Hopefully, he's kidding: Should leagues bailout sports sections?

http://www.mcnsports.com/en/node/4545

Evan Weiner's opus on the notion of sports leagues bailing out sports sections eventually devolves to "Newspapers need to get very local anyway, they need to cover school board meetings and little league baseball and if they do that people will buy the product."

I'm going to start an organization of professional journalists called the Society for Profession Scrapbook Fodder Generators, or SPSFG for short, once we all cover Little League as a beat. Then, Weiner can blast the media for turning a blind eye toward the bullying scandal in baseball (little league).

Sounds like a career to me!

 

Here's the thread on Cuban's proposal:

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/65150/

I have no idea how that last line fits into the rest of the piece. Poor choice.

You sem a bit vindictive, CM.

 

Boy, this guy lives on the Island Of Misfit Analogies, doesn't he?

 

There's more than a bucket-load of stupid in these ideas. If Mark Cuban wants to take out an ad, what's stopping him?

 

The publishers would just pocket the bailout money and use it to leverage themselves up to their scalp follicles instead of just their nose.

 

Weiner needs a copy editor. Give him the bailout.

 

I wasn't as interested in bitching about the Cuban proposal as much as I was interested in bitching about this guy's stupid last line, just as jlee mentioned.

 

Covering little league and junior high. No thanks. Kids that young shouldn't be getting written about, period. Let the kids play and be kids. If it takes little league coverage to save the business, let it die.

 

I'd much rather have the professional teams start an endowment fund for high school athletics in their respective market areas.

It would be a much wiser use of resources and some great PR if, for example, the 49ers decided to endow the athletic programs of the San Jose city school syustem, which are threatened to be eliminated. It's not like any NFL team doesn't have a spare couple millions floating around to build that endowment every year.

 

Very true, and a great gesture, but that is still another bailout. Don't our institutions all over America have to get their stuff together and start making it on their own?

 

Bailout?

Athletics are an extra-cirricular not fundamental to the basic mission of public education. As much as I enjoy athletics and feel they have value in high school, academic programs must be funded first.

It would be no different than a corporation or other private enterprise/donor endowing a chair or program at a university that might otherwise go unfunded or disappear altogether because there's a finite amount of public resources.

And a bailout is just another form of tax shelter, loophole or price support.