All Things Bubba

I probably shouldn't even ask the question; I might get sued.

Admittedly, I'm not unbiased. As a Cowboys fan, I find it easy to criticize the Redskins...and their owner. But honestly, Snyder's beyond the pale for any team.

His various failings were detailed in this article in the Washington City Paper, a weekly alternative paper that isn't exactly widely read.

Snyder took exception to the article, and rather than ignore it or ask for equal time, he sued. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. The brouhaha over the lawsuit has resulted in far more people reading the offending article than ever would have read it otherwise.

Moreover, said lawsuit has no basis. His objections are downright bizarre. He accused them of libeling his wife because they quoted something she said about him in an interview. (It wasn't anything bad, but he seems to think implying she talks about anything except breast cancer is libel.) Silliest of all, he claims the illustration that accompanied the article - a photo of him with horns and beard scribbled on it, like a child might do - was anti-Semitic. Huh?

It seems so crazy that he would do this. What was he thinking? Assuming Snyder hasn't completely lost his mind, David Carr might have the answer. He thinks Snyder's motive was to intimidate. The Reds' lawyer included this paragraph in his letter to the paper's owners:

“Mr. Snyder has more than sufficient means to protect his reputation and defend himself and his wife against your paper’s concerted attempt at character assassination. We presume that defending such litigation would not be a rational strategy for an investment fund such as yours. Indeed, the cost of the litigation would presumably quickly outstrip the asset value of the Washington City Paper.”

City Paper might have seemed vulnerable, as a small paper recently in financial trouble.

Perhaps Mr. Snyder feels emboldened to threaten as opposed to negotiate because City Paper — a weekly in Washington, D.C., that I used to edit over 10 years ago — went through bankruptcy in 2008 and now is owned by Atalaya Capital Management, a hedge fund.

Atalaya lent Creative Loafing the money to finance a purchase of City Paper, among other papers, in 2007. Libel cases are notoriously difficult to win, but as newspaper companies have been in decline, some of the targets of their reporting have begun to push back in the belief that owners are less eager to defend their work in costly ways.

(Emphasis mine.)

Perhaps it was meant as a shot across the bow...not just for City Paper, but for all the papers that have been so critical of him.

If so, it's backfired, big-time. City Paper is not backing down. They've set up a legal defense fund and are prepared to go the distance.

Labels: media

Sports journalism is hurting. The bad economy is often blamed, but in reality, it's only exacerbated a deeper problem. The Internet is permanently changing the relationship between readers and publishers. It's not going to go back to the way it was, even if the economy recovers.

So what will the future of sports coverage look like? Some have suggested that bloggers will take the place of journalists. The problem with that is that bloggers, for the most part, are still reliant on conventional sports journalists. They can't do their own legwork, and there's no clear way for them to get the money to do it, even if they wanted to.

Could this be the answer? Mark Zuckerman, formerly the Nationals beat writer for the Washington Times, lost his job when the Times eliminated their sports department. Taking a page from C. Trent's book, he asked for reader donations to cover spring training...and got a much more generous response than he expected. Everyone from devoted fans to family and friends to bloggers who recognize how dependent they are on beat writers contributed. Donations even came in from people not particularly interested in the Nats or baseball; they just like the idea of reader-supported journalism.

"Radiohead journalism" has also worked on non-sports subjects. Not sure if it's a long-term solution. Perhaps once the novelty wears off, people will tire of donating alms for the journalist. But it's an interesting trend to watch.

Labels: media

I've written before about how the media, especially sports journalism, is being affected by changing technology (the Internet) and the economy. It seems clear that newspapers as we know them will not survive.

The latest example...the Washington Times has announced they are laying off 40% of their staff, including the entire sports department and all their staff photographers.

And a lot of newspapers are beginning the new year with plans to charge for their content. (Of course, they've tried before, mostly unsuccessfully.)

A lot of people point to bloggers as the answer to what will take the place of newspapers, but most bloggers are dependent on the mainstream media to provide grist for their mills.

Here's one possible solution: C. Trent Rosecrans is asking for donations to cover the costs of going out to Arizona to cover spring training. Trent is not a garden-variety blogger, of course. He used to be the Reds beat writer for the now-defunct Cincinnati Post. So his tactic is probably not one the average blogger can take. Still, it's an interesting idea.

The reception at Big League Stew was skeptical at best. Most people don't seem to think Trent will succeed. But I think he will. So far, he's 42% toward his goal, with 64 contributors. (That works out to about $25 each.)

The new face of sports coverage, maybe?

Labels: media

I've written before about the current struggles of the media, as well as its uncertain future. Now, President Obama is considering a newspaper bailout. While this guy at Newsweek argues that newspapers need to die and get out of the way.

