If a tree falls in the press box …

Photo from Boston.com

A friend sent me a story a couple of days ago from the Wall Street Journal, written about the phasing out of traditional baseball beat writers.

The headline — “Baseball Writers Brace for the End” — is startling. It’s also shortsighted. It’s too general, and although it’s clarified by its subhead, I seriously doubt Buster Olney, Jayson Stark, Peter Gammons, Ken Rosenthal and others are worrying for their jobs.

They work for national sites such as ESPN and Fox. The article focuses on hyperlocal and regional publications. The WSJ article details how the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun are sharing Nationals and Orioles content because of financial difficulties within the newspaper industry. One can’t see a scenario when George Bodenheimer and Ken Schanzer get together over lunch and say, “You know, money is a little tight this month. Tell you what: You cover the Bears, we’ll cover the Packers, and we’ll give each other our content.”

By now we can agree sports media isn’t shifting online. It has shifted. So when we read leads like this one from the WSJ story, it produces more of a shrug than a gasp:

       ”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.”

The worthwhile story, written by Russell Adams and Tim Marchman, is more groundbreaking for industry outsiders than insiders. As it should be. And it details what those of us with personal ties to the medium have known for some time. Road coverage of MLB teams is in jeopardy. The circle of familiar and comfortable beat writers we once saw each summer day, 162-plus games a year, will continue to get smaller.

It shouldn’t be all gloom and doom. ESPN, Fox, The Sporting News and others have a stable of talented writers, some of whom are even competing against each other in-house (e.g. ESPN NFL scribes Chris Mortensen, John Clayton, Michael Smith …). And there are enough sites — and enough writers at those sites — that there will still be a competition for news.

The significant problem will come on the local level. National sites love the major markets. If it ever happens that a major daily in a small-market baseball town (Pittsburgh, Milwaukee) ceases road coverage, the only source for daily coverage will come from the AP or other wire services. Let’s face it: AP coverage of road teams, like a St. Louis-based writer attempting to cover the breaking news of a road team like, say, San Diego, lacks a certain level of institutional knowledge.

Then there’s the worst-case scenario: Fans of a team getting their information directly from that team’s communications department. When you want credible news about Ford and General Motors, you read the Detroit News and Free Press, you don’t check out the Ford newsletter.

Still, there are signs of hope. Longtime baseball writers such as Murray Chass and Tracy Ringolsby have started their own sites. They bring instant credibility to online coverage of baseball. Surely more will follow suit, and in time these independent entities might, to some degree, repopulate the press box.

The “name” will replace the nameplate.

– David Schwartz