Plain Dealer Indians writers will only cover "select" road trips

We're at the stage newspapers have no advantage over bloggers. Cleveland.com by not traveling with the Indians is just another hack website. There's no reason to read Cleveland.com. Sure a good reporter can get quotes off TV and radio and actually fake it very well. But it's deceptive and again ripping off the reader. It's a bad idea and again, there now is nothing separating Cleveland.com from any other guy who wants to watch a game on TV and write a gamer off it.

 

That's the Internet's fault.

 

I cringe every time I read that a beat writer's task is to "get quotes." That's a significant part of the damn mentality that leads to newspapers deciding that they can live without travel coverage, now that press conferences and other assorted interview highlights are piped to laptops, AM radios, and cable postgame shows.

What happens to the sports section over the next 10-20 years will be both a fascinating and frightening development. The question no one asks aloud, but kind of looms over the proceedings: Does the daily newspaper really need a sports section? This is entertainment. We love it - I love it - but it's entertainment. And it is entertainment that is broadcast seven ways from Sunday on TV, the Internet, and radio. It's not really news, as I've said, and if it's also not improving the bottom line, then what exactly is the point? Isn't it journalistic and business malpractice, both, to spend a red nickel on covering an MLB home game for 10-20 man hours if one minute and a single penny is drained from the limited Town Hall or cops or statehouse budget to do so?

You have to read the Chicago Tribune to find out what Rahm Emmanuel is up to. But what, exactly, are we learning about what Chris Sale is up to that Fangraphs and BP and the broadcast and any number of other independent bloggers can't tell you already? I suppose there is a market for someone to be there, considering how much happens off the ball at a baseball and football game. But I'm just not sure that the someone should be the same entity covering murders and the legislature.

 

If I ran a newspaper, I'd look at daily staff beat writing for the sports section as a luxury. You know, like how most of the "bosses" currently view editing.

Proper editing is much, much more important and cost-effective to the bottom line than having a beat writer cover every Indians road game.

 

The city whose monopoly newspaper (nearly all of them now) decides to get rid of the sports section will be the first city with no newspaper (or digital news site, same thing) at all. Sports is in the paper because people like to read about it.

 

They do! I do, too. And they have lots and lots and lots and lots of places to read about it that aren't the local daily. You know what else I like to read? Stephen King novels. I don't expect them to be serialized in my daily metro each morning, though.

 

I'm more talking about getting rid of daily beat writing than the sports section as a whole.

Newspapers can no longer afford to be in the business of spending tens of thousands of dollars so beat writers can travel with the team and "get quotes" by personally asking mundane, nonsensical questions like, "can you describe the 'message' you sent to your opponents tonight?"

 

Anybody who cares enough about the local team to read about its home games will also want the same level of information (unobtainable from wire copy) about road games. When it's not forthcoming, they'll go somewhere they can find it -- regional cable outlet Websites being a prime example of where it can be found, along with team Websites. And there goes another reader of everything else.

 

You know how major institutions release bad news on Friday afternoons, on the theory that fewer people are paying attention? I wonder if road trips are when teams will fire coaches, cut players, etc., as a way of avoiding questions from the local beat writers.

 

I agree with this.

And, I don't think they should be writing gamers off of TV. Run an AP gamer.

There are lots of great stories in baseball. Let your writers spend their time discovering, reporting, and writing them.

 

You're assuming, with no evidence, that newspapers will lose readers over this. You're also, I would think, assuming that they will lose enough readers to make this a poor business decision, i.e. the revenue lost through lost readership will outpace the money saved by cutting the travel budget.

 

I'm assuming by now that newspapers will lose readers no matter what. At this point, we're just speculating about how fast the elevator will fall down the chute.