Mark Purdy hanging it up

San Jose Mercury News columnist since 1984 to call it a career in August:
Purdy: Why I'm hitting the exit ramp for my sports column

 

Man - nice to see a sportswriter retire on their own terms. Didn't know that was possible anymore.

 

That was a very good column. I tip my cap to pros like this. I'm sure he has done a great job with video and instant 24/7 news as he talked about. The pros adjust no matter their age. Problem is the 24/7 era and some of the hassles he mentioned eventually make a talented veteran pro like him say, "Fuck this. I'm out." I'm sure the news group wanted to keep him as he suggested, but hey they certainly aren't crying over shedding his salary you can bet that to be the case. Anyhow, very good piece he wrote there. And congratulations to him on a fine career and getting out as this business continues to near extinction.

 

Him and Ann Killion were my favorites at the Merc. Both were thousands of times better than Skip Bayless and at times a much better read than Kowakami who gets a little full of himself these days. Will be sad to not see his columns any more but glad he's moving on willfully.

 

Good on Mark Purdy! He was always a good guy toward me when I worked in the Bay Area and shared press box space. My lasting impression came from a simple tag line from a radio ad that came in just after he started...

"Mark Purdy is in the Mercury News. Mark Purdy will change the way you look at sports."

He definitely did. We're all better off for the efforts.

 

He was spot-on in declining a once-a-week column presence, for the reason stated: It's more work to play catch-up when you haven't been immersed in this crap all week and even then you don't feel you're writing with authority. The once-a-week scribes rarely are relevant and it's nice to see Purdy didn't just grab for the dough.

 

It's odd to think that the (almost) daily sports columnist as a thing of the past. Most markets still have them of course, but these days they don't tend to "set the agenda" like they once did. More likely its the former big dog columnist who is now a talking head on a local radio show and/or cable outlet who says something outrageous when someone serves him up one of those "games" like "Buy or Sell" - Over or under, Win Lose or Draw, FMK...(kidding about the last one, but I'm sure someone has adapted it to sports talk. ) It used to be these voices offered well-reasoned insight or analysis of a local team - now they are responding to some producer making slightly more than minimum wage who rips off content from national shows he listens to.

 

National outlets have that have specialists on their sites per sport or outlets entirely devoted to one sport have made the local general sports columnists largely obsolete. Readers want "insiders" and experts on their favorite team/sport, not one person who tries or pretends to have the best insights, sources and opinions across all the teams and leagues. That might have been and still might be fine for casual sports fans, but we've all seen how a columnist who is great at one or two sports might be borderline at best writing about a third, fourth or fifth. They can handle the human-interest stuff, but it doesn't seem that stuff is what the hardcore audience gives two craps about most of the time.

 

Excellent post.
I've heard most sports talk radio stations have one host, maybe two out of their lineup of five different shows a day that make "fairly good" money, but 2-3 shows have talent basically making about 20,000 a year. True?

 

I thought that in a prior thread many posters said that the lead columnists at their paper would receive more clicks than any article in the section. Is this true?

 

I think it's true that a columnist focused on one sport or a hot team will do better than most general columnists on the web. Of course there are still exceptions. But in the Bay Area, for example, a beat writer or columnist focused on the Warriors or Giants or 49ers (well, maybe not the 49ers lately) would do a lot better on the web than Purdy.

 

@DanOregon FMK is alive and well in sports talk radio, sadly (using a euphemism for the F part for radio, of course).