New York starts sharing

It's official. The Daily News is providing Newark with baseball coverage.

Baseball writers in that town once clawed each others eyes out to get a scoop over the No. 2 pitcher's ingrown toenail. The good old days. The Daily News is now selling its scoops to appear the same morning in a rival paper.

And there could be more cooperation down the line.

Dogs and cats living together in sin.

 

Unfreakin'-believable, but not surprising either given the times, is it?
Geez.

 

At first I thought this said something sad mostly about Newark. But after reading your post, it might be equally sad for the NYDN, which exchanges its competitive advantage -- at least on stories where it would have had one -- for cash.

Does anyone know if the coverage deal has any provisions for breaking news, i.e., scoops, as opposed to basic game and notes content?

Or is it OK with the Daily News that people won't have to buy their paper or visit their Web site to read the baseball writers they employ, even for the big "talker" stories?

 

The Daily News hasn't been especially aggressive in pushing suburban home delivery for at least a couple of decades -- it's mostly been street sales, and distribution has been handled by wholesalers, until recently an outfit called City & Suburban Delivery Systems that's been shut down by its longtime owner, The New York Times Co., and supposedly replaced by Times staff drivers and other wholesalers, but I don't know the specifics on how the new thing works. I believe the NY Post's suburban distribution has been outsourced for a long time, too. In the mid-1990s the Daily News allowed Lupica to self-syndicate his column to dailies in upstate New York (including Westchester), New Jersey and Connecticut (the News taking a cut of that action, if I remember correctly). Also, there were many years (1980s and part of the 1990s, IIRC) the NY Post ran Jerry Izenberg's sports column from Newark. So my opinion is that from a business standpoint, in some ways it hasn't been as competitive a market as it might appear. From a journalism standpoint, in my opinion, this is a larger sign of the apocalypse for Newark than for the News.

 

The way I understand this from some S-L people is the sharing is game coverage only.

The S-L, in fact, is looking to hire Yankees and Mets "beat" writers who will travel with the team but not to cover games. They will be expected to blog morning, noon and night, break news on the internet, and write "an occasional feature" for print.
They will be rewarded with a salary of $700 a week and have full benefits. They will not, however, have any assurances of having a job when the baseball season ends.

I had heard rumor of this for the past month or so and have refrained from posting (I heard there was a job ad on the NABJ website and know two people who applied). Someone at the Ledger recently confirmed that this was his understanding of the situation as well.

 

So they travel but don't appear in the paper?

I can't decide if that's brilliant or suicidal.

 

But they are responsible for keeping the web updated 24/7....so I'm told

 

So this person is on duty, what, 16 hours a day (say, 8 a.m. to midnight)? What does that work out to, 9 bucks an hour or so, with no overtime?

And someone will take it. Of course.

 

Another Ledger note ... Tom Bergeron has been "promoted" to Executive Sports Editor but his duties seem to be mostly web related and creating local (High school, that is) video etc. content for the internet.

The new Sports Editor (print edition) is someone who has been there for about five years who's name escapes me. Drew something I think.

 

$700 a week? To have a job in metro NYC? If you're not living at home with mom and dad, not a good deal. For those hours, pretty close to migrant farmworking.

 

It's happening everywhere else so why should NYC be any different?