In the end, newspapers probably will die. But I can understand why people are unnerved by this. A free press is a fundamental part of our democracy. And as Clay Shirky has pointed out, we are not going to smoothly transition to whatever comes after newspapers. Based on history, this is likely to be a chaotic time for the media, where old institutions are destroyed faster than new ones can replace them. And no can can predict which ideas will be the ones that catch on.

This New York Times article is one possible future.

CBS News plans to announce Monday that it has formed a partnership with GlobalPost, a foreign news Web site, that will provide CBS with reporting from its approximately 70 affiliated correspondents in 50 countries.

As many print and broadcast news outlets are struggling to find ways to cover foreign news, the alliance may suggest a blueprint.

GlobalPost doesn't pay its correspondents much. Most of them are part-timers, working locally. The video segments are often shot, narrated, and edited by one person. It's a bit like a paid version of CNN's iReport, or blogging/YouTube on steroids.

Obviously, CBS benefits from the lower costs. It's not so great for the journalists, however.

Meanwhile, there are changes afoot in Yankees blogdom. Peter Abraham is leaving the Journal-News for the Boston Globe. Taking his place will be Chad Jennings, the SWB Yankees blogger.

No word on who is taking Chad's place. I hope someone does. The SWB Yankees blog is great. I wish all minor league teams had blog coverage from their local papers.

And I really enjoy Chad's style. More so that Pete Abe's, if truth be told. I know bloggers are supposed to be "edgy," but Pete was often a little too edgy, IMHO. He likes to rile people up, which gets old after awhile.

Labels: media

Hal McCoy had this to say about Paul Janish:

NOW EVERYBODY is up in the air over Paul Janish batting second. Who else? And who cares at this point where anybody bats when the Reds can’t find first place with mount Palomar? What the Reds need to find out is if Janish can play every day and produce. He is a magician with the glove but a sorcerer with the bat. If he can hit .265 and maintain his magical glove he can play every day.

So maybe batting second and getting a lot of at-bats will give Janish an opportunity to show what he can (or can’t) do with the bat.

Janish actually didn't do that badly last night: 1 for 4. He's probably a bit rusty, having played so little. I'd like to see him show a little more patience at the plate. He did flash some leather, impressing Reds fans who hadn't seen him in action before.

He's starting at SS again tonight, though he's been moved down to eighth in the batting order.

Could this really be an audition for a starting role next year? Possibly. Zack Cozart is supposedly the SS of the future for the Reds, but he's not expected to be promoted to the big leagues until September 2010. That means the Reds need someone to play SS next season. They had an option on Alex Gonzalez, but he and his option have been traded to the Red Sox.

The Reds will have a hard time signing a SS who's any good for just one year. And they are reportedly in money-saving mode. (Sports has been hard-hit by the recession. The Rangers have laid off a lot of their front office staff, and have been forced to borrow from the MLB emergency fund. The Indians say they're on track to lose $16 million this year, and the Reds are reputedly in the same boat.) So maybe they'll be willing to give Janish a shot, if he can show them anything at all at the plate.

Hal McCoy, one of my favorite baseball writers, is also being impacted by the recession. And by changes in the newspaper business. His paper, the Dayton Daily News, announced his retirement and tried to make it sound like his choice, but according to his blog, it was a cost-cutting move by the paper. It costs them a quarter of a million dollars a year to sent Hal around the country following the Reds, and they simply can't afford it any more.

Papers are really hurting. A lot of baseball beat writers are losing their jobs, or being moved to other departments.

Baseball writers can see the handwriting on the wall. No doubt something will replace newspapers, but Clay Shirky argues that it's impossible to guess what it will be...and things could be very chaotic in the meantime.

Labels: media, Paul Janish, The Greater Depression

An article from the Wall St. Journal...

Baseball Writers Brace for the End: As Newspapers Cut Back, Press Boxes Grow Lonelier; How a Venerable Institution Lost Its Way

Baseball's independent press corps, once the most powerful in American sports, is fading. As newspapers cut budgets and payrolls, the press boxes at major league ballparks are becoming increasingly lonely places, signaling a future when some games may be chronicled only by wire services, house organs and Web writers watching the games on television.

"I certainly recognize where things are going," says Jack O'Connell, secretary of the Baseball Writers Association of America, the venerable 101-year-old membership organization for the profession. "I certainly see the dark clouds."

It's not clear how many newspaper beat writers and columnists will vanish. Some major dailies in baseball towns like Boston and New York say so long as they exist, they will never stop covering their teams. Online-only sources have filled some of the void, and independent Web sites have popped up where fans gather to comment on the games as they happen. In many ways, baseball writers are no different than other professionals whose industries are being shrunk.

