Just like restaurant servers and college professors, sports journalists like to complain about their job when they get off the clock.
On most Saturdays, I cover Major League Soccer matches for the Torrance-based newspaper, the Daily Breeze. Last week, after my collogues and I filed our stories, a group of journalists started talking about their profession.
They talked about salaries being slashed, staffs shrinking and out-of-touch editors.
I was just sitting on the outside listening, but one reporter turned to me and said, “I hope we are not demoralizing you at all Pat.”
I would have been demoralized if I didn’t already know.
Training to become a newspaper sports reporter in 2006 is slightly more productive than training to become a milkman.
This is evident at the job fair on campus this week, where there is a grand total of zero newspapers looking for new employees.
The Internet is taking over the journalism world and newspapers are becoming a thing of the past.
It makes more economic sense to copy and paste a story on to the Internet, than to write a story, lay it out on a page, print thousands of copies and finally distribute it over a large area.
Newspapers are expensive, Web sites aren’t.
It’s not a question of if newspapers are going to become extinct, but rather when they will.
This is becoming evident in sports journalism. The most widely read sports columnist in the country doesn’t work for the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times but for ESPN.com.
Bill Simmons has a huge following with his weekly pop culture/sports column. Many of his columns are a few thousand words long, which emphasizes one of the other great advantages of the Internet – endless space.
Along with infinite room for stories, Web sites also allow editors to have podcasts, photo albums and links to related material. Newspapers have charts.
Many newspapers realize their business is becoming as outdated as the 8-track and are building extensive Web sites. Not that anyone even reads even the print version of the Daily Forty-Niner, but we even have a new Web site at daily49er.wpengine.com (shameless plug, I know).
Technology has changed the media since the very beginning, and for the most part, the media has evolved for the better over the years. Journalists need to embrace the changes, not resist them, and to provide the public with the best news coverage, with the best technology, they can.
So although I’m the sports editor of this paper, and I work for another, it’s safe to say my newspaper career is going to be a short one.
