1-Man’s Opinion on Sports-Friday “NEWSPAPERS–A BAD TIME”
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Hacksaw’s Great Sports Weekend Podcast
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“NEWSPAPERS ON LIFE SUPPORT”
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The media landscape has changed.
Social media has taken over our world, some with credibility, others without
So-called citizen journalists, have replaced real journalists.
The challenge now is to determine what is fact-vs-fiction in what you read and what source to trust.
Television has become reporting with commentary, more the latter than the former. Sports on TV has become scattered between local stations, the networks, and now streaming packages.
Local radio has seemingly lost its hold on listenership with Sirius XM as a rival.
Newspapers are struggling with advertising support, circulation cancellations, the urge to put everything on websites and drive readership to Social media.
What was something special, once upon a time hardly exists anymore. Where we had the San Diego Union and the Tribune as separate morning-afternoon papers, only one exists now. Across the county, once upon a time there was the Escondido Times-Advocate, the Oceanside Blade Citizens, the Daily California out of El Cajon.
In LA, the Times owned the market, that also contained the LA Daily News, the Herald-Examiner, the Torrance Daily News, the Daily Breeze, the Van Nuys News, plus the Orange County Register.
They are virtually all gone, done in by mergers, corporate takeovers, bankruptcies.
What is left today is a shadow of what readers used to get. The beat writers and columnists are almost all gone, retired, deceased, laid off. The content of your sports section is so much less now. Game stories replaced by feature stories, because the deadlines for print are so early now (4:30pm) LA Times…(7:30pm) Union Tribune.
More cut and paste AP wire stories than locally produced stories about all your teams.
Of course you can go to the paper’s websites to get full stories of the games you might not have seen or gone too, if you subscribe to get behind a paywall.
And now this stunning news, a report on the nation’s top 25-newspapers from the Alliance for Audited Media, the report for 2024 in the industry.
The shocker, the LA Times and the San Diego Union Tribune had the biggest circulation losses of this past year, bigger than the Wall Street Journal, the NY Times, the Washington Post.
The LA Times lost 27,000-subscribers last year, a drop of 25-percent of their circulation.
The UT lost 30,000-circulation, 22.5% of its readership in 2024.
Both are owned by capital venture company, Alden Global Capital, which has a history of being a profiteer, wrecking the papers they own, and cutting back everything, from content to customer service, to editorial and print workers.
Sad commentary on what used to be, a trustworthy industry, to what is now, a failing industry with no way to stop the erosion.
A shame for so many great journalists and the profession they chose. A bigger loss for the citizens, who so valued the newspapers they got and read and trusted.
Times change, in some cases, not such good news for those of us who grew up in the newspaper industry.
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It is a combination of technology disrupting traditional print media combined with journalists addicting their duty to be objective. There is the SPJ Code of Ethics that everyone should follow. Instead, we have a media that cannot be trusted. Sites like AllSides are required to sift through the garbage.
The tragic loss has been in sports is there is no more required reading from people like TJ Simers, Jimmy Murray, and Red Smith. Worse is you can see how AI is starting to infect the industry.