...The changing world was on vivid display recently at McKechnie Field in Bradenton, Fla., the spring home of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Opened in 1923 during the golden age of sportswriting, it held its first-ever night game last March -- 20 years after the lights first went on over Chicago's Wrigley Field. At a March 22 game between the Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds two writers from Pittsburgh papers were in attendance, along with two reporters from Major League Baseball's Web site. The Pittsburgh chapter of the BBWAA is down to nine members, an all time low, from 20 in 1988.

The Beaver County Times, outside Pittsburgh, has stopped covering spring training and won't cover every Pirates home game -- primarily due to finances, according to sports editor Ed Rose. To some, it's inevitable that more papers will follow suit. "We're waiting for that first domino to fall, for that first major newspaper not covering its team on the road," says current BBWAA president David O'Brien.

Will we miss baseball writers when they're gone? We really don't need newspapers for the box scores, or even accounts of what happened on the field. With sites like Fangraphs, MLB's own Internet coverage, and bloggers who describe the games as seen on TV or from the park, we can generally follow what happened.

What we lose with the beat writers is the view from inside the locker room. Beat writers develop a relationship with the players over the long season, and have access and insight a blogger can't hope to match. There are the radio and TV reporters, of course, but with their time constraints, they generally don't provide the kind of in-depth reporting the print media does.

Newspapers are dropping like flies. Declaring bankruptcy, going web-only, folding altogether.  Among the troubled papers: the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Detroit News, the Detroit Free-Press, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Rocky Mountain News, Christian Science Monitor.  And of course, the Cincinnati Post went under in 2007.

The bad economy is exacerbating the problem, but this is deeper than the economy, as this essay points out:

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

It argues that what we are facing is as fundamental a change as the invention of the printing press. Though we know what the world was like before the printing press, and what it was like afterward, what's really interesting is the transition. That is what we are living through now. And if the previous transition is any model, we can expect this one to be chaotic. In the end, something will replace newspapers, but from where we are now, it's impossible to know what. We won't know the turning point when it happens; it will be clear only in the rear-view mirror.

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

In the end, we'll get our baseball coverage somehow. But it could suck to be a baseball writer in the immediate future.

Labels: media

The economic crisis is hitting the media hard. Gannett laid off 10% of its staff. The Chicago Tribune (owner of the Cubs) is bankrupt, as is sister paper the Los Angeles Times. CNN laid off its entire science department, including Miles O'Brien. The New York Times was forced to take out a mortgage on their building last week. Christian Science Monitor is going web-only, no longer printing a dead-tree version. The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News are considering delivering papers only three days a week, and asking their subscribers to read the paper online on other days.

This article from AFP has a summary:

US newspapers struggling to survive

Circulation is dropping, print advertising revenue is falling and readers are going online to get news for free, leaving the US newspaper industry awash in red ink and threatening some of the biggest names in journalism.

"The business model that used to work at newspapers does not work any more," The Washington Post Co chairman Donald Graham said last week, echoing what many observers of the US media landscape have been saying for some time.

...The crisis gripping the industry is of course no laughing matter to the 15,422 newspaper employees who have been laid off this year or taken buyouts, according to figures compiled by Erica Smith, a St Louis Post-Dispatch journalist who tracks the cuts on her blog at graphicdesignr.net/papercuts/

Media job losses are also being updated several times a day on a feed on micro-blogging service Twitter started last month by a group of public relations agents called The Media Is Dying (twitter.com/themediaisdying).

Not a day goes by without more bad news for the newspaper industry as the financial slowdown accelerates the decline in print advertising revenue and more classified advertisers turn to free websites such as Craigslist.com.

As the article points out, the problem is not all due to the financial crisis. Rather, the bad economy has hastened what was probably an inevitable decline. The traditional media was already under pressure from "new media" - the Internet.

A few years ago, I was home for Christmas and watched Hawai`i win a thrilling bowl game with my parents. After the game, my mom couldn't wait to read about it in the paper the next day. Not me. I got online and read about it right away. Not only that, I went to the loser's web site and read their articles, too. And didn't have to get black stuff all over my fingers.

I have never subscribed to a newspaper, and I can't imagine I ever will. Why, when you can get news for free on the net?

And yet...I'm not sure net news is ready to stand alone. A bunch of bloggers isn't going to provide the coverage that real papers with regular reporters can provide. Some papers have been trying to transition to the web, but the bad economy is making that difficult. Web advertising is likely to drop just like print advertising is. (Perhaps even more so, since browsers like Firefox allow people to easily block ads.)

Eventually, that may affect even us bloggers. The dot-com bust saw a lot of "free" things that people had taken for granted disappear, or become so crippled as to be useless. Free Internet access, such as Juno and Netzero, became pay services. Free webhosting became so limited and choked with ads that most people ended up paying for hosting instead. I wonder if the same thing will happen to blogs and social networking sites this time around.

Labels: media, The Greater Depression