a lot of smaller daily newspapers. Many dailies have a single person or worse yet, someone covering sports part-time along with city council, county commissioners, etc.
Two people does mean we aren’t able to get to every game, every meet, every day. With nine high schools and a college in our coverage area, there are some weekends in which we have as many as 30 or 40 different events to try and report on.
Some days we run out of time and space to get to it all.
There is a rare weekend in which we literally get every single sporting event in the paper, which has literally been cause for a celebratory beer down at the BarHop after work.
When that happens, I like to quote my favorite line from “Bull Durham” … “It’s a miracle!”
So, I like to think of the sports section as making little miracles happen. From looking at a daunting calendar ahead of time and imagining that into a cover page and getting as much of it in print as possible. It keeps me motivated and keeps me looking forward to work each day.
Bull Durham: “How did we ever win eight?” “It’s a miracle!”
