Mark Cuban: your saviour?

Teams should subsidize -- without any promise of editorial control -- writers' salaries, he says on his blog, dated Christmas Eve.

http://blogmaverick.com/2008/12/24/why-pro-sports-need-newspapers/

Taking a cooperative approach could create a win win for leagues, teams and newspapers. Letting the newspapers go belly up and depending on our own websites, blogs, newspaper websites and national sports websites to communicate with our fans, in particular our casual fans, IMHO, is a recipe for disaster. The cost to reach those fans in a newspaperless world over the next 5 to 7 years will cost us far more than working with newspapers today to try to help them.

 

I wonder if this has anything to do with this... http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/64679/

 

Probably... but how could Cuban's proposal work without the cloak of bias?

 

Didn't he know the Burn has been called FC Dallas a while now?

 

It can't. We're talking conflict of interest on an epic scale. I don't think Cuban's idea could be considered a way to save the industry, because if we get to the day where teams are directly subsidizing the salaries of the reporters who cover them, newspapers as we know them will be dead anyway.

 

This is the key line:

"The more stories that are written by sportswriters and columnists, the more opportunities for fans to connect and stay connected to our teams."

The smarter leagues and team owners are realizing that without at least one mass-market, local publication to cover the home team and dictate the objective nature of coverage, ticket sales and fan interest is going to dry up pretty fast. Not among the hardcore, but among the so-called casual fan that makes up a particularly large portion of the NBA ticket-buying public. The reason teams gives credentials is to drum up that free publicity. Plus, if teams thought that had trouble controlling the story with a few newspapers and local TV stations, they are apoplectic at the thought of what a million blogs and Ed Werder (in Dallas' case) will come up with.

 

Mark Cuban -- the living demonstration of the concept of more money than sense.

 

Meaning what ?

 

Except that bridge has already been crossed. 2 papers share the same reporters/newsroom/editors for their sports department. The reporter is paid by only one of the papers. Does he/she bias their reporting to the benefit of the paper paying the salary or write the best story possible ?

The reality is that when you are underwater and running out of air, you don't worry which stroke you use, or how it looks to get to the surface. You get some air, and then deal with other issues after the fact.

m

 

Love him or hate him, this guy is the best owner in sports.

 

Just buy 20 full-page ads a day. Problem solved. Of course, the newspaper will just pocket the money, the same as the writer "subsidy."

OK, I'll really bite.

Mark, if that is you and I wouldn't doubt it is, my paper paid for my hot dogs at Reunion Arena to make sure there would be no appearance of bias. You think they're going to do this?

You got the money, start your own DFW sports daily (or thrice weekly maybe). It's been attempted before, but not by anybody with your coin.

 

In a practical business sense, I see what you're saying. And perhaps there's simply no preserving what it is we're supposed to be about and also staying in business.

But speaking as somebody who works for a site that has, ever since I arrived here in 1997, blurred lines I thought were absolute in my chosen profession, if we take that next step simply to preserve ourselves, then the press as we've known it, and as conceived as a vital part of the American process, is